Keynote Speakers
Day 1- June 17, 2025 (Tuesday)
10:00 am, Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Barbara Brown
Director, Exploration Research and Technology Programs
NASA, Kennedy Space Center
Florida, USA
10:40 am, Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Rob Kantor
Vice President
Universal Studios
Orlando, FL, USA
11:20 am – Break
11:40 am, Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Dr. Waldemar Karwowski
Pegasus Professor and Chairman
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
University of Central Florida
Orlando, Florida, USA
Waldemar Karwowski is Pegasus Professor and Chairman, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, University of Central Florida, USA. He holds an M.S. in Production Engineering and Management from the University of Technology Wroclaw, Poland, and a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Texas Tech University, USA. He was awarded D.Sc. in management science by the Institute for Organization and Management in Industry, Warsaw, and received the National Professorship title from the President of Poland (2012). Three Central European universities also awarded him Doctor Honoris Causa degrees. Dr. Karwowski served on the Board on Human Systems Integration, National Research Council, USA (2007–2011). He currently is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science journal, Editor-in-Chief of Human-Intelligent Systems Integration journal, and Field Chief Editor of the Frontiers in Neuroergonomics. Dr. Karwowski has over 550 research publications, including over 200 journal papers. He is Fellow of the Ergonomics Society (U.K.), Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE), and the International Ergonomics Association (IEA), and served as President of both HFES (2006-2007) and IEA (2000-2003). He received the William Floyd Award from the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics & Human Factors, the United Kingdom in 2017, and the David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award. Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers, Atlanta, USA, in 2020. He was elected to Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine of Florida (ASEMFL), Orlando, Florida, USA, November 2020.
12:20 pm, Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Javad Mokhbery
CEO and President
FUTEK Advanced Sensor Technology, Inc.
Irvine, California, United States
By all accounts, Javad Mokhbery is a brilliant man. Without any financial help, he built his company, FUTEK Advanced Sensor Technology, Inc., from one bed room apartment to be the leading manufacturer of sensors for a wide variety of industries throughout the world. As a mechanical engineer and innovator, he stays ahead of the trends and positions his company as a pioneer within the evolving industries that he serves. Today, his sensors are used on drills deep down in the Earth for the oil and gas industry and on the surface of Mars where NASA’s rover Curiosity has been exploring since 2012 and making new discoveries each day with the help of FUTEK’s technology. FUTEK sensors are also used in the manufacturing process of the world’s leading smartphones and wearable devices. Indeed, he is extremely smart.
Yet this is not what makes Javad an effective entrepreneur. Pure intelligence, he says, only gets one so far in business. Even if you boast the top mind in your field and balance it with a knack for business and science, you are still missing a huge piece of the equation – emotional intelligence (EQ).
Javad says his EQ has been his key to entrepreneurial success. It’s not something that can be taught through a traditional education, and it’s not necessarily something one is born with either. Rather, Javad credits his unique upbringing and life experiences.
Born in Iran in 1952, Javad was raised by religiously conservative parents, and his father was a successful businessman. By the early 1960s, Javad knew he wanted to study in America, but his parents did not approve. Refusing to take “no” for an answer, he began recruiting random tourists off the street and invited them over for lunch or dinner to expose his folks to the West and show them that foreigners weren’t bad while making friends, practicing English and learning their culture. Then again, we are talking about 1960s; there were no internet or social media like today.
The strategy forged a special kind of EQ in Javad, which serves him to this very day. As an Iranian pre-teen, he said that conversations with strangers from places like Switzerland and Germany helped him empathize and connect with people from all walks of life. He was able to connect with his parents in a powerful way as well. Emotional Intelligence is largely about knowing what other people want or need, and Javad pulled this off in an unusual fashion. When he was 19, they agreed to let him go study in England.
In January 1974, he moved from London to Detroit to advance his education first at DIT (Detroit Institute of Technology). Then at OCC (Oakland Community College) and finally at the Lawrence Institute of Technology (LIT). The move was drastic. He wound up in some of the most dangerous areas of the city and worked there as an ice cream salesman to pay for his education. Though he easily could have, Javad never asked his parents for money. Instead, he worked hard and used his EQ to forge relationships in some of the most undesirable neighborhoods of Detroit to pay for this stage of his education.
Upon graduating from LIT, Javad worked his way up at sensor Production Company in Detroit called GSE. With no green card but with practical training permit from the government, he started in 1979 as the lowest paid engineer at the company and left in 1985 as the highest paid engineer, just below his manager. Then he moved to Southern California to another sensor company in Cerritos called Transducers Inc. and later worked primarily as a contractor to aerospace manufacturers at Rockwell International in Downey, including NASA’s Space Shuttle program.
In 1988, Javad Used up all his saving to buy his first house in Aliso Viejo Ca, got married, ended his journey and his full-time job at Rockwell International and committed to FUTEK with his brother Mohammad Mokhberi, who joined him from Sweden. Upon Javad’s Arrival in California, FUTECH was originally founded in 1985 , which stands for “future technology,” They built the company from the ground up with no money and no commercial loans. The only financing Javad had available to him was his home equity loan on his house in Aliso Viejo and credit cards.
For seven years they struggled, but by the mid-1990s FUTEK had caught its stride, and it was innovating sensors ahead of any other manufacturer in the space. Javad said FUTEK has been successful because of its ability to foresee where other industries are going and develop a sensor for that new direction before the technology needing the sensor actually exists. This approach which follows Blue Ocean Strategy as well as Bayesian Strategy has enabled FUTEK to make its own markets and have huge sectors essentially all to themselves.
The result has been almost two decades of exponential growth. FUTEK employs over 140 people at its Irvine headquarters, where it develops and manufactures all of its sensors. Javad takes great pride in making all of his products in the U.S., and he uses all American-sourced raw materials as well. Not only does he not buy components from China, which is done by many other players in his market, but as a global U.S. company he sells many sensors to China at a premium.
FUTEK’s sensors have a great reputation with high volume medical, aerospace and automation OEM accounts maintaining a zero field reject rate, with the mindset that “Failure is not an option“, something that is extremely rare at this level of precision manufacturing. However, an even greater source of pride for Javad is the fact that FUTEK has never laid off an employee since inception. Even during a lean period following implementation of Oracle Business Suite in 2009, FUTEK kept everyone on staff even though the orders had temporarily dried up. He puts machinist and skilled technicians to work doing other things around the office, such as landscaping, just to keep them productive until activities picked up again.
He insists on a “quality culture” as opposed to “quality control,” which gives manufacturing ownership to his team and yields FUTEK’s coveted zero field rejection rate. The dedication to his team is part of Javad’s Emotional Intelligence philosophy towards entrepreneurship, and it guides different management strategies that he’s deployed at FUTEK.
Day 2 – June 18, 2025 (Wednesday)
10:00 am, Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Michael Tanis
Sr Manager Industrial Engineer
Blue Origin
Florida, USA
10:40 am, Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Dr. Yuehwern Yih
Tompkins Professor of Industrial Engineering
Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering
Purdue University
West Lafayette, Indiana, USA
Dr. Yuehwern Yih is the Tompkins Professor of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University. She previously served as the Director of LASER PULSE ($70 million USAID funded program) and the Associate Director of Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering. Dr. Yih’s core research focuses on understanding system dynamics and improving the outcomes of complex systems under volatile environments including manufacturing systems, supply chains, humanitarian assistance, health care delivery, and global development. Dr. Yih received the IISE David F Baker Distinguished Research Award, the NSF Young Investigator Award, the Melinda and Bill Gates Grand Challenge Award, the inaugural Faculty Engagement Fellow (highest honor for engagement at Purdue), and multiple Outstanding Teaching Awards and the Most Impactful Faculty Inventors at Purdue. She has vast experience in interdisciplinary collaboration to address global development challenges, e.g. integrated food system for HIV patients in Kenya, medical supply chain for maternal/child health in Uganda, humanitarian supply chain in South Sudan and Ukraine. Dr. Yih received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is an IISE Fellow and an ELATE Fellow.
11:20 am – Break
11:40 am, Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Dr. Jesus Velasquez
CEO
Hypothalamus AI
Florida, USA
Math Methodologies:
• Artificial Hypothalamus: Artificial Intelligence & Mathematical Programming Integration
• Mathematical Programing 4.0 for Industry 4.0: a new vison for Math Programming.
• G-SDDP (Generalized Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming) to speed up the solution of distributed/parallel optimization.
• PDS (Primal-Dual Subrogate Algorithm) to solve non-linear problems using Subrogate Math Programming.
• MS-KF (Multi-State Kalman Filter) for unstable/ chaotic systems.
Books:
• Mathematical Programing 4.0 for Industry 4.0 Cyber-Physical Systems (in edition)
• Large Scale Optimization Applied to Supply Chain & Smart Manufacturing: Theory & Real-Life Applications, Springer Optimization and Its Applications Series. Main Editor.
• A Mathematical Programing Model for Regional Planning Incorporating Economics, Logistics, Infrastructure and Land Use, Chapter 1 of Networks Design and Optimization for Smart Cities. World Scientific Publishing Co
High Complexity Mathematical Technologies:
• OPTEX Optimization Expert System a Math Programming 4.0 cognitive robot that generate Artificial Hypothalamus in many technological platforms like IBM CPLEX, GAMS, AMPL, MOSEL, C, PYTHON.
• OPCHAIN (OPtimizing the Value CHAIN) optimization models for general agro-industry, transport, energy (oil, gas, electricity), retail systems, financial and risk management, marketing optimization, mines and regional planning systems.
• SAAM (Stochastic Advanced Analytics Modeling) cognitive robot specialized in applications of Machine Learning (SVM, Clustering, ANN, …) using Math Programming.
Keynote Lecture: XIX Operations Research Latin-Iberoamerican Conference, On-line International Conference on Ancient Math & Science for Computing (2018)
Doctor in Engineering (Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2006). Industrial Engineer and Magister Scientiorum (Los Andes University, 1975). Postgraduate studies in Planning and Engineering of Water Resources (Simon Bolivar University, Caracas) and in Economics (Los Andes University). CLAIO 2008 Chair. Consulting engineer in mathematical modeling, industrial automation, and information systems, for large companies in multiples countries.
LOGYCA-GS1 Award for Innovation and Logistic Excellence 2006. ACOLOG Award to Logistic Research (2006). ACIEM-ENERCOL Award to Colombian Engineering (1998). Alberto Betancourt Operations Research Award (1986). Colombian Society of Operations Research Founder (2000). ALIO Vicepresident. Ex Member by Colombia of IFORS Committee.
12:20 pm, Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Dr. Christopher Mejia
Research Scientist, MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics
Director, MIT SCALE Network for Latin America and the Caribbean
Director, MIT Graduate Certificate in Logistics and SCM (GCLOG) program
Founder & Director, MIT Food and Retail Operations Lab
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Christopher Mejía Argueta is a Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. He develops applied research on retailing operations and food supply chains for multiple stakeholders, including consumer packaged goods manufacturers, carriers, and retailers in the Food and Retail Operations Lab (FaROL). His research focuses on improving the efficiency and flexibility of operations in multiple stakeholders, designing route-to-market and logistics strategies to address changing purchasing patterns, coupling these dynamic consumer profiles with the retail landscape, and reducing undesired socioeconomic and health problems related to income disparity, social backwardness, food malnutrition, food waste by proposing sustainable policies, business models to help vulnerable population segments.
Dr. Chris Mejía is also the Director of the MIT Supply Chain and Global Logistics Excellence (SCALE) Network for Latin America. This initiative, conducted by the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics in the region, aims to lead impactful research and education projects for all companies, the public sector, and society together with top Latin American universities and the support of the Center for Latin-American Logistics Innovation (CLI). In addition, Dr. Chris Mejía serves as the Director of the MIT Graduate Certificate in Logistics & Supply Chain Management (GCLOG), an elite program from the MIT SCALE Network geared towards outstanding graduate students from Latin America.
He holds a M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering focusing on supply chain management and multicriteria optimization, and a PhD in Industrial Engineering focusing on Humanitarian Operations. Dr. Mejía got both degrees with summa cum laude honors (best grade, top 1% students) in both classes at Monterrey Tech, Mexico. In 2013, Dr. Mejía was the academic leader at CLI, where he developed dozens of projects with industry and other academic partners related to disaster response, green logistics, packaging, and last-mile distribution in emerging markets. Before joining MIT CTL, Dr. Mejía Argueta was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Eindhoven University of Technology (TUe), the Netherlands, where he investigated retailing operations for emerging markets and formulated estimation models to analyze the prevalence of nanostores in emerging markets. He is author and editor of the books: 1) Reaching 50 Million Nanostores: Retail Distribution in Emerging Megacities, 2) Supply Chain Management and Logistics in Latin America: A multi-country perspective and 3) Supply Chain Management and Logistics in Emerging Markets.
He has over 15 years of experience, and his work in over 16 countries worldwide has focused on improving the efficiency of operations across the supply chains. He is a co-editor of various special issues in recognized journals and an author of scientific papers published in top journals. He has developed dozens of industry projects focused on the reality of emerging markets regarding transportation, logistics, retailing, and supply chain management.
Day 3 – June 19, 2025 (Thursday)
10:00 am, Thursday, June 19, 2025
Homero Escandon
CEO
Biotix Inc.
San Diego California
10:40 am, Thursday, June 19, 2025
Dr. Cristian Barria
Professor
Director, Master of Engineering and Information Security
Director of the Cybersecurity Research Center
Universidad Mayor
Santiago, Chile
Ph.D. in Computer Engineering with postdoctoral studies in Advanced Research in Multicultural Education and Social Media Management. Holds a Master’s in Computer Engineering and a Master’s in Educational Management and Planning, as well as degrees in Computer Engineering and Administration Engineering. Currently serves as the Director of the Cybersecurity Research Center at Universidad Mayor, Chile.
11:20 am – Break
11:40 am, Thursday, June 19, 2025
Dr. Ivan Garibay
Associate Professor
Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
University of Central Florida
Orlando, Florida, USA
Director, UCF Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Initiative
Director, Master of Science in Data Analytics
Director, Complex Adaptive Systems Laboratory
Founding Director, UCF I-Corps program
Affiliated appointments to Computer Science and Modeling and Simulation
Dr. Ivan Garibay is an Associate Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, University of Central Florida. He is the Director of UCF Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Initiative, Director of Master of Science Program in Data Analytics, and the Director of the Complex Adaptive Systems Laboratory. He is also the Founding Director of the UCF I‐Corps program. His interests lie in studying complex socio‐technical systems such as social media and artificial social intelligence. He received Ph.D. in Computer Science and M.S. in Computer Science from University of Central Florida, P.E. in Electronic Engineering (Titulo Profesional) and B.S. in Electronic Engineering from Ricardo Palma University, Peru.
12:20 pm, Thursday, June 19, 2025
Dr. Lawrence Morehouse
President & CEO
Florida Education Fund (FEF)
Tampa, Florida, USA
Areas
| Name | Company/University | Area |
| Dr. Cristian Barria | Universidad Mayor, Chile | Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence |
| Barbara Brown | NASA, Kennedy Space Center | Ground Support Systems, Artemis |
| Homero Escandon | CEO Biotix Inc., San Diego California | Nearshoring |
| Dr. Ivan Garibay | University of Central Florida, Industrial Engineering and Management Systems | Social Cybersecurity |
| Rob Kantor | Universal Studios, Vice President | Universal Studios Operations |
| Dr. Christopher Mejia | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Transporation and Logistics | Last Mile Delivery and Artificial Intelligence |
| Dr. Javad Mockbery | FUTEK, CEO and President | Sensors and Space Exploration |
| Dr. Lawrence Morehouse | President & CEO of the Florida Education Fund (FEF) | Minorities Education in Florida |
| Dr. Waldemar Karwowski | University of Central Florida, Industrial Engineering and Management Systems | Human Factors and Workforce Climate |
| Michael Tanis | Blue Origin, Florida | Systems Engineering, Manufacturing |
| Dr. Jesus Velasquez | Hypothalamus AI, Florida, CEO | Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence |
| Dr. Yuehwern Yih | Purdue University, Industrial Engineering | Healthcare and Emergency Management |
Contact: info@ieomsociety.org