What a Week It Was!

This week has certainly flown by quickly!

Besides teaching my two courses and holding office hours, I was:

1. interviewed for a radio program on the news of my latest publication, that was highlighted both on physorg.com and on the homeland security newswire and was also the subject of a UMass Amherst news release;

2. interviewed by several journalists on my research on the negation of the Braess paradox and the wisdom of crowds, the subject of my latest article, and asked to comment on some preprints of other researchers;

3. contacted by UMass Amherst development to see whether I could help host an executive who is also an alum;

4. contacted by a representative who was wondering whether I was willing to have a photo of George Dantzig (the founder of operations research who passed away at ago 90) and me, that was taken at a conference, be used in a new edition of a book, and whether I was willing to provide a high resolution image of the photo (coincidentally, I had just shared that photo with the students in my graduate class the day before);

5. a participant in a teleconference for the SBP 2011 conference that I am serving as the tutorial chair for;

6. busy working on a multiple investigator NSF proposal, and

7. trying to finish up two research papers on sustainable supply chain management and on electronic recycling with collaborators;

8. busy contacting all the INFORMS student chapter Faculty Advisors and Chapter Presidents that I am responsible for to see how their chapters were doing and the activities that they were planning for this semester, and

9. trying to catch up with the reviewing of a pile of papers;

10. taking out a senior colleague to lunch who is a distinguished teacher, since I wanted to document his pedagogical wisdom (will write about what I learned later on this blog), and

11. starting my reviews of proposals for a scientific foundation of another country (luckily, this country pays for this kind of hard work).

All of the above I somehow managed to do as our community was having a very hard time dealing with the sudden death of a terrific colleague.

And the above does not even mention any duties/activities as a wife and mother!