Thanking the Fabulous Guest Speakers in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare Class

Now that the Spring 2022 semester has come to a close (except for some grading), I thought it important to publicly thank and recognize the outstanding guest speakers in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class this term.  In this class, we cover many relevant topics in disaster management, as well as applications to current events, and having experts, who are very knowledgeable in terms of practice, speak to my students, provides for a transformative educational experience.

The class met Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Isenberg School of Management at 8:30AM. Amazingly, and this speaks to the interest of the students in the class, there were several students who would arrive before me, shortly after 8:00AM, which I found very inspiring.

On February 17, 2022, we had the honor of having Mr. Vince Mullen, who is a Major in the Massachusetts National Guard, and who is also the VP of Operations at JP Morgan in Boston, as our first guest speaker. He traveled about 2 hours from eastern MA, and appeared in military dress to speak to my students. The topic of his presentation was: "The Military and Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare." He spoke about his experiences responding to the earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010 and the logistical and other challenges encountered in the relief efforts. He also discussed how his experiences in the army and the National Guard have helped him as an Executive in a financial services firm, including having very logical thinking skills and being able to adapt to dynamic, evolving situations. Major Mullen also shared with us information about his participation in Phases I and III of the National Guard's COVID response operations. Soldiers’ mission included handling medical supplies, swabbing, transportation, and driving school buses. The constraints included: a lack of vaccines at the time, a lack of organization, non-medical training background of soldiers, and addressing the fundamental question: Where is the need? In Massachusetts alone, the Guard's COVID response has included the logistical issues of handling 1000 soldiers, 69 hospitals, 40 nursing homes, 12 ambulances, 13 dialysis centers, 95000 shift hours, 64000 observed patients, 4500 transported EMS, and 74000 delivered meals.

I found it profoundly moving, as did the students, how much Major Mullen cared about helping disaster victims. I am so grateful for his exceptional service for many years!

The second guest speaker was Dr. Denise Sumpf, who is the highest ranking UN official in Armenia. Her guest lecture took place on February 24, 2022, which, you may recall, is the date of the latest invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign country, by Russia. Dr. Sumpf had taken part in a UN Security Council meeting just hours before her guest presentation, in which she spoke virtually to my class from Yerevan, Armenia. She spoke about the situation between Armenia and Azerbaijan and the many challenges associated with Nagorno-Karabakh. She also discussed the UN cluster approach, which was great, since this reinforced some of the material I had covered in my lectures. Dr. Sumpf also continued to bring up the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. And, clearly, our world has, sadly, dramatically changes since February 24, 2022.

I had hosted Dr. Sumpf a while back in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series, when she was based in NYC with the United Nations. She contributed a very interesting co-authored chapter, "The Impact of the Syria Crisis on Lebanon," to the first Dynamics of Disasters volume that I co-edited with Professors Ilias S. Kotsireas and Panos M. Pardalos. It was very special to have her speak to my class.

On March 10, 2022, Ms. Lauren Ulrich, the Executive Director, Operations Management & Logistics, American Red Cross, spoke to my class virtually.  She leads the teams necessary to carry out the key functions for major Red Cross relief operations including incident command, operations management, planning, logistics, finance, and external relations. They have the responsibility for the readiness, planning, resourcing, and implementation of scalable response operations to meet the needs of disaster clients for large-scale Red Cross domestic disaster operations, including across all U.S. States, Territories, and Commonwealths. In her amazing career (she had also been a Marine), Ms. Ulrich has taken part in  multitude operations ranging from Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom; to international disaster response operations, including the Haiti Earthquake, Typhoon Haiyan, and Alberta Floods; to domestic disaster response operations, including Hurricane Sandy, Michigan Water Crisis, Hurricane Harvey, and the California Wildfires! Support, according to Ms. Ulrich, must be repeatable and scalable with the disaster response necessitating speed to market and speed to scale. Speed to market means having access to the required assets for help and shelter, and speed to scale means scaling from  a single home to tens of thousands of homes in 72 hours. Holistically, the logistics team’s mission is to have the required assets to get the volunteers on the ground in 2 hours and to hold the ground for 72 hours while quickly scaling up. She also shared with us the challenges associated with disaster response in the COVID pandemic and how she and her boss were very well-prepared in terms of PPEs, since the Red Cross was closely following the spread of the coronavirus globally, already in January 2020. Her lecture was incredibly engaging and informative.

The fourth guest speaker was UMass Amherst's very own Dr. Peter Reinhart! Dr. Reinhart is the founding Director of the Institute for Applied Life Science (IALS) at UMass Amherst and has more than 25 years of R&D management experience in academia (Duke University), biotechnology (Cogent Neuroscience, Proteostasis Therapeutics), and large pharma (Wyeth, Pfizer). He  came to the University of Massachusetts Amherst from the Cambridge MA biotechnology company, Proteostasis Therapeutics (PTI), where he was President and Chief Scientific Officer. Dr. Reinhart shared with us how the incredibly effective and, frankly, life-saving, in my opinion, COVID-19 Testing Center at UMass was founded from scratch. As of April 2020, when UMass shut down and reverted to online teaching, 750 scientists in the Applied Life Sciences building had to stay at home. That was when he thought that they could use these human resources and talent to form the Testing Center. He made the idea into a “white paper” and handed it to be reviewed by Chancellor Subbaswamy.  After a month, Chancellor permitted Dr. Reinhart to start the project, who came up with a timeline to make it functional in 100 days, from the preliminary processes and operational foundations to the beginning of the testing. This required exceptional logistics, team work, planning, scientific expertise, legal interventions, and even the assistance of Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker. Thousands of students, faculty, and staff and members of our community have benefited from the exceptional convenience and turn around time and accuracy of the UMass Amherst COVID Testing Center. We are all so proud of this truly exceptional achievement in the service of our community during the pandemic and so grateful!

The fifth and final guest speaker was Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford, who spoke in person on April 26, 2022. The topic of his guest lecture was: "Disaster Communications." He even brought hardware to demonstrate to the students. The slide deck of his lecture can be downloaded here.

He discussed many interesting topics with some of the highlights being the disruptions to communications after the volcanic eruption in Tonga (and the restoration efforts) and the importance of communications to the war efforts of  Ukraine against the Russian aggressors.

Many thanks to these outstanding guest speakers, who took the time from their very busy schedules to share their important insights and experiences with my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class!

Our Recent Research on Human Migration Networks, Climate Change, and Covid-19

The New York Times yesterday published an article, "The Great Climate Migration,"  which stated: As with much modeling work, the point here is not to provide concrete numerical predictions so much as it is to provide glimpses into possible futures. Human movement is notoriously hard to model.

I have been working on the modeling for human migration networks for over 20 years and, in the past year, with collaborators, I have returned to this important topic. Our research was motivated by real-world events. According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, by the end of 2019 the number of people forcibly displaced due to war, conflict, persecution, human rights violations, poverty and economic inequality but also climate change and natural disasters, had grown to 79.5 million. Furthermore, the vulnerability of millions of international migrants may be exacerbated in crisis situations, as actually is the case now with the COVID-19, and, of course, by climate change.

In addition,  migration interactions will be the key to achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the member states of the United Nations. In the 2030 Agenda, 9 out of the 17 goals contain targets and indicators that are related to migration or mobility.

In the series of papers, we first set out to include the impacts of regulations on migratory flows and utilities, and took the perspective of migrants behaving in a user-optimizing manner, that is, choosing their locations, subject to the differential between the destination location utility and that in the origin location minus the migration cost. This led us to publishing the paper, "International human migration networks under regulations,"  in the European Journal of Operational Research:

This paper we then extended to include multiple paths between origin and destination nodes, with each path possibly consisting of multiple links. The paper, "Refugee migration networks and regulations: A multiclass, multipath variational inequality framework," was published in the Journal of Global Optimization:

We also introduced, for the first time, a system-optimized perspective for human migration, in which a central authority allocates migrants to locations in a way that is optimal from a societal perspective. In the paper, published in the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR):  "Human migration networks and policy interventions: Bringing population distributions in line with system optimization," we demonstrated how, through policy interventions, in the form of subsidies, a governmental body could ensure that, once imposed the migratory flows (and associated population distributions) would generate a system optimum, although migrants were behaving in a user-optimizing manner.  Those of you well-versed in transportation science can see the analogues.

Subsequently, we included capacities associated with the population locations of the multiclass migrants in the paper, "Capacitated human migration networks and subsidization." The paper has been accepted in the volume:  Dynamics of Disasters - Impact, Risk, Resilience, and Solutions, I.S. Kotsireas, A. Nagurney, and P.M. Pardalos, Editors, Springer International Publishing Switzerland, 2020. This paper shows that the results for the  policy interventions in ITOR also hold in the capacitated case.

And, in our most recent paper on human migration, "A system-optimization model for multiclass human migration with migration costs and regulations in the Covid-19 pandemic," also co-authored with Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy and her PhD student, Giorgia Cappello, we proposed novel utility functions associated with origin an destination nodes and also considered regulations as in the above work. The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically  affected global mobility in the form of blockages, restrictions, and travel disruptions, as risk mitigation measures are being implemented by numerous countries. Indeed, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reports that between 11 March 2020, when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and 20 April 2020, the total number of movement restrictions implemented around the world has increased to more than 48,000! This paper is now under review in a special issues of a journal.

People since time immemorial have sought to identify better locations for themselves and their families. As The New York Times also noted,  our model offers something far more potentially valuable to policymakers: a detailed look at the staggering human suffering that will be inflicted if countries shut their doors.

Research on human migration networks will continue.

Inspiring Discussion with Kofi Annan, Former Secretary General of the United Nations, at Oxford University

Some of the wonderful aspects of being a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College at Oxford University is the amazing people that I have met, the great speakers that I have heard, and the special events that I have attended.

Today, we were greatly honored to have Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General of the United Nations, and also Nobel Peace Prize recipient, come to Oxford, specifically, the beautiful Blavatnik Building of Government, for a discussion of the United Nations in the 21st Century. The moderator was Professor Wood. I was thrilled to hear him acknowledge Ed Mortimer in the audience, whom I have had lunch with at All Souls College since he is a Fellow, and we had a fabulous conversation on how he used to write speeches for Annan when he worked for the United Nations.

Kofi Annan was brilliant and just the other day I read in my International New York Times here as to how charismatic, charming, and successful of a leader he had been of the United Nations for almost a decade. He is now 78 years of age and his charm, sense of humor, dedication to saving lives were vividly apparent during today's discussion. He held what is considered one of the toughest jobs in the world.

After being introduced by Professor Wood, he told a delightful story how, after stepping down from the United Nations, he went with his wife to Italy for 3 months and wanted essentially no communication with the outside world and that included no newspapers. Venturing out to Como (a place I have come to love during my two stays at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center there) he thought he may have been recognized only to be told that he was the actor, Morgan Freeman. I must admit there is some resemblance!

Since stepping down from the United Nations, he has been very active with his Kofi Annan Foundation and is regularly called upon to assist in international affairs and mediation, including serving as a special envoy to Syria. This he eventually stepped down from because he said the parties would not stop fighting one another. He said it is hard for him to say no if he can save one life of a child or of a woman. His sincerity  and great intelligence were apparent throughout the event today.

He emphasized what matters to him: finding peace and stability, sustainable development, the rule of law, and respect for human rights.

He said that when he looks at inequality, at hunger in the world, he sees a lack of trust in leadership and politicians building on anger of the people.

He told the many students in the audience to not only go into government and law but also into the private sector since much can be accomplished for good from this sector.

He emphasized the concept of the responsibility to protect and some crimes are too horrible to ignore so interventions are needed.  He said that there is a list of questions that must be answered before military intervention.

After Kofi Annan's remarks, it was time to open up questions from the audience with students' questions being first answered.

As to how to manage migration effectively and the crisis now in Europe, Annan noted that if the countries had worked together from the onset that there would not be such division now. He emphasized that compassion is needed and although politicians tend to chase votes, people are not stupid. He also said that 40% of founders of Fortune 500 companies were immigrants.

After a student brought up a recent OpEd in The New York Times written by a former UN employee who said that the inefficiency there was extremely problematic (and which I had read), Annan agreed that the UN needs more efficiency and reforms but that it is also up to the member states.

Something that he said that resonated very much with me was that holding many discussions over issues was like scientists testing different hypotheses and, ultimately, you may have a breakthrough, so it is important to keep those discussions going.

His advice to students and those who may want to work for the United Nations was to, once you got an assignment, to analyze it, and determine what you can contribute to it and how long it will take you, and then follow through. He has always used such ideas in his career, which has been brilliant.

He also mentioned that if you are creative you can get others to move with you.

He said that he would get impossible mandates from the Security Council, but that he would break down the task into manageable components.

Sadly, he said that he does not see any movement towards peace between Israel and Palestine.

Professor Wood emphasized the brilliance of the discussion and I concur! And, when he noted the importance of delivery of humanitarian relief supplies, I thought of the course on Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare that I teach at the Isenberg School each spring and could not help but be inspired.

At the end, Professor Wood announced a special partnership with Africa, including Nigeria and Ghana, the country where Annan was born, to bring scholars to Oxford, and also to support a Visiting Fellow which is terrific.

Politics of Sustainability -- India and China

The title of the talk -- Politics of Sustainability -- intrigued me and it was heavily promoted on the UMass Amherst website, so I gathered two of my doctoral students, one from China and the other from India, and off we went to hear former United Nations policy advisor Mukul Sanwal speak on climate change and sustainability. His talk was under the auspices of the political science department at UMass and Five Colleges, Inc.

Mr. Sanwal worked for the United Nations from 1993 to 2007, serving first as a policy advisor to the executive director of United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and later to the executive secretary of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Given that the IPCC just produced its Fifth Assessment report, and it has been getting a lot of attention in the media, his topic was especially timely.

Sanwal began his talk by stating that what India and China will do will frame the future. He emphasized the shifting of the population from being producers to being consumers and noted that the global middle class will triple by 2030. He noted that the climate crisis is caused by the scarcity of resources, or the distribution of resources, and sees the problem as one to be managed, and not solved -- I thought this rather pessimistic but very much appreciated his emphasis on conservation and the importance of altering the behavior of consumers. We need to have better ways of measuring carbon imprints and environmental impacts on the consumption side.

In terms of economic development, we are seeing major migrations to urban areas, especially in China and India, and urban design for sustainability is critical. The population was 1.6 billion in 1900 and will increase to 9 billion in 2050. The urban population was 30% (of 2.5 billion) in 1950 and will be 70% (of 9 billion) in 2050. Economies are now driven by the services sector and not just industry.

It is expected that the transport sector will generate half of the global emissions by 2050.

We need to educate the population about changes in lifestyle and, where feasible, also have the right legislation.

Changing behavior is not easy and society needs to agree that changes need to be made. And we can make the changes through the food that we eat, the homes that we live in, and the modes of transport that we use as well as the products that we buy.

We need a common vision for human welfare (and that of our planet).

Ken Toong, our award-winning Executive Director (and chef) of Auxiliary Enterprises, was also in the audience, and he made some great comments on what his group is doing in sustainability in terms of reducing food waste in the dining commons and also serving red meat infrequently. He is in the blue shirt in the photo above.

Lots of ideas were generated -- thanks to Mr. Mukul Sanwal for sharing his experiences and wisdon with us today.

Medical Waste, Sustainability, and Operations Resarch

For many months now, we have been researching health care supply chains, with a focus on perishable products ranging from blood supply chains to medical nuclear supply chains.

In our research, we have, specifically, emphasized the impact of improper disposal of medical wastes on the environment. Our mathematical models are generalized network models in which the arc multipliers capture features of the perishable, but, life-saving, products that we are studying.

Today, CBS News is reporting on an investigation by a human rights official of the United Nations that noted that: nations pay "too little attention" to their tons of waste each year — waste that contains pathogens, blood, low levels of radioactivity, discarded needles, syringes, scalpels, expired drugs and vaccines. In many poorer nations, discarded chemicals and pharmaceutical wastes go straight to city dumps, down hospital toilets into water systems, or are burned in cement kilns that just add to dioxide emissions.

Our research on blood supply chains, from the operations management aspects, to the design, is written up in our papers:

Supply Chain Network Operations Management of a Blood Banking System with Cost and Risk Minimization
Anna Nagurney, Amir H. Masoumi, and Min Yu, to appear in Computational Management Science.

Supply Chain Network Design of a Sustainable Blood Banking System
Anna Nagurney and Amir H. Masoumi, in Sustainable Supply Chains: Models, Methods and Public Policy Implications, T. Boone, V. Jayaraman, and R. Ganeshan, Editors, Springer, London, England, 2011, in press.

Our research, to-date, on medical nuclear supply chains, which I presented recently at the INTRIM Conference at McGill University, is reported in the paper:

Medical Nuclear Supply Chain Design: A Tractable Network Model and Computational Approach
Anna Nagurney and Ladimer S. Nagurney.

According to the report, the UN investigator, Cailin Georgescu, recommended that all nations adopt better laws for managing medical waste and replace incinerators with "more environmentally friendly and safe methods of disposal" such as autoclaving, which uses pressurized steam and superheated water to disinfect waste and medical equipment.

Next week I will be speaking on Sustainability: Methodologies with Some Applications at the SAMSI Workshop, which is part of the 2011-2012 Program on Uncertainty Quantification.

One thing that I am certain about is that we need to take better care of our environment not only for us and our children but for future generations as well.

Clearly, we, in the Operations Research community, understand this, and are doing something about it. Just read Dr. Ian Frommer's wonderful blog post on the course that he has taught on Sustainability.

On my list of new courses that I am developing are courses entitled:

Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare and

Sustainable Systems.

United Nations of Students and a Mini Reunion

This past week, a group of my present and past doctoral students gathered in my Supernetworks Lab at the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst for a mini reunion. The occasion was that it was the week before the UMass Amherst spring break and a former doctoral student, who had arrived from Australia, had joined us as a Visiting Scholar. Dr. Dmytro Matsypura, who received tenure at the University of Sydney and is on sabbatical now, will be with us through mid-May. He received his PhD with a concentration in Management Science in 2006 and joined the Faculty of Economics and Business at Sydney in January 2007. Dr. Matsypura is originally from Ukraine.

Another former doctoral student of mine, Dr. Jose M. Cruz, who is now an Assistant Professor at the School of Business at the University of Connecticut (UCONN) in Storrs, drove up with his wife and gorgeous, almost one year old, twins (a boy and a girl). Dr. Cruz received his PhD from UMass Amherst (also with a concentration in Management Science in 2004). He has 5 degrees from UMass Amherst (in engineering, computer science, applied mathematics, an MBA, and a PhD) and is one of ten children. (His parents in Cape Verde deserve multiple trophies!) Two of my doctoral students were also able to join us for some conversation, exchanges of advice, and serious "catching up."

I have chaired the dissertations of 15 doctoral students and you can find the complete list of their names, graduation dates, and the titles of their dissertations on this academic genealogy website.

What impresses me most about my students is their congeniality and support of one another and their respectful natures. They come not only from the US but from many different countries. Even after graduation, they continue to collaborate and support one another. Quite a few continue to be active Center Associates of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I direct. They have written journal articles together, shared rooms at conferences together, and congratulate one another when notable goals (both personal and professional) are achieved.

For example, Professor Jose Cruz told us at his visit this past week that he had just received the annual undergraduate teaching award from the UCONN School of Business as the best undergraduate teacher (and this evaluation was done over a three year period)! The congratulatory messages were flying but especially thoughtful was one from a Full Professor, Dr. Ding Zhang of the State University of New York at Oswego, who is originally from China, that stated that Jose was not born in the US but in Cape Verde (islands now part of Africa) and in a different culture. Hence, Dr. Cruz's receipt of an undergraduate teaching award at such a big business school is truly impressive. Plus, he was even a finalist for the graduate teaching award!

My doctoral students (present and past) have come from (as already mentioned) Ukraine and Cape Verde, and from Japan, Korea, China, India, Austria, Greece, and the US. I call them the United Nations and they realize the benefits and personal satisfaction of working together, sometimes struggling together, always supporting one another, and laughing together. The synergies that are created benefit education, research, as well as personal and professional growth and success.

Above I share with you a photo taken in my Supernetworks Lab at our recent mini reunion, where many friendships have been made! Each of us in the photo was born in a different country and only the twins were born in the USA!

ITU of the United Nations Leads the Communications Rebuilding of Haiti

The Intemational Telecommunications Union (ITU), the oldest organization in the United Nations, is leading the efforts to rebuild the communications infrastructure in Haiti post the devastating earthquake. This effort is being led by Dr. Cosmas Zavazava of the ITU, who was a speaker at the Humanitarian Logistics conference that I organized under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center program. Above is a photo, taken at the conference at the Bellagio Center in Italy, of me with Dr. Cosmas Zavazava and Professor Panos Pardalos with several conferees who have become dear friends and colleagues and who are from the African continent.

This article discusses how the UN is making plans for Haiti's future with the building of a strong communications infrastructure as it continues to play a pivotal role in supporting humanitarian and relief efforts in Haiti. Dr. Zavazava is quoted as saying: Our aim is to help Haiti mobilize and deploy different kinds of technologies to mitigate the impacts of disasters. Reliable telecommunication systems can be complemented with remote sensing and GIS [geographic information systems] technology. In disaster management, a hybrid of these technologies is important.

In addition, Dr. Zavazava believes that: Haiti needs a lot of assistance. Even before the earthquake, it was one of the least developed countries in the world. It will need a strong infrastructure to run e-business, e-agriculture, e-environment, e-education, and e-health efficiently. E-applications and e-services are a critical ingredient to today’s results-based business model.

I salute the extraordinary efforts of Dr. Zavazava and his colleagues from the ITU!

Supply Chain Network Economics and Taking Risks

Yesterday, the Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Dr. Barbara Grosz, launched the official recognition of the institute's tenth anniversary by delivering the Morning Prayers at Harvard University. In her speech, she quoted Genesis and overviewed the origins of the Radcliffe Institute. She spoke of the increasingly important roles that such institutes play in academia and even how Radcliffe is helping to crack glass ceilings and narrow recognition gaps at the highest levels of academia through its fellowship program, symposia, and other initiatives. As a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow '06, I personally benefited from a glorious year there during which I was able to write the book, Supply Chain Network Economics: Dynamics of Prices, Flows, and Profits. Dean Grosz (who, by the way, was Radcliffe's Dean of Science when I was a Fellow) also stated that she hopes that Radcliffe will continue to inspire students, faculty, fellows, staff and institution leaders alike, so that, like Jacob, we have the courage to risk unknown roads and the strength to overcome the obstacles we encounter along the way. And, may our circumstances enable us to realize our dreams.

My Supply Chain Network Economics book is now being cited and used internationally. It is quoted in a recent United Nations report on the social life cycle assessment of products produced by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and has even been discussed in the context of diamond supply chains!

Thank you, Radcliffe, for giving me the time, the community, and the incredible intellectual ambience so that I could write this book!