Celebrating a Great Operations Researcher and Friend Professor Panos M. Pardalos

Very soon the conference in honor of Distinguished Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida, Gainesville, will take place in beautiful Chalkidiki, Greece. We will be recognizing this great operations researcher and scientist, who has been deservedly lauded with numerous awards from being elected INFORMS Fellow, class of 2006, to his receipt of the Euro Gold Medal Award in 2013, to his being appointed the first Paul and Heidi Brown Preeminent Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Panos' record of accomplishments is breath-taking from his outstanding and voluminous research in optimization and numerous applications from engineering to even medicine. At the same time, he is extremely generous and giving to his numerous doctoral students, collaborators, and colleagues from around the globe. His energy, stamina, knowledge, and vision are legendary.

And he is a very special friend and role model for multiple generations of operations researchers.

When I received an invitation from the organizers of the conference in honor of Professor Pardalos' 60th birthday, Professors Sergiy Butenko and Sakis Migdalas, I had to accept.

The conference in honor of Panos is entitled:  Conference on Optimization Control and Applications in the Information Age will take place June 15-20, 2014.

Speakers will be coming from many different countries, including my former doctoral student at the Isenberg School of Management, Dr. Dmytro Matsypura, who has tenure now at the School of Business at the stunning University of Sydney in Australia!

At the conference we will present Panos with a book, with the cover featured below. More information on the book is available from the Springer website.

 

Another former doctoral student of mine, Dr. Min Yu, of the University of Portland, and I have contributed the paper, A Supply Chain Network Game Theoretic Framework for Time-Based Competition with Transportation Costs and Product Differentiation, to this book, which is edited by  Th. M. Rassias, C. A. Floudas, and S. Butenko, Springer, New York (2014).

I will be presenting the paper, Supply Chain Network Competition in Time-Sensitive Markets, Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, Jonas Floden, and Ladimer S. Nagurney, which builds on the paper in the edited book.

The full presentation can be downloaded from the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website.

Last summer I spoke at a conference on Network Models in Economics and Finance in Athens, Greece, which Panos organized and the photo of us with some researchers is below.

We look forward to celebrating the achievements and the humanity and kindness of Professor Pardalos!