A Walk Down Memory Lane - I Thoroughly Enjoyed Presenting on 20 Years of EURO Conferences

Congratulations to the European Association of Operational Research Societies (EURO) on its 50th anniversary, which we recently celebrated at the great EURO Conference in Leeds, UK, June 22-25, 2025  https://euro2025leeds.uk/outline-programme/. I am writing this post, which is the 5th one in a series on this conference, while in Edinburgh.

It was a very busy, engaging conference for me, with 2,000 delegates from across the globe. I was honored to give 3 presentations. The first two (on tariffs and trade in the Making an Impact session, and on war risk insurance in the Insurance and finance session) I have already blogged about.  My third presentation was: "Reflections on Wonderful OR Experiences at EURO Conferences Over 20 Years."

This talk I gave on the last day of the conference. I  am very grateful to Professor Gerhard-Wilhelm "Willi" Weber for inviting me to speak in the session: "Celebrating 50 Years of EURO."

The session presenters and their titles:

Reflections on Wonderful OR Experiences at EURO Conferences Over 20 Years

Anna Nagurney

Why the 1970’s Was an Important Era in Operational Research, with Personal Reflections

Jyrki Wallenius

Lessons I learned from EURO

Emilio Carrizosa

Fifty years of Data Envelopment Analysis

Ali Emrouznejad, Anna Mergoni, Kristof De Witte.

The session was chaired by the Immediate Past President of EURO - Professor Anita Schöbel.

I have posted the slide deck of my presentation on the Supernetwork Center website: 

https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/EURO20YearsNagurney.pdf

In my slide deck I have many photos of conferees at EURO Conferences in Reykjavik, Poznan, Glasgow, Dublin, and Copenhagen. I was touched that several colleagues, whose photos I had included in my presentation, came to my talk in Leeds! 

Afterwards, we took a group photo, which included the session chair,  Professor Anita Schöbel,  the session organizer, Professor Gerhard-Wilhelm "Willi" Weber, and Graham Rand, who was mentioned in several of the presentations, including mine.

The EURO conference have been expertly organized, with excellent scientific sessions, and, above all, I now can consider many of the wonderful researchers and practitioners that I have met at these conferences to be friends. Science is about research, education, and, most of all, it is about people!

Presented Our Integrated War Risk Insurance Paper at EURO in Leeds

The outstanding EURO 2025 conference in Leeds is now over and delegates have disbursed. Scientific conferences are essential to knowledge exchange and also to networking and building communities.

It was an honor to present our recently published paper, "Integrated Crop and Cargo War Risk Insurance: Application to Ukraine," in the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) at this conference.

The paper was co-authored with my Isenberg School of Management PhD student Ismael Pour and Professor Borys Kormych of the Odesa Law Academy in Ukraine. Professor Kormych was a Virtual Scholar, in the first and second cohorts, thanks to the partnership between UMass Amherst and the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE). We enjoyed our collaboration very much.

The paper can be accessed here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/itor.70038?af=R

The paper was presented on Monday, June 23, 2025, in a very relevant session on Data Science in  Insurance and Finance. Information on the session is below.

Integrated crop and war risk insurance

Anna Nagurney, Ismael Pour, Borys Kormych

Finding robust profiles of mental well-being across Europe

Irene Albarran

Premium calculation using Parametric Quantile Regression for insurance count data

Fabio Baione, Davide Biancalana, Aurora Ferri

Implementing non-dominated sorting into asset preselection within portfolio problem

Tomáš Tichý, David Neděla, Sergio Ortobelli Lozza

We took a selfie of the speakers and the session chair.

Thanks to all who came to our session, including Christina Phillips! The link to our slide deck, from which our full presentation can be downloaded, is here: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/EURO-2025-NPK.pdf

Outstanding Making an Impact Lightning Talks: Honored to Speak on Tariffs, Trade, and OR

This post is the third in a series on the EURO Conference, which took place in Leeds, UK, June 22-25, 2025.

I was honored and delighted to have been invited by Ruth Kaufman to deliver a lighting talk in the Making an Impact session on Monday morning, June 23, of the conference at 8:30AM. All 13 speakers, from several different continents, showed up. The full list of speakers, their presentation titles, and abstracts can be found here: https://euro2025leeds.uk/making-an-impact/. The breadth of topics was fantastic and included algorithms for fighting crime, reducing food waste on airplane flights, and emergency ambulance service planning. 

My presentation was on Tariffs, Trade, and OR.

This session was a truly outstanding beginning to this scientific conference.

Below is photo of the speakers with Ruth Kaufman and Jane Parkin, followed by a photo of the audience.

I have been publishing on tariffs (of different types) for quite a few years now, so I very much enjoyed preparing and delivering my presentation, which is now posted on the Supernetwork Center website: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/EURO2025_MakinganImpact-Tariffs,%20Trade,%20and%20OR.pdf

Excellent Journal Editorial Board Meetings at the EURO Conference in Leeds

The outstanding EURO Conference in Leeds, UK, is now over and this is the second blogpost in a series about this conference. I have been coming to this OR conference since 2006, which was in Reykjavik, Iceland.

One facet of these conferences that I very much enjoy is the editorial board meetings. I have the honor of serving on both the editorial boards of the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) and the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR). ITOR is the flagship journal of IFORS (International Federation of Operational Research Societies) and EJOR is the flagship journal of EURO (European Association of Operational Research Societies), which, at this year's conference, we celebrated its 50th anniversary. EURO is part of IFORS.

Celso Ribeiro, the EIC of ITOR, travelled all the way from Brazil and our lunch time meeting on Monday, June 23, 2025, was wonderful. The journal is doing very well with thousands of submissions each year. A highlight for me is always seeing Celso and also fellow Associate Editors. 

I enjoyed meeting Sunil Tiwari, who is in the above photo with Kathy Stecke and me. Kathy was the first conferee that I encountered and that was at our hotel in the elevator in Leeds.

And, on Tuesday, June 24, 2025, Elsevier, the publisher of EJOR, treated us to a nice lunch and the EIC, Roman Slowinski, shared with us a lot of good news about EJOR. I had the pleasure of being seated next to Michael Yearworth, one of the main editors,  and Shaunna Whittle, publisher of EJOR.

Below is a collage of  photos taken at the editorial board meeting and after lunch.

Thanks so much to the Editors, and to all the Associate Editors, reviewers, and authors of articles published in these important journals that advance scientific knowledge in OR as well as its relevance to so many disciplines!

Serendipity of Great Conferences - the 50th Anniversary of EURO in Leeds

This is the first post of a series on the EURO Conference, which took place June 22-25, 2025 in Leeds, UK. This Operational Research (OR) Conference brought together 2,000 delegates from around the globe and was historic since it also marked the 50th anniversary of the establishment of EURO - the Association of  European Operational Research Societies. There were delegates even from China!

This post is on the serendipity of conferences - it is always a delight to see colleagues in person, some of whom you might not even have realized would be coming.

On Sunday, June 22, 2025, in the hotel elevator, I saw Kathy Stecke of the University of Texas Dallas and we burst out laughing. Then, en route up a big hill to the University to register on Sunday, I was greeted with a warm: Hello! on the street by Razia Amzad of Springer Nature. At registration, it was truly a delight to see Christina Phillips, Graham Rand, Tetyana Romanova, Martine Labbé, and Gendreau Michel! And, amazingly, in my third conference presentation on 20 years of EURO conferences I have photos of many of these wonderful colleagues in my slide deck. A delight was to even see at registration the photographer who took the official photos at my Blackett Lecture at The Royal Society on December 5, 2024, thanks to The OR Society.

Conferences can be very energizing and inspiring from the scientific knowledge exchange perspective to all the wonderful personal connections. On June 24, 2025, after my second conference presentation,  I was thrilled to see Anand Subramanian, the genius behind the Subject_To interview podcasts, who came all the way from Brazil. Then, to meet up with Suresh Sethi, whose passion for life and scholarship fills me with hope, plus to see Kostas Nikolopoulos, one of the outstanding editors of the Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS) of The OR Society, and its publisher Richard Goodman, along with Sunil Tiwari, whose dynamism and intellect delight, made for an extraordinary afternoon. Joining us was Pritha Dutta, one of my former Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst PhD students, who traveled all the way from Portland, Oregon, where she is now an Assistant Professor at Willamette University. Pritha presented on her latest research on humanitarian operations with applications to India.

After my third conference presentation, and the wrapup of the conference, as we were heading to the Leeds train station from the hotel, I saw Senay Solak, who is the Chair of my OIM Department at the Isenberg School of Management! We were delighted to see each other and walked together to the station, each heading onwards on our journeys.

Many thanks to EURO and to The OR Society for such wonderful conference experiences, which further emphasize the importance of face to face professional meetings.

And, then at the Leeds train station, I saw Janny Leung of Macao, who actually chaired the session that Senay spoke at the day before. We had an excellent conversation about some initiatives. 

The Spring Supernetwork Newsletter Is Published!

I am delighted to share that the 2025 Spring Edition of The Supernetwork Sentinel, the newsletter of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I founded in 2001 and continue to serve as the Director of, has now been published.

It was an extraordinary spring semester with many activities and news items to report.

It is wonderful to see that our research is making impact and that we continue to be sought by the media for our expertise on supply chains and various policies, including tariffs. This summer will be busy with conferences and also with work on international trade as well as food security.

The Spring 2025 newsletter, as well as all other earlier newsletters, can be accessed here: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/newsletters/sentinel.html

Thank you for the support!

Excited About the 2nd Virtual Conference on Ukraine with Amazing Keynote Speakers!

The 2nd Virtual Conference on Ukraine (with free registration) will take place August 22-23, 2025.

Many thanks to the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden for providing support.

Last year I was involved with the first such conference and, this year, I am honored to be on the conference Scientific Committee as well as to be one of the keynote speakers. This conference will also have 3 Nobel Laureates in Economics delivering keynotes: 

• Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu, MIT, USA
• Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, City University of New York, USA
•  Roger Myerson, University of Chicago, USA

along with keynoters:

• Yuriy Gorodnichenko, UC Berkeley, USA
• Subal Kumbhakar, Binghamton University, USA.

I have the pleasure of working with Roger Myerson on the International Academic Board of the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) and the same for Yuriy Gorodnichenko.

We are also organizing a panel on “Challenges of Ukraine’s Post-War Reconstruction.”

The deadline for full papers or extended abstracts is approaching, so, please, also visit the website at KTH: https://www.kth.se/ukraine-conference

And for some highlights of last year's conference, please see my blogpost: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2024/08/kudos-to-organizers-of-first.html

Making an Impact - All Set with 3 Talks for the EURO Conference in Leeds, UK!

In a few days, I head to the UK. I am very excited about the EURO conference at the University of Leeds https://euro2025leeds.uk/, at which I will have 3 invited presentations. My talks are all prepared. This conference marks 50 years of the professional society of EURO, so it will be a very celebratory conference.

The Making an Impact stream, which is the practitioners' stream at the EURO conferences, is always a favorite of mine. I'm thrilled that, at this conference, I'll present on: Tariffs, Trade, and OR: Impacts on Producers, Consumers, and Labor in the Making an Impact: 'OR in Action Lightning Talks' session. Thanks to Ruth Kaufman for organizing this session, which will be the first one of the conference. I last saw Ruth at my Blackett Lecture, which I delivered at The Royal Society in London on December 5, 2024. 

And, in the session immediately following, I'll deliver the presentation, "Integrated Crop and Cargo War Risk Insurance: Application to Ukraine," which is based on a paper I co-authored with my Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst PhD student Ismael M. Pour and Professor Borys Kormych of Odesa. The paper was recently published in the International Journal of Operational Research: https://lnkd.in/ewmXR8kU. 

Many thanks also to Professors Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber and Roberto Rossi for inviting me to speak in the session: Celebrating 50 Years of EURO on "Reflections on Wonderful OR Experiences at EURO Conferences Over 20 Years." In that presentation slide deck I have many photos of conferees at EURO conferences in Reykjavik, Poznan, Dublin, and other locations.  I am very much looking forward to the outstanding scientific presentations and social gatherings and to building new memories.

Thrilled to be Ranked #6 in Supply Chains Globally by ScholarGPS

 A while back, I received the following letter from ScholarGPS:

I had been seeing posts on social media, including on LinkedIn, celebrating notifications by ScholarGPS, which uses a combination of metrics to achieve their rankings. I had also heard that one of my former PhD students, now an Associate Professor - Jose M. Cruz of UConn's Business School, was ranked #94. Given that there are many notable contributors to supply chains, I was thrilled to see my ranking as being #6 since I have been working very hard (but loving the work) on supply chains for over two decades. 

I know quite a few of the scholars in the top 20 in supply chains - the list can be viewed here

https://scholargps.com/highly-ranked-scholars?ranking_duration=LIFETIME&specialty=Supply+chain&p=1#6

and am honored and delighted to be included.  Quite amazing to also be #26 in MIS and #76 in Business and Management since there are so many scholars in different areas in Business: https://scholargps.com/scholars/90395641764625/anna-nagurney

Back to finishing up presentations for the upcoming EURO conference at the University of Leeds in the UK.

Our Latest Paper on Multicommodity Trade of Fresh Produce with a Case Study on Bananas Is Now Published!

I am thrilled that the paper, "Multicommodity Fresh Produce Trade Networks with Quality Deterioration Under Congestion and Transportation Capacities," that I co-authored with Deniz Besik of the University of Richmond is now published in the Journal of Global Optimization! Plus, the paper is published open access and can be read and downloaded on the link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10898-025-01507-3.

Deniz presented this paper last year at the EURO Conference in Copenhagen:

The paper contains a very interesting case study on bananas, the most widely traded fruit globally, and demonstrates the impacts on fresh produce quality of transportation disruptions and delays. The work was inspired by recent challenges to transportation on the Panama Canal because of insufficient water, leading to congestion. The paper shows that because of negative transportation impacts, consumers may pay higher prices for bananas of lower quality. 

Deniz will present this paper at the 2025 Commodity and Energy Markets Association Annual Meeting (CEMA) in Houston in a few days, as I head to the EURO Conference in Leeds, United Kingdom, where I have three invited talks!

This was another outstanding collaboration of ours on a highly relevant topic.