Celebrating Student Achievements - A First Prize Award

The best part about being a faculty member is working with students.

And with the beautiful month of September and the beginning of the new academic year, there is a renewed energy on campus.

Faculty who work closely with students are also happiest when their students achieve and such achievements should be celebrated.

This past week has been filled with wonderful news concerning students.

For example, yesterday evening, my doctoral student in Management Science, Shivani Shukla, who had traveled by public transportation - quite the challenge in itself  - to our sister campus, UMass Lowell, to take part in the Air Force Association (AFA) Cyber Workshop  shared with me some wonderful news. The poster that she had presented, "Game Theoretic Model for Cybersecurity Investments with Nonlinear Budget Constraints," was awarded the first prize in the poster category!

Part of Shivani's poster presentation was based on the paper: A Supply Chain Game Theory Framework for Cybersecurity Investments Under Network Vulnerability, Anna Nagurney, Ladimer S. Nagurney, and Shivani Shukla, which was just published last week in Computation, Cryptography, and Network Security, N.J. Daras and M.T. Rassias, Editors, Springer International Publishing Switzerland (2015) pp 381-398. A nice writeup is here.

Below is a photo of Shivani with Bruce Baikis from MITRE and Joe Carriere from L3 Communications, who gave her the award. MITRE is also the home base of one of my absolutely favorite INFORMS colleagues, Dr. Les Servi (who is also a fellow Brown U. alum).

The prize consisted of a check plus an Air Force medal, which is considered a badge of honor.

The first prize in the paper category went to Patrick Dynoff, who is a high school student, and has been working with faculty at the Naval Postgraduate School. So impressive!


Congrats to all the entrants in the AFA Challenge!

Clearly, the way forward with cybersecurity is through research and education, which must include great students!  At the Isenberg School of Management and at UMass Amherst our students are fabulous and a delight to work with.