This award funds a summer 2006 planning visit to Turkey for Dr. Alice Smith and Ms. LuAnn Sims, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama. The purpose of the visit is to work with Dr. Berna Dengiz of Baskent University in Ankara, Turkey to co-organize a regional workshop to take place in Turkey in the summer of 2008. The workshop will focus on women in academic industrial engineering and related fields such as systems engineering, engineering management and manufacturing engineering. Discussions will center on the current environment for women academics in this field in the regions involved, and to formulate workable solutions to problems of recruitment and retention. Participants will be drawn from the U.S. and from Middle Eastern countries. The long lead-time for planning and organizing this workshop enhances the likelihood that it will fully explore the rich diversity of practices, challenges, institutions, and solutions across the countries involved.
While women form a relatively large proportion of industrial engineering undergraduate students in the U.S. (their number approaches 50% at many institutions), female women academics in the same field are a minority. Because Turkey has a relatively large proportion of women academics in this field, it is an ideal place to hold such a workshop and an ideal source of successful practices and models for consideration by U.S. and Middle Eastern universities. Such a workshop has the potential to stimulate positive research interactions between the U.S. and the Middle East, to increase the number of qualified women who choose to pursue advanced industrial engineering degrees and enter academia in all countries involved in the workshop, and to improve the retention and advancement of current women academics in the field.
During the planning visit, the PI and her colleagues will visit at least 8 Turkish universities with strong industrial engineering programs in order to explore candidate venues for the workshop and to meet with potential participants to solicit their support and ideas to make the workshop successful. One of the principals for the workshop, Dr. Rym M-Hallah, a Tunisian-born female industrial engineering professor on the faculty at Kuwait University, will join the U.S. visitors and Dr. Dengiz during the planning visit. She will help contact women professors and advanced doctoral students in other countries in the region, including Egypt and Lebanon.
