ISR welcomes five new affiliate faculty

The Institute for Systems Research added five new affiliate faculty as of July 1, 2016.

Ken Wood, D.O., is a professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. He is the associate chief compliance officer for the University of Maryland Medical Center and director of the Maryland Critical Care Network. Wood’s research joins systems engineering applications to critical care medicine; he is also active in re-engineering health care processes.

Bill Fagan is professor and chair of the Department of Biology. His research involves meshing field biology with theoretical models to address critical questions in community ecology and conservation biology. Several areas illustrate this melding of theory and problem-solving: spatial ecological dynamics; ecoinformatics, biodiversity databases, and conservation planning; and biological stoichiometry and paleoecostoichioproteomics.

Daniel Butts is an assistant professor in the Department of Biology and the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science. His research interests are in sensory computation and neural coding; natural vision and the role of eye movements; network modulation of sensory processing; statistical modeling of neural data; and activity-dependent development and synaptic plasticity.

Monifa Vaughn-Cooke is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Her research interests are in behavioral mechanisms associated with system risk propagation to inform user-centric product and system design and improve productivity and safety. She does work in human reliability assessment, human factors, systems engineering, healthcare system and medical device design, design decision making, psychometric tool development, bio-behavioral risk assessment, decision support systems.

Ilya Ryzhov is an assistant professor in the Smith School’s Department of Decisions, Operations and Information Technology. His research interests are in business analytics, encompassing topics in optimization, probability, and statistics. He studies decision-making under uncertainty, often with the additional dimension of information collection.

Published July 5, 2016