Professors, grad student win recognition

Larry Snyder, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering, has been chosen to receive his second doctoral dissertation award in less than a year.
Snyder will receive the Pritsker Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Institute of Industrial Engineers this month during the Industrial Engineering Solutions 2005 conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
IIE is the world's largest professional society dedicated to industrial engineering and to people whose work involves improving quality and productivity. IIE has 15,000 members and 280 chapters worldwide.
Snyder received his Ph.D. in 2003 from the department of industrial engineering and management sciences at Northwestern University.
The Pritsker award recognizes outstanding graduate research in the field of industrial engineering.
Last fall, Snyder received the 2004 Dissertation Prize from the Transportation Science and Logistics Section of INFORMS (the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences), a 12,000-member society that serves scientists, students, educators, managers and other operations research and management sciences professionals and their institutions.
Snyder, who joined the Lehigh faculty in 2003, wrote his dissertation on Supply Chain Robustness and Reliability: Models and Algorithms.
In his research, Snyder studies supply chain management, logistics, facility location theory, and applied optimization. He is particularly interested in supply chain optimization models under uncertainty, focusing on problems in which components of a system can fail or are otherwise unreliable.
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Leonidas Bleris, a Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering, has been chosen to take part in the Pan American Advanced Studies Institute Program on Process Systems Engineering in August at Iguazu Falls, Argentina. The workshop, which is designed for advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and young researchers, is supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.
Leonidas Bleris, who is writing a dissertation on Dynamics and Control of Integrated Microchemical Systems, expects to earn his Ph.D. later this year. He holds an M.S. from Lehigh and a Diploma from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.
Last year, Bleris received the Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Graduate Fellowship from the National Academy of Science, and served with the Board of Mathematical Sciences and Their Applications in the Division of Engineering and Physical Sciences.
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John Ochs, professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics and founder of Lehigh's Integrated Product Development (IPD) program, was recognized recently as one of four finalists for the inaugural Olympus Innovation Award from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance.
NCIIA is a national alliance of 200 colleges and universities that promote invention, innovation and entrepreneurship in U.S. higher education.
Each finalist for the Olympus prize was allowed to choose an Olympus product, including a digital microscope, ultra zoom digital camera, or combination digital music player/digital camera.
Lehigh's IPD program allows students in engineering, business and the arts to work in teams to design and make products for industrial sponsors, and to develop marketing plans for their products. Students in the year-long program have made more than 300 products.