Celebrating My 19th PhD Student's Successful Defense at the Isenberg School of Management

It is always a very special day when a doctoral student successfully defends her dissertation.  It s extra special when it is your doctoral student and you chaired her dissertation committee.

Today is a very steamy day in Massachusetts with temperatures in the mid 90s but we celebrated, nonetheless, and for good reasons. Sara Saberi, my 19th PhD student, successfully defended her dissertation at the Isenberg School of Management this morning. Her concentration was Management Science. And, this is not Sara's first PhD, but her second. Her first is in Industrial Engineering from a university in Malaysia!

Sara's defense was at 8:30AM and she surprised us with some treats.

Sara's dissertation is entitled:  Network Game Theory Models of Services and Quality Competition with Application to Future Internet Architectures and Supply Chains. Her presentation can be downloaded here.

Her research was funded, in part, by  a three-year, $909,794, National Science Foundation grant to address some of the difficulties with new protocols and services on the Internet. The project, "Network Innovation through Choice," was part of a $2.7 million collaborative project. The project also included the University of Kentucky, North Carolina State University, and the Renaissance Computing Institute of Asheville, North Carolina. Professor Tilman Wolf, Associate Dean in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, who is also a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was the PI on the grant and I was a Co-PI.  Professor Wolf was also on Sara's doctoral dissertation committee. We received a one year extension on this grant and, together with Professor Wolf, I now have an NSF EAGER grant.

Sara also received not one, but two, Isenberg Scholar Awards from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, each for $10,000.

Sara's dissertation committee consisted, of Professor Adams Steven of my department at the Isenberg School of Management, and Professors Tilman Wolf and Michael Zink of the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst.

Sara did a great job presenting today.

After the successful defense, we went out to lunch at Judie's restaurant in downtown Amherst.

Sara, I am very pleased to say, begins a tenure track Assistant Professorship at the Foisie School of Business at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) this month! It will be very nice to have her in Massachusetts and only about an hour away. WPI is a research university and with the great colleagues and students there, Sara should thrive.

Several of Sara's research publications can be found below.

Supply Chain Network Competition in Price and Quality with Multiple Manufacturers and Freight Service Providers, Anna Nagurney, Sara Saberi, Shivani Shukla, and Jonas Floden, Transportation Research E 77: (2015) pp 248-267.

A Game Theory Model for a Differentiated Service-Oriented Internet with Duration-Based Contracts, Anna Nagurney, Sara Saberi, Tilman Wolf, and Ladimer S. Nagurney, Proceedings of ICS 2015: Operations Research and Computing: Algorithms and Software for Analytics, Brian Borchers, J. Paul Brooks, and Laura McLay, Editors , INFORMS (2015) pp 15-29.

A Network Economic Game Theory Model of a Service-Oriented Internet with Price and Quality Competition in Both Content and Network Provision, Sara Saberi, Anna Nagurney, and Tilman Wolf, Service Science 6(4): December (2014) pp 229-250.

A Dynamic Network Economic Model of a Service-Oriented Internet with Price and Quality Competition, Anna Nagurney, Dong Li, Sara Saberi, and Tilman Wolf, in Network Models in Economics and Finance, V.A. Kalyagin, P.M. Pardalos, and T. M. Rassias, Editors, Springer International Publishing Switzerland (2014) pp 239-264.

A Network Economic Game Theory Model of a Service-Oriented Internet with Choices and Quality Competition, Anna Nagurney, Dong Li, Tilman Wolf, and Sara Saberi, Netnomics 14(1-2): (2013) pp 1-25. (This article was recognized by ACM Computing Reviews as a Notable Article in Computing in 2013.)

A full list of my PhD students, up to Sara,  can be found on the academic genealogy website:
 https://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=14557

  Great to see the academic family tree growing.