Very Much Looking Forward to the 2023 INFORMS Conference in Phoenix!

The 2023 INFORMS Annual Meeting is on the horizon, and is taking place October 15-18 in Phoenix, Arizona. The program is filled with numerous sessions, keynote and plenary talks, business meetings, and many award and social networking events.

I look forward to seeing colleagues from around the globe and also quite a few of my former PhD students. Dmytro Matsypura, for example, will be traveling all the way from Sydney, Australia to take part in this conference! Shivani Shukla will be coming from San Francisco, Deniz Besik from Richmond, and Sara Saberi from Worcester. Zugang "Leo" Liu will be traveling from eastern Pennsylvania.

It is also very exciting that my present Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Dana Hassani, will be speaking at this INFORMS conference, which is his first. He will be presenting our paper, "Exchange Rates and Multicommodity International Trade: Insights from Spatial Price Equilibrium Modeling with Policy Instruments via Variational Inequalities," which is co-authored with Kyiv School of Economics colleagues in Ukraine - Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev. The paper was recently published in the Journal of Global Optimization. 

I will present the paper, "Defense Critical Supply Chain Networks and Risk Management with the Inclusion of Labor: Dynamics and Quantification of Performance and the Ranking of Nodes and Links," which is now in press in the  Handbook for Management of Threats: Security and Defense, Resilience and Optimal Strategies, Konstantinos Balomenos, Major Antonios Fytopoulos, and Panos Pardalos, Editors, Springer Nature, 2023.

Our talks are prepared and I am honored and delighted to be also speaking on two panels.

The above resilience panel is organized by Himadri Sen Gupta and the ITOR Editors panel by the EIC of ITOR (International Transactions in Operational Research) - Celso C. Ribeiro!

I will also be taking part in multiple Editorial Board meetings and in the meeting of the Magazine Editorial Advisory Board (MEAB) of INFORMS that I am now chairing, with the outstanding support of Kara Tucker of INFORMS and committee members.

I look forward to the INFORMS Fellows lunch and to congratulating the newly elected members.

It will also be wonderful to see the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter receive the Magna Cum Laude Award from INFORMS at this conference. Congratulations to all the student chapters who will be recognized for their activities at the conference!

Information on the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix can be found here. Seeing all the exhibits at the Convention Center will be great fun, I am sure, as well as meeting conferees at the various events and even in passing.

And, on Sunday, October 15, for a while, I will take part in an NSF Workshop on Mobility at Arizona State University with both David Boyce and Hani S. Mahmassani speaking. I have forwarded a tribute to David Boyce to the workshop organizers.

I have to also take this opportunity to congratulate Hani Mahmassani since he will be recognized at the Transportation Science & Logistics (TSL) Society business meeting in Phoenix with the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science! Robert Herman was his PhD advisor at UT Austin and this award is so well-deserved. Hani is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering. 

It will be a very exciting time in Phoenix and we will manage, I hope, with the 100 degree temperature!