Supernetwork Center Associate Reunion at INFORMS San Francisco

Conferences at which you get a chance to see in person wonderful collaborators, colleagues, and former students are always my favorites and, of course, the venue is also important.

The 2014 INFORMS conference was fabulous and served as a great venue at which many of the Supernetwork Center Associates got together face to face. Although not everyone could be there, including Professor Dmytro Matsypura of the University of Sydney in Australia (a regular at this conference) and Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy, as well as Dr. Stavros Siokos, Sciens CEO of London, UK, Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria,  the representation by the supernetwork team was, nevertheless,  great! It was extra special that doctoral students could meet some of the more senior Center Associates, who are Full Professors or managers in industry.

Below I provide photos that will keep the wonderful memories alive of this terrific supernetwork team and this great conference.

We went to J&G's for dinner on Sunday and one of several of my colleagues, who were born in China,  remarked that this was the best Chinese food that they had had in the US and I agreed. Thanks to Professor Min Yu of the University of Portland for locating it and to Professor Patrick Qiang of Penn State Malvern  for being our navigator to the location.

Our supply chain network competition session that I organized generated good questions and we thank Professor Vladimir Boginski of the University of Florida for taking the group photo below and for inviting me to put together this session!

In the above photo top row are: Professors Min Yu, June Dong of SUNY Oswego, and Ke Ke of Central Washington University, with Isenberg School Management Science doctoral students Sara Saberi and Dong "Michelle" Li. In the front row Professors Patrick Qiang and Amir H. Masoumi of Manhattan College  are seated with me. All of the presentations delivered in this session are now posted on the supernetwork center website.

After our session it was time to celebrate the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter cum laude award at a very nice ceremony. It was great to see Professor Min Yu come to support the students. She had been a long-serving member of the chapter before receiving her PhD.

On Tuesday, we had a great turnout for the WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) awards lunch at which we enjoyed the delicious food (an amazing dessert) and the conversations.

It was special to speak with Center Associate Professor Jose M. Cruz of the University of Connecticut and Dr. Padma Ramanujam of SAS, both of whom received their PhDs with a concentration in Management Science from the Isenberg School at UMass. I was their very proud dissertation advisor.

Center Associate Professor Trisha Anderson of Texas Wesleyan University was also a presenter but could not stay for the full conference. She spoke at a session on supply chains that Professor Cruz organized and her co-author was Center Associate Professor Zugang "Leo" Liu, whose wife recently gave birth to a baby girl (so he was otherwise preoccupied).

It was also to have Doctoral Student Center Associate Sara Saberi present for the first time at an INFORMS conference. Sara spoke on our joint work with Professor Tilman Wolf on game theory and a service-oriented Internet.