Lehigh’s Industrial and Systems Engineering Department was honored to host two esteemed guests as part of the 2019 Spencer C. Schantz Distinguished Lecture Series.

On Wednesday, April 24, 2019, Dr. R. Tyrrell Rockafellar presented an engaging and timely lecture entitled “Risk and Reliability in Optimization Under Uncertainty” to a packed crowd in Mohler Laboratory Room 451. Dr. Rockafellar spoke about the role for so-called "measures of risk," which offer fresh ways of dealing with reliability constraints. Dr. Rockafellar is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Washington Seattle. In addition to being a winner of the Dantzig Prize given jointly by SIAM and the Mathematical Programming Society (1983), Dr. Rockafellar has gained international recognition for his work through honorary doctorates bestowed by universities in a number of countries.  INFORMS awarded him and Roger Wets the 1997 Lancaster Prize for their book Variational Analysis, and in 1999 he was further honored by INFORMS with John von Neumann Theory Prize for his fundamental contributions to the methodology of optimization. He has authored over 250 publications, including one of the all-time most highly cited books in mathematics, Convex Analysis.

On Thursday, May 2, 2019, Stacey Cunningham, a 1996 graduate of Lehigh ISE, presented a public lecture entitled “Engineering the 21st Century” in Neville Auditorium. Speaking both about her own journey from Lehigh to the New York Stock Exchange, and the stock exchange’s journey through the evolution of technology, Ms. Cunningham closed with a lively Q&A with members of the audience. Stacey Cunningham is the 67th President and the first woman to lead the NYSE Group in its 226 year history. She is a respected equities industry veteran having held senior positions in global exchanges throughout her career. She spearheaded the roll-out of NYSE’s state-of-the-art trading platform NYSE Pillar, one of the most ambitious technology programs ever completed by a global exchange. Before joining NYSE, Ms. Cunningham held several senior positions at Nasdaq.

Following her lecture, Ms. Cunningham received the 2019 Distinguished Alumni Award for Excellence in Industry at the annual ISE Banquet.