Currie awarded IISE Fellow status

 Ken Currie

Kenneth Currie, chair of the Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering at West Virginia University, has been awarded Fellow Status by the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineering, previously known as the Institute of Industrial Engineers.

The award recognizes outstanding leaders in the profession who have made significant, nationally recognized contributions to industrial engineering. A fellow is the highest classification of IIE membership.

“I’m extremely proud to be named a Fellow of IISE,” said Currie. “This is an elite appointment where only 400 other IISE members have been recognized during the Institute’s 68-year history. It’s especially rewarding to know the company that I will be associated with: National Academy of Engineering members, presidents of universities and industry leaders.”

Currie, who earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees at WVU, previously served as a member of the industrial and manufacturing engineering faculty at Tennessee Technological University and as director of its Center for Manufacturing Research. During that time, he was either principal or co-principal investigator on more than $9 million in externally funded research with a client list that included the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, Oak Ridge National Laboratories and the National Center for Advanced Manufacturing, among others. He also served as the associate director of the DOE-funded Industrial Assessment Center, which offered energy assessments to small and medium-sized industrial clients at no cost to the industry.

He was named chair of the Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering at WVU in July 2014 and in fall 2015 he was inducted into the Department’s Academy of Industrial Engineers.

The Fellow award was presented to Currie at the IISE Annual Conference Awards banquet, held May 23 at the Disneyland Resort Hotel in Anaheim, California.

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