Our OpEd on Why We Are Stronger Together - Brexit and the Upcoming US Presidential Election

I have been back from beautiful Oxford, England for exactly one month. The memories of the Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College at Oxford University will always be with me from the cameraderie of the Fellows, the wonderful staff and delicious meals, the gardens, my office, and historic Oxford (plus I got a lot of research on supply chains completed).

While in Oxford, we engaged in numerous discussions over meals and afternoon tea and being there during the Trinity term was truly a historic time. The referendum take place on June 23, 2016 and we awoke to the shocking news that Great Britain had voted to exit the European Union (known as Brexit), although Oxford overwhelmingly voted to Remain. Also, we were all anticipating the nominations of the US Presidential candidates. Indeed, many of the conversation would include US politics and Hillary Clinton  or the latest on Trump.

As a researcher and educator but also a blogger I believe that it is very important to share information, commentary,  and opinions with the public.

While still in Oxford and reeling from the vote and the impact that it would have on the British economy and even research funding (plus one of my former doctoral students from UMass Amherst and co-author is a financier in London so we had some great insights as to the possible ramifications of Brexit),  my husband and I sat down that weekend and we wrote the OpEd: Why We Are Stronger Together. We submitted it exclusively to the Daily Hampshire Gazette (DHG) and we received the response quickly on a Sunday with the Editor telling us that it would be published the very next day since he liked it so much.

The  page on which our OpEd appears can be viewed here.

The direct link to the article is here.

One can also read it here.

Our OpEd ends with the following: We are  all stronger together with the free flow of people, ideas, services, and goods.  This enhances the education of our students and the resilience of our communities.

My other commentaries, OpEds, and Letters to the Editors can be viewed on the following page on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website at the Isenberg School of Management.

Visiting Fellows 50th Anniversary Celebration at All Souls College at Oxford University

Yesterday was a truly a historic day in Britain. We woke up in Oxford, England to brilliant sunshine and then were shocked with the news that Britain  had voted to leave the European Union, so Brexit had become a reality.  Living now in a college town - that of Oxford - where intellectual freedom and the movement of ideas and people are essential to research and innovation - the news was shocking and stunning.The repercussions are reverberating around the world.

Yesterday was also the day that we celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the Visiting Fellowships Program at All Souls College at Oxford University. I am now a Visiting Fellow (VF) at All Souls College for the Trinity term. I had received an invitation to attend this full day of celebrations while I was in Amherst months ago and was thrilled to take part yesterday and my husband did as well.

The program is below.

We began with registration and a welcome by the Warden, Sir John Vickers, who is an economist.

Mr. Edward Mortimer, who is a Fellow at All Souls College, provided us with background and the history of the Visiting Fellowship Program, which began in 1966 with the college deciding on November 6, 1965 to admit Visiting Fellows. All Souls College is a unique college at Oxford University in that it does not admit undergraduates.

Edward Mortimer, whom I have mentioned in my blog before, worked at the United Nations and wrote speeches for the former Secretary general, Kofi Annan.

I was delighted to hear Sir John Vickers say that we were celebrating "one of the best things that has happened to All Souls College." He said that the VF Program provides internationalization of the college and to-date there have been 800 Visiting Fellows from 40 different countries. The first female Visiting Fellow Dr. Janet Morgan, now known as Lady Balfour of Burleigh, was a VF in 1982, while she was also studying the BBC, upon the invitation of the PM,  spoke yesterday morning and I was delighted to see her.

 I also very much enjoyed hearing Sir Roger Braithwaite, who is an expert on negotiating with Russians, and is featured in the photo below. He was UK's ambassador to Russia and also its representative at the embassy in the US where he focused on commercial policy and was very successful.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the first Visiting Fellows were invited.

About 130 Visiting Fellows attended the celebration yesterday.

 
After the morning session we were treated to a delicious lunch in our elegant Codrington Library.

The menu is below.

Then it was time for tea and coffee before additional panels ands sessions followed by tea and a concert!

I enjoyed meeting former VFs from Berkeley and Illinois and was thrilled to see Professor Carol Heim of the Economics department at UMass Amherst, who had been a VF at Oxford a few years ago.

 Many thanks to Sir John Vickers and to the Dean of Visiting Fellows, Professor Simon Hornblower, for such a pleasant and very memorable celebration of the the great Visiting Fellowship Program at All Souls College Many thanks also to the staff for the exquisite hospitality, food, and organization.

It has been a marvelous experience being a Visiting Fellow at Oxford and the support, intellectual freedom, fellowship with our Fellows, have all been extraordinary. All Souls College is a unique institution and very special.

A Historic Week for Oxford University and England

This is a truly momentous week and it is fascinating to be living in Oxford, England while history is going to be made. Since late April I have been a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College at Oxford University and I have been writing about the experience.

This Thursday, June 23,  England will be voting on the referendum on the European Union, that is, whether to Remain or to Leave.  The term Brexit, which has been top news not only in England, but also in the United States, refers to Britain exiting the European Union.

Many of the discussions at the luncheons that the Fellows attend at All Souls College have been around this issue with the majority of Fellows that I have been speaking with definitely favoring to Remain in the European Union. As someone whose passion is scientific research there are clear advantages to Remain. Researchers and scholars in England can avail themselves of European Union grants and collaborations. I have even served on the Advisory Board of a well-funded European Union grant. With Brexit, it would become much more difficult to secure research funding and to have multicountry research projects funded. Also, the free movement of those in the EU provides for a great vitality and energy and also spurs innovation and fresh ideas.

Lately, frankly, as I check out both CNN.com and BBC.com these websites' top stories tend to be identical so that I sometimes wonder whether I am in the US or in England. Now our hearts are breaking because of the horrific murder of Jo Cox, the MP (Member of Parliament) in broad daylight.as she was going about her work. The mother of two small children, ages 3 and 5, who had been elected in may 2015,  she had worked as the policy chief in Oxfam in Oxford and her husband works for Save the Children. To have a mentally ill individual kill such a shining light has created a pall over all of us. Her husband' tribute was incredibly touching and now every time that I walk along the Thames I will think of her since she lived with her family on the river in a house boat. She was for Remain. Even my neighbor from Amherst sent me an email yesterday expressing her shock and horror at this terrible tragedy.

On Wednesday, we will be taking part in honorary degree celebrations at Oxford University, where 10 will be honored, including the Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences, Paul Krugman, whose Opeds in The New York Times on the potential impacts of a Brexit I have been reading, as well as Professor Millie Dresselhaus of MIT, whom I had met when I was a Visiting Scholar and Visiting Professor there.  It is  a tradition for All Souls College to host the luncheon after the ceremony, and I received the nice invitation below for it. I would have also marched but I did not bring my Brown University cap and gown with me since I already had a lot to carry for more than two months in England.

And this coming Friday, after we have the results of the vote on the referendum, we will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Visiting Fellows program at All Souls College with many Visiting Fellows returning to Oxford.  Below is a photo that the Visiting Fellows at All Souls College took recently after a delicious dinner and wonderful lecture. Included in the photo are also the Warden, Sir John Vickers, and the Dean of the Visiting Fellows, Professor Simon Hornblower. The photo was taken at the Codrington Library.  We are the Visiting Fellows for the Trinity Term this year. As a senior Fellow told me recently, he believes that the best part of All Souls College is its Visiting Fellows program and that the college admitted women as Fellow.s

The full day program next Friday is splendid and is featured below and I hope to share photos with you of both the honorary degree recipients and the Visiting Fellows program later in the week. Women were admitted as Fellows at All Souls College only in 1979.

 

Great Academic Experiences in London

I returned from London, which was extra busy in preparation for the Queen's 90th birthday celebrations this weekend,  to Oxford via train in the late afternoon today.

We had left for London on Wednesday afternoon since I was to give the presentation: Supply Chain Networks Against Time: From Food to Pharma, at the Centre for Transport Studies at Imperial College on Thursday afternoon. I was invited to speak by Dr Panagiotis Angeloudis, Senior Lecturer in Engineering Systems and Logistics and the Director, Port Operations Research & Technology Centre. Professor Angeloudis has done fascinating work on critical infrastructure resilience, construction logistics, as well as maritime transport, including a recent game theory model which was just published in Transportation Research B. He is supervising 9 PhD students and has 3 postdocs working for him - very impressive - and is a computer geek with a lot of skills in data visualization.

When I arrived in London, I checked my email messages, and found a message from a reporter from Waterloo, Canada, Jeff Outhit, requesting an interview with me on ransomware and cyberattacks. He needed a response quickly and we managed to correspond and the great article that he wrote was published. The title is: "Cyber ransoms are ‘fastest-growing threat,’ expert warns." Outhit had seen that I gave a keynote talk at the University of Waterloo on cybercrime and cybersecurity on April 15, 2016 on Analytics Day. That great conference was organized by my INFORMS colleague, Dr. Fatma Gzara, whom I thank in my presentation, which Outhit even linked to in his article.

Since the hotel I was staying at was close to Hyde Park the morning of my presentation I had to take a walk there since I just love the green spaces.

I was treated to a delicious lunch in a beautiful building before my talk with both Professor Angeloudis and Professor Washington Y. Ochieng, the Head of the Centre for Transport Studies, who is very dynamic and a great intellectual force and leader, whom I enjoyed speaking with very much. 

The audience for my talk, which was on June 9, 2016, consisted of students, postdocs, and also representatives from industry, including from data science, which was very neat. 

I also had a great surprise: Professor Ben Heydecker, a transportation professor from the University of College London, whom I had not seen for a long time, but with whom I have very pleasant memories, which included even conversations with my dissertation advisor at Brown University, Professor Stella Dafermos, at various conferences, came to my talk. 

Of course, we had to talk about the book by such dear colleagues as Professors David E, Boyce and Huw Williams,  Forecasting Urban Travel, whose book launch I was a panelist at last Fall at Northwestern University.

I enjoyed giving my presentation very much since the audience was very attentive and afterwards they also asked great questions. We continued the discussions for about an hour after my presentation, which was delightful.

The conversations with Professor Panagiotis Angeloudis were also much too short - from drones for disaster relief and delivery of medicines to ancient Roman supply chains - this is a must to explore  research and tools by an archeologist at Stanford, which I could very much relate to because, as a Visiting Fellow now at All Souls College at Oxford University, I interact not only with economists, mathematicians, and scientists but also with humanists and archeologists!

And, yesterday evening, after a very pleasant seminar and discussions - Professor Panagiotis' group reminds me of the United Nations - with students from different countries working so well together - my family and I were hosted by Dr. Stavros Siokos, a former doctoral student of mine, with whom I wrote the Financial Networks book. Dr. Siokos is a financier based in London and has a PhD in Industrial Engineering from UMass Amherst and I was his dissertation advisor. He is also a Center Associate of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management, which I founded almost 15 years ago!

Stavros took us to an exclusive club for dinner - the Royal Automobile Club (RAC), where the ambience was extraordinary as was the food and service, but, best of all, were the conversations with a former student of mine, who has achieved great success in industry. We discussed even the possibility of Brexit, that is, England leaving the European Union, with the vote taking place on June 23, 2016. This would be disastrous for numerous reasons, including for research and science, which is not even much written about.  The possibility of Brexit as well as Trump are major topics of conversation among the Fellows at All Souls College at Oxford University.

It is quite the experience living in England during this very historic time.

Below are some photos, including several of the desserts eaten at the exquisite dinner, last night.

Thanks to both Professor Panagiotis Andeloudis and to Dr. Stavros Siokos for such fabulous experiences in London!

We ended the evening with a walk to Stavros' office which had been Eisenhower's office when he planned D-Day, got to see the home of the richest man in England, and saw St. James Park, as well.