LTC Dale Henderson successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Arizona in Systems & Industrial Engineering. His research is in the field of nonlinear optimization, titled Heuristic and Exact Techniques for Solving a Temperature Estimation Model. Congratulations, Dr. Henderson!
Dale is now assigned to the Department of Systems Engineering at USMA.
I recently asked him about his studies and his current job and he responded with the following. Dale writes: I love teaching at USMA. It is the best job in the Army (for me). I teach non-majors a soft course, so it is really different than my research areas, and these cadets are very different from what I was like – they are forced to take an engineering sequence. It is very hard work. I’m not sure it is anything like being on the faculty of a civilian university. We work harder at teaching and we do less research.
On civilian graduate studies: I probably have a unique perspective on the process. I went to military school twice before I went for the PhD, and in the military schools your path is laid out pretty clearly. When you go for a PhD at a civilian school there are a sequence of steps, and requirements, but the path you follow is very much up to you and your advisor. It is extremely hard to –finish-. The academic world is far different than the military (or business I imagine) world. People take a long time to do things. On the other hand, there really is nothing like having several years to really do nothing but think about a particular problem and a narrow field of study.
Research interests: I am interested in applied optimization. Especially in looking at optimization problems that people have formulated and can’t solve (due to complexity issues) and helping to reformulate or apply some different approach to them to make them solvable.