Leon F. McGinnis is Professor Emeritus in Georgia Tech's School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) and a registered Professional Engineer in the state of Georgia. McGinnis has been a leader in developing and administering industry-focused and interdisciplinary education and research programs at Georgia Tech. He helped establish the Material Handling Research Center in 1982, and he managed one of five research programs over the next decade. McGinnis also helped establish the Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems (CIMS) Program in 1983, which received a LEAD Award from ASME for excellence in graduate-level interdisciplinary manufacturing education, and he served as its Director from 1988 to 1998. As CIMS Director, he lead a team that competed for, and won, a $1 million TRP grant, resulting in the establishment of the Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing Institute within the Manufacturing Research Center. In 1994, McGinnis lead a team of ISyE faculty to win over $2 million in grants from the W. M. Keck Foundation to create the Keck Virtual Factory Lab as a focal point for IE systems design and control research. Additionally, McGinnis enjoys teaching students how to think like industrial engineers, particularly in developing and using mathematical and computational models to support design of facilities and control systems. His research focuses on fundamental representation issues in discrete event logistics systems, on performance assessment models, and on the development of integrated computational tools.