My Co-Authors Are From 23 Different Countries

The past few days have been tumultuous with the new US President signing an Executive Order late on Friday proposing a 90-day suspension of visas and other immigration benefits to all nationals of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia. This happened as I was working on completing a paper on blood supply chains with a former doctoral student of mine from Iran, who is now a Professor - Dr. Amir H. Masoumi, and another former doctoral student of mine from China, also now a Professor - Dr. Min Yu.

This Executive Order (EO) struck very close to home, especially since last year another doctoral student of mine at the Isenberg School of Management, Sara Saberi, had returned to Iran, for the first time in about five years, and would not have been able, most likely, to return to the US to defend her thesis and to begin her Assistant Professorship at WPI, had the EO happened last year!

A petition against the EO had been started, which was featured in The Washington Post, so I signed it, and, at this point, the petition has over 40 Nobel prize winners signing it, over 7000 faculty,  and over 12,000 other academic supporters.

Researchers live by the free exchange of ideas and disciplines, especially scientific ones, cannot move forward without the free exchange.

So, I started to wonder, how many different countries of origin were represented by my collaborators with whom I had published papers or written or co-edited  books?

I did some counting and determined that my co-authors were born in 23 different countries and the countries and the collaborators' names are below:

Austria: Tina Wakolbinger and Thomas Nowak

Canada: Francois Soumis

Cape Verde: Jose M. Cruz

China: June Dong, Dong Li, Zugang Liu, Jon Loo, Jie Pan, Patrick Qiang, Ke Ke, Jiahao Wu,  Hong Yan, Min Yu, Ding Zhang, Lan Zhao

Colombia: Luis Marentes, Yezid Donoso, Harold Castro

England: David Parkes, Alan G. Robinson

France: Christian Mullon

Germany: Dietrich Braess, Tilman Wolf

Greece: Stella Dafermos, Ilias S. Kotsireas, Panos M. Pardalos, George Rouskas, Stavros Siokos

India: Kathy Dhanda, Rudra Dutta, Padma Ramanujam, Shivani Shukla

Iran: Amir H. Masoumi, Sara Saberi

Italy: Patrizia Daniele, Antonino Maugeri

Japan: Takashi Takayama,  Fuminori Toyasaki

Korea: Dae-Shik Kim

Lebanon: Hani S. Mahmassani

Mexico: Emilio Alvarez Flores

Norway: Sten Thore

Romania: Monica-Gabriela Cojocaru

Russia: Ilia Baldine, Alexander Eydeland

Sweden: Jonas Floden

Turkey: Deniz Besik, Ceren Soylu

Ukraine: Dmytro Matsypura

United States: Trisha Wolley Anderson, J. Aronson, Phillip M. Bishop, David E. Boyce, Ken Calvert, Paul Dupuis, Jim Griffioen, Kitty Hancock, Merritt Hughes, Patricia L. Mokhtarian, Craig L. Moore, Ladimer S. Nagurney, Charles F. Nicholson, Frank Southworth, John K. Stranlund, Kai Wu.

Five different continents are represented above.

If I have missed someone, just let me know, and I will add or correct whatever needs correcting.

It is inspiring to see the diversity in countries of origin of the above collaborators and also to reflect on our joint work together. Some collaborators are operations researchers / management scientists / mathematicians; others are engineers, computer scientists, or  economists. Some have moved and are in different countries than their birthplaces and others have remained.

Working with collaborators is always enjoyable and synergistic plus motivating as well.

I was born in Canada and proud of it.