Emeriti Faculty

Mikell P. Groover | mpg0@lehigh.edu

Dr. Groover taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the above topic areas and is the recipient of several Lehigh University and national teaching awards. His book, Fundamentals of Modern Manufacturing: Materials, Processes, and Systems (Prentice Hall, 1996) won the 1996 IIE Joint Publishers Book of the Year Award. The sixth edition of this book will be released in Fall 2015. The 4th edition of his book Automation, Production Systems, and Computer Integrated Manufacturing, was published in June 2014. Dr. Groover served as the Director of the George E. Kane Manufacturing Technology Laboratory. He has been the principal investigator and contract administrator for research contracts sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Ben Franklin Partnership Program in Pennsylvania, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and several industrial companies. Dr. Groover taught courses and did research in the areas of manufacturing processes, metal cutting theory, automation, production systems, robotics, material handling, operations management, and agile manufacturing. He joined the faculty in 1966 after several years in industry and retired in December 2010.

Louis J. Plebani | ljp2@lehigh.edu

Dr. Plebani was a faculty member of the Department of Industrial and System Engineering (ISE) of Lehigh University until 2024 as an Associate Professor. His research interests were in the areas of modeling of manufacturing processes, computational operations research, and automation and process control. Sample projects include high speed data acquisition and spectrum analysis of metal removal processes for purposes of predicting catastrophic tool wear; the design and implementation of specialized parallel processing algorithms using workstation networks and also for implementation using heterogeneous embedded processors; and the design and implementation of a high-speed electronic part sorting system. Dr. Plebani has been the principal investigator on a number of research contracts for both federal and local governments and for numerous industrial firms.

George R. Wilson | grw3@lehigh.edu

Dr. Wilson was a faculty member of the Department of Industrial and System Engineering (ISE) of Lehigh University from 1978 to 2019 and served as ISE Associate Chair from 2011 to 2019. Dr. Wilson served multiple times on university and college committees, such as the Graduate and Research Committee, Tenure & Promotion Committee, and Academic Policy Committee. In 2017 he was co-awarded the INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice for his joint work on “The Inmate Assignment and Scheduling Problem and its Application in the PA Department of Corrections”. He kept a 20-year long consulting activity with IBM.