Yesterday we had the honor and great pleasure of hearing Dr. Oleh Nivievskyi present at the Isenberg School of Management in the UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series! Dr. Nivievskyi's seminar title was, "Rebuilding Crossroads of Ukraine: Bridging the Gap Between Damage, Recovery, and European Aspirations." Dr. Nivievskyi is a Full Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) and a Siemens Research Fellow at the Freie University of Berlin. He is a co-founder of the KSE Agro-Food Center.
His presentation was based on a paper, now in production in the Ukrainian Analytics Digest, which is edited by Eduard Klein, and which is co-authored with Dmytro Goriunov of KSE and me. We expect the paper to be published in an issue later this month.
Professor Nivievskyi had a few travel kerfuffles but made it to Northampton on Thursday via Amtrak from DC after flying from Europe. We picked him up at the train station and then had a lovely dinner at the Whately Inn al fresco.
He overnighted at the UMass Amherst Hotel and had a quick tour and meetings with students in the morning, followed by his outstanding presentation, and then lunch at The Commonwealth Restaurant.
It was wonderful to have a fabulous audience that included several exchange students from KSE plus our OIM Department Chair Professor Solak. Thanks to everyone for the great questions and discussions! It was thrilling to have two faculty from Amherst College, who are Ukrainian, join us for lunch.
The UMass Meet and Greet service provided a comfortable ride to the Springfield Union Station for his journey to NYC for some KSE business.
Along with my Isenberg PhD student, Dana Hassani, we had published several papers with Nivievskyi in such journals as Transportation Science, the European Journal of Operational Research, and the Journal of Global Optimization, and a paper in the recent Dynamics of Disasters edited volume; see my recent post: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2025/07/working-with-colleagues-in-ukraine-is.html. It was very special that Nivievskyi could meet my PhD students in person, including co-author Dana.
We organized this event on short notice but one has to take advantage of opportunities. Having face to face engagements between scholars and students is very enriching education-wise and also personally!
Many thanks to the UMass Amherst Office of Global Affairs for the support of the partnership with KSE!
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