Food Safety, the Financial Crisis, Katrina and Lessons, Reservoir Simulations, Dynamics of Inequality, and Cyber-Forensics

We are delighted to announce a terrific speaker lineup for the Fall 2009 UMass Amherst Speaker Series in Operations Research / Management Science! This speaker series is organized by the award-winning UMass Amherst Chapter of INFORMS (the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). I have been the chapter's Faculty Advisor since 2004 and this Fall will be the eleventh semester of continuing operation of our speaker series, which is multidisciplinary in nature and is open to the public.

The topics for the fall include: food safety, the financial crisis, Katrina and emergency logistics issues, the optimization of reservoir operations, the nature of wealth and the dynamics of inequality from pre-history to the knowledge-based economy, and cyber-forensics.

We are honored to be hosting: Dr. Mary Helander of IBM, Professor Andrew Lo of the Sloan School at MIT, Professor Jose Holquin-Veras of RPI, Professor Richard Palmer of UMass Amherst, Professor Sam Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and the University of Siena in Italy (and Professor Emeritus of Economics from UMass Amherst), plus Professor Brian Levine of the Computer Science Department at UMass Amherst. The complete titles, abstracts, and information about the speakers and the venue at the Isenberg School of Management can be found here.