Biography

Leonie S. Otte is a Ph.D. candidate in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Rhode Island and a Fulbright scholar with experience in both academia and in industry. She holds a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Industrial and Mechanical Engineering from Germany and a Master of Science in Systems Engineering from the University of Rhode Island.  As an undergraduate, she held a co-op position with Volkswagen AG in Germany, where she gained hands-on experience in industrial mechanics as well as planning and development of the battery cell manufacturing department. For her master’s thesis at the University of Rhode Island, she shifted away from electric vehicles towards the US election system.

Leonie’s current research focuses on the processing and tabulation of mail ballots. She is investigating the Vote-by-Mail from different engineering perspectives, like noise levels, process performance, comparison of humans vs. machines, process optimization, and process benchmark comparison. For this, she uses different tools such as statistical analysis and discrete-event simulation. Leonie received the opportunity to present her work at various national conferences, working with Dr. Bridgett King at the University of Kentucky during the summer of 2025, and performing data collection in five US states and Germany.

For Leonie’s master’s degree at the University of Rhode Island, she was awarded a German-American Fulbright Scholarship. In her Ph.D. studies, she received a First-Year Doctoral Fellowship from the Graduate School of the University of Rhode Island, a Society of Women Engineers Scholarship, and a Scholarship from the Max-Kade Foundation. She is on the COE Dean Student Advisory Board and involved with the Society of Women Engineers, the URI Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers student organization, and the URI Dance Company.