ISyE Seminar Series: Dr. Larry Snyder
"Teaching "Algorithms and Social Justice""
Dr. Larry Snyder
Harvey E. Wagner Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Deputy Provost for Faculty Affairs
Lehigh University
About the seminar:
This talk discusses interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches to teaching Algorithms and Social Justice, using examples from a co-taught undergraduate course at Lehigh University cross-listed between Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS). The students in the course come from both engineering and humanities/social sciences, and the course builds students' skills in a broad range of topics, such as interpreting feminist philosophy and writing Python code. I will share our philosophical approach to course design, along with concrete examples of course readings and activities. I argue that an integrated approach to quantitative and qualitative reasoning about algorithms, grounded in peer-to-peer instruction, has transformative potential not only for undergraduate students, but also for the future of our disciplinary fields.
Bio:
Larry Snyder is the Harvey E. Wagner Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Deputy Provost for Faculty Affairs at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences from Northwestern University. Dr. Snyder’s research interests include modeling and solving problems in supply chain management and energy systems, particularly when the problem exhibits significant amounts of uncertainty. He is co-author of the textbook Fundamentals of Supply Chain Theory, published in 2011 by Wiley, which won the IIE/Joint Publishers Book-of-the-Year Award in 2012; a second edition was published in 2019. He is the author of Stockpyl, a Python package for inventory optimization and simulation, and he collaborated with Gurobi to develop the free educational software the Burrito Optimization Game. He previously served as a Senior Research Fellow–Optimization for Opex Analytics. For more information, visit coral.ise.lehigh.edu/larry.