I am delighted to share that the 2025 Spring Edition of The Supernetwork Sentinel, the newsletter of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I founded in 2001 and continue to serve as the Director of, has now been published.
It was an extraordinary spring semester with many activities and news items to report.
The 2nd Virtual Conference on Ukraine (with free registration) will take place August 22-23, 2025.
Many thanks to the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden for providing support.
Last year I was involved with the first such conference and, this year, I am honored to be on the conference Scientific Committee as well as to be one of the keynote speakers. This conference will also have 3 Nobel Laureates in Economics delivering keynotes:
I have the pleasure of working with Roger Myerson on the International Academic Board of the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) and the same for Yuriy Gorodnichenko.
We are also organizing a panel on “Challenges of Ukraine’s Post-War Reconstruction.”
And for some highlights of last year's conference, please see my blogpost: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2024/08/kudos-to-organizers-of-first.html
In a few days, I head to the UK. I am very excited about the EURO conference at the University of Leeds https://euro2025leeds.uk/, at which I will have 3 invited presentations. My talks are all prepared. This conference marks 50 years of the professional society of EURO, so it will be a very celebratory conference.
The Making an Impact stream, which is the practitioners' stream at the EURO conferences, is always a favorite of mine. I'm thrilled that, at this conference, I'll present on: Tariffs, Trade, and OR: Impacts on Producers, Consumers, and Labor in the Making an Impact: 'OR in Action Lightning Talks' session. Thanks to Ruth Kaufman for organizing this session, which will be the first one of the conference. I last saw Ruth at my Blackett Lecture, which I delivered at The Royal Society in London on December 5, 2024.
And, in the session immediately following, I'll deliver the presentation, "Integrated Crop and Cargo War Risk Insurance: Application to Ukraine," which is based on a paper I co-authored with my Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst PhD student Ismael M. Pour and Professor Borys Kormych of Odesa. The paper was recently published in the International Journal of Operational Research: https://lnkd.in/ewmXR8kU.
Many thanks also to Professors Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber and Roberto Rossi for inviting me to speak in the session: Celebrating 50 Years of EURO on "Reflections on Wonderful OR Experiences at EURO Conferences Over 20 Years." In that presentation slide deck I have many photos of conferees at EURO conferences in Reykjavik, Poznan, Dublin, and other locations. I am very much looking forward to the outstanding scientific presentations and social gatherings and to building new memories.
A while back, I received the following letter from ScholarGPS:
Back to finishing up presentations for the upcoming EURO conference at the University of Leeds in the UK.
I am thrilled that the paper, "Multicommodity Fresh Produce Trade Networks with Quality Deterioration Under Congestion and Transportation Capacities," that I co-authored with Deniz Besik of the University of Richmond is now published in the Journal of Global Optimization! Plus, the paper is published open access and can be read and downloaded on the link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10898-025-01507-3.
Deniz presented this paper last year at the EURO Conference in Copenhagen:
The paper contains a very interesting case study on bananas, the most widely traded fruit globally, and demonstrates the impacts on fresh produce quality of transportation disruptions and delays. The work was inspired by recent challenges to transportation on the Panama Canal because of insufficient water, leading to congestion. The paper shows that because of negative transportation impacts, consumers may pay higher prices for bananas of lower quality.
Deniz will present this paper at the 2025 Commodity and Energy Markets Association Annual Meeting (CEMA) in Houston in a few days, as I head to the EURO Conference in Leeds, United Kingdom, where I have three invited talks!
This was another outstanding collaboration of ours on a highly relevant topic.
This past week, we were delighted to have Dr. Kostyantyn Kyrychenko, the Vice Rector for International Cooperation at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), come to UMass Amherst. Those of you who have been reading my blog are aware of the global partnership between these two universities established shortly after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
It was a pleasure to have Dr. Kyrychenko join a group of us for lunch. At the delicious lunch at The Commonwealth Restaurant sponsored by the UMass Amherst Office of Global Affairs (OGA) even the one and only Associate Vice Chancellor Ken Toong stopped by! When I told our distinguished visitor from Ukraine that UMass Amherst had been voted as having the best college food 7 years in a row - he corrected me (thank you) - UMass Amherst has received this honor 8 times! Special thanks to Kimberly Stender and Claire Novotny of the Office of Global Affairs for the lovely time and to my great Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst colleagues, Professors Bogdan Prokopovych 🇺🇦 and Ina Ganguli, who also has an appointment in our Economics Department and who graciously shared the photo with Ken Toong in the collage below. It was extra special to also have exchange students from KSE join us.
Tariffs and their impacts we have been researching for several decades now because of the relevance of the topic as well as the scientific interest in the mathematical modeling of supply chain networks and international trade. Furthermore, there are different types of tariffs, including unit tariffs, ad valorem tariffs, and even tariff rate quotas. We have studied the impacts of tariffs in perfectly competitive contexts such as spatial price equilibrium problems as well as in oligopolistic markets.
Recently, because of the escalating trade wars and imposition of various retaliatory tariffs in the second Trump administration, our research has included rerouting to evade tariffs. This topic has been quite newsworthy; see, for example, this article in The New York Times, which was published today: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/24/business/vietnam-china-transshipment.html
My paper, "Multicommodity Trade, Tariffs, and Rerouting," co-authored with my Isenberg School PhD student, Samirasadat "Samira" Samadi, was accepted in the very special volume: Convex and Variational Analysis with Applications: In Honor of Terry Rockafellar’s 90th Birthday. Panos M. Pardalos and Themistocles M. Rassias, Editors, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
Posts
