Congratulations to Mojtaba Salarpour on His Successful PhD Dissertation Defense!

In an academic's life, one of the many joys is seeing one's students achieve milestones.

Today was a very special day, since Mojtaba Salarpour,  my PhD student in Management Science at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, with the title: "Essays on Supply Chain Economic Networks for Disaster Management Inspired by the Covid-19 Pandemic." The abstract of his dissertation can be viewed here. Mojtaba is my 23rd PhD student. I am grateful to the committee members: Professor Priyak Arora of the Isenberg School and Professors Hari Balasubramanian and Chaitra Gopalappa of the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst. 

When I arrived for the defense today, Mojtaba had assembled all sorts of treats and refreshments and we managed a quick photo before the committee members and others arrived.

Mojtaba's PhD dissertation research has already yielded several journal articles and a book chapter.

The above paper is open access, thank to Springer Nature and Operations Research Forum.

Mojtaba served for two years as the President of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter (1 1/2 of those in the pandemic). Under his leadership, the chapter received two national awards from INFORMS because of its activities. Below is a photo taken at the Phoenix National INFORMS Meeting in 2021, at which the Chapter was honored with its latest award.

Mojtaba also taught required two different courses at the Isenberg School and has experience teaching in both face to face and in online formats. He clearly, is the "full academic package" with talents in research and scholarship, teaching, as well as service.

I am delighted that he will be joining the faculty of Texas A&M Commerce as an Assistant Professor, in the tenure track, in the Fall.

It is wonderful to see the academic family tree growing with the list of my PhD students, whose dissertation committees I chaired listed here.

And, my academic genealogy, in terms of those "who came before me" is featured below with incredible scientists such as Maxwell, Newton, and Galileo!

My students and I are clearly "standing on the shoulders of giants." 

Serving on Habilitation Dissertation (Higher than a PhD) Committee in France

Academics are always open to new experiences.  New experiences are interesting and valuable and help you to grow.

Today, I had the pleasure of taking part in a dissertation defense since I am on a habilitation dissertation committee of Dr. Patrick Maille.  Dr. Maille is an Associate Professor at Telecom Bretagne (part of Institut Mines-Telecom) in France and last year was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California Berkeley, working with Dr. Jean Walrand, whose work I am very much a fan of.

I agreed to be on Patrick's committee after I received an invitation from him last March since Patrick's work is very complementary to our NSF project research, both to our most recent ChoiceNet project and our new EAGER project.

Moreover, he is the co-author, with Dr. Bruno Tuffin, of the book: Telecommunication Network Economics,  published by Cambridge University Press, which I have read and reread.

I like it that in the book he cites my Supply Chain Network Economics book since I consistently see (and he does, as well) many behavioral similarities associated with decision-makers in the Internet space and in supply chains.

A habilitation is even "higher" than a PhD. According to Wikipedia, a  habilitation is "the highest academic qualification a scholar can achieve by his or her own pursuit in many countries in Europe, Central Asia, Egypt and the Caucasus." And it is usually earned after attaining a research doctorate.

This was a new experience for me since, although I have chaired 18 doctoral dissertations, and have served on committees as an external examiner for dissertations in Canada, Norway, and Sweden, this was my first habilitation experience.

In addition to reading the habilitation dissertation, I read quite a few papers of Dr. Maille's, and examined his professional dossier of accomplishments. I also had to complete a report on his publications provided to me one month before the defense date, which was today.

I was invited to the defense in Rennes, France, but, given all of my travel commitments this month, which I blogged about in a previous post, I asked whether I could teleconference in. Tough to turn down a trip to France during this beautiful time of year especially since another member of the committee, Dr. Eitan Altman, had been my host in Paris at the NetGCoop conference  4 years ago when I gave a keynote talk on supply chains. But, as I have written on this blog, this October is an extremely busy month for me.

Dr. Maille had received permission from his university to have me teleconference in for the defense. Yesterday, we checked out the technology, a new software I had never used before,  and Skype. The new software worked yesterday but not this morning, so good old reliable Skype was used and it worked great! I had been sent the presentation slides this morning. Last year, I Skyped in for Niklas Arvidsson's doctoral dissertation defense at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Niklas  received an international dissertation prize a few months ago for his thesis, which is terrific.

The habilitation this morning, for me, and the afternoon for my French colleagues, began with an introduction of the committee, followed by about a 45 minute presentation by the candidate. Then it was time for comments from the committee members, and questions from the committee, followed by more discussions. Overall, the defense took about 2 hours and then the committee members in France (with me, in the meantime, getting a virtual tour of the premises)  ambled with the computer with Skype to another room where we together prepared a report in French.  I am fluent in several languages but French is not one of them so this part was quite interesting. Luckily, some of my comments after Dr. Maille's presentation had been typed up so there was some translating and enhancing done and the report was completed. It was a very enjoyable part of a very pleasant habilitation experience!

The candidate successfully passed his habilitation so a BIG congratulations to Dr. Patrick Maille. He can now apply for a Full Professorship and can supervise doctoral students independently.

I toasted with a glass of champagne virtually!

My 18th PhD Student - Another Successful Dissertation Defense

Yesterday, was a very happy day since my 18th PhD student, Dong "Michelle" Li successfully defended her doctoral dissertation in Management Science at the Isenberg School of Management.

The title of her dissertation, which was nearly 250 pages long, was: Quality Competition in Supply Chain Networks with Applications to Information Asymmetry, Product Differentiation, Outsourcing, and Supplier Selection.

Michelle did a great job presenting, although we had to do some disruption management since in her scheduled room there was a final exam taking place and then an hour into her presentation in another room, another group of students entered for their final exams.

Michelle's full presentation can be downloaded here and it is stunning and her delivery was great, too.


Special thanks to the great committee members: Professor Adam Steven of my very own Operations and Information Management Department, Professor Hari Balasubramaian of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, and Professor Christian Rojas of the Resource Economics Department for all their valuable inputs and also for helping Michelle in her academic job search process. She has had more on-campus interview invitations and visits than any of my former students but I expect, given her offers, that she will soon reach closure.

Michelle has an outstanding record of publications in such journals as the Annals of Operations Research, the International Transactions in Operational Research, Computational Economics, Computational Management Science, Netnomics, and the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation, with a series of other articles in review in other journals.

She has worked very hard as an Officer of the award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter and even taught 3 sections of our required Operations Management undergraduate course at the Isenberg School. Both of her parents are academics in China and she told me that 18 is a lucky number in China.

Great to see my academic offspring genealogy tree growing.

Interestingly, my 17th PhD student, Dr. Amir H. Masoumi, told me that 17 was always his favorite number.