Industrial Engineer Earns National Honor

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Rajan Batta, Ph.D., professor of industrial and systems engineering and associate dean for graduate studies in the University at Buffalo's School for Engineering and Applied Sciences, has received the Institute of Industrial Engineering Fellow Award.

Each year the national organization selects individuals to recognize distinguished service and leadership qualities.

Batta uses industrial engineering techniques, such as operations research, to develop and analyze mathematical models of systems critical to society. His research areas range from transportation planning and analysis of urban crime patterns to military logistics, telecommunications and homeland defense.

Batta, along with colleagues in the UB Department of Geography, helped develop Erie County's first database of automobile accidents. He also has studied traffic flow and the transportation of extremely hazardous materials.

In the area of homeland defense, Batta studies airline security-system design and the control of queues in disaster-management situations like earthquakes and hurricanes. In telecommunications applications, Batta has worked on ways to locate cell phone towers and estimate signal strength.

Batta received UB's 2002 Sustained Achievement Award and he won the Best Paper Award from Military Operations Research Journal in 2004.

He has a sustained record of funding from federal agencies, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Justice; local government, including the City of Buffalo; and private industry, including Boeing, United Airlines, Lockheed-Martin and Federal Express.

His research also has been funded by UB's National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis and the Center for Transportation Injury Research.

He has published more than 80 journal papers in the premier journals in his field, most co-authored with his doctoral students, and serves on the editorial boards of IIE Transactions and Computers & Operations Research.

A UB faculty member since 1984, Batta served as chair of the UB Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering for nine years.

He graduated from the India Institute of Technology in New Delhi and earned a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He lives in East Amherst.