About Us

Located just 20 minutes from Washington DC, the SEOR Department at GMU is in the heart of the region with the highest concentration of systems engineers and operations research practitioners in the country. The Department is part of the Volgenau School of Engineering. We offer BS and MS degrees in Systems Engineering and an MS degree in Operations Research and a PhD program in Systems Engineering and Operations Research.

Systems Engineering is the "people-oriented engineering profession". Systems Engineers determine the most effective ways for an organization to use all of a given system's components -- people, machines, materials, information, and energy. Systems engineers plan, design, implement and manage complex systems that assure performance, safety, reliability, maintainability at reasonable cost and delivered on time.

Operations Research deals with the use of scientific methods in management decision making, especially for the best allocation of limited resources. Operations researchers try to find order in apparent chaos by identifying the structure in complex situations and understanding how the components or organizations interact. They can then explain and predict the effect of actions on these systems. Operations research thus provides a rational basis for making decisions.