Connor Jennings graduated with PhD in Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering in December 2018. While at Penn State, he worked in the Smart Design and Manufacturing Systems Lab and The NSF Center for e-Design. He research focused on data mining and its application in predicting when products will become obsolete and monitoring systems to forecast failures. For someone whose research is predicting the different ways products can die, he is surprisingly upbeat.

Connor received his B.S. in industrial and manufacturing engineering, B.S. in economics and M.S. in industrial engineering from Iowa State University. He loves explaining that Iowa has more than corn. He has also worked in many random jobs, from supply chain engineer to financial analyst to software engineer. When he graduates, he would like to be an entrepreneur, business analyst, politician, comedy writer, or professor. His advisor and everyone else (including himself) is waiting eagerly to see which he picks.