On March 9 and 10, 2023, the PanOptiC Conference on Global Optimization took place at the University of Florida Gainesville. The conference was organized to celebrate the distinguished career of Professor Panos M. Pardalos.
The conference was excellent and brought speakers together from many countries. The full program can be downloaded here.
Panos (if I may) has chaired the PhD dissertations of 71 students, which is an incredible accomplishment and has an h-index of 105! His nurturing of students, colleagues, both junior and senior, and his warmth and entrepreneurial spirit in the founding of journals and book series are truly laudable. He has co-directed the Center for Applied Optimization at the U. of Florida for many years and Bill Hager presented him with an award at the banquet this past Thursday, along with a testimonial. Many of his former PhD students and friends were in attendance. Panos also spoke as did his former PhD students Vladimir Boginskii and Clayton Commander (who has both a PhD and an MD).
It was exciting to have John Birge and Nick Sahinidis (both members of the National Academy of Engineering) give the keynote talks.
It was extra exciting for me to be at this conference since my PhD student Dana Hassani and I were presenting our work with colleagues at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) - Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev through the partnership that UMass Amherst established with KSE.
In our presentation, I had included two collages of events with Pardalos from Greece to Bellagio in Italy as examples with many colleagues and even students in the images.
It was great to see the display of books by Springer at the conference. The display included my new Labor and Supply Chain Networks book as well as the latest Dynamics of Disasters book that I co-edited with Ilias Kotsireas, Panos Pardalos, and Arsenios Tsokas. It was wonderful to see our Editor Elizabeth Loew of Springer!
I leave you with some additional photos of wonderful colleagues including Dionne Aleman from the University of Toronto and Sandra Eksioglu from the University of Arkansas!
And, since Florida is know for its gators, I include some images of the campus.
We are lucky to have such an amazing scientific scholar and human being in our discipline. Thank you, Professor Panos M. Pardalos!
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