Dr. Jian Hu will be joining IMSE Department as an Assistant Professor in September 2012.  Dr. Hu received his Ph.D. degree in Operations Research from Northwestern University in 2011. Dr. Hu's recent research focus is in risk management and multi-expert multi-criteria decision making with applications in project management, healthcare, and homeland security. In his recent work he proposed risk-adjusted aggregation methods to distill a robust group preference form individual judgments. Based on these methods, he developed budget allocation model for the government grant, Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI), for successfully predicting the underfunded homeland defense in New York. His contribution has been reported by many news media and highlighted by the NSF as one of the best projects funded by the NSF. Dr. Hu published papers in such journals as Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, IIE Transactions, and Transportation Research.

Nationwide, there is an increasing demand for skilled and experienced professionals who can develop, deploy, and manage locally and globally developed programs in a timely and efficient manner. M.S. in Program and Project Management (M.S. in PPM) is 30 semester hours graduate degree designed to address this growing need and targets technical professionals from various industries (i.e. engineering, information technology, military, government, healthcare, energy, transportation) who need to deepen their understanding of program and project management and would like to make a transition from team members to program managers. Graduates will also have the foundation to pursue certification as a project management professional (PMP).