Congratulations and Kudos to the Supernetwork Team at the Isenberg School of Management for a Great 2019 Year!

Every year, at this time, as the Center Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, I prepare a Congratulations and Kudos piece to the Supernetwork Team. 2019 was another extraordinary year for the Supernetwork Team, one in which we continued to make global impact through fundamental network research with a wide range of applications and activities! It is an honor to highlight some of the accomplishments and achievements of the Center Associates of the Virtual Center for Supernetwork in the past year.

The year began with a marvelous event. I had the great honor and pleasure of speaking at the extraordinary 2019 Congreso Futuro, which took place in Chile from January 14-20. I was invited to speak at this truly unique Congress last April via a formal letter from Senator (Senador) Guido Girardi Lavín, President, Future Challenges, Science, Technology and Innovation Commission, who was writing on behalf of the Chilean Congress, the Government of the Republic of Chile, and the Chilean Academy of Sciences. This year's Congress was the eight annual one and the Congress has become the most important free and open-access scientific forum in Latin America. The Futuro Congreso is unique in the region for providing Nobel laureates, scientists, researchers, artists, opinion leaders and citizens alike the opportunity to experience some of the world’s most cutting-edge research, participate in the understanding of emerging trends and actively engage in the innovation of ideas and debates that directly influence the globe. I had the pleasure of speaking in both Santiago and Valparaiso, and we were even hosted by the President of Chile for a dinner at the palace in Santiago.

On April 5, 2019, we marked an extraordinary milestone - the 50th anniversary of the PhD Program at the Isenberg School of Management, with alums, family members, present doctoral students, faculty, and guests convening for a special celebration. Center Associate Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business was one of the two keynoters at the banquet and Center Associates Professors Jose M. Cruz of UConn and Patrick Qiang of Penn State, and Dr. Padma Ramanujam of SAS, were panelists on the Management Science PhD panel that I had the pleasure of organizing. Center Associates: Professors Min Yu of the University of Portland, June Dong of SUNY Oswego, Michelle Li of Babson College, and Amir H. Masoumi of Manhattan College came back for this big event. Also, Doctoral Student Center Associates: Deniz Besik, Pritha Dutta, and Mojtaba Salarpour very much enjoyed this truly celebratory event. Pritha Dutta successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, graduated in May from UMass Amherst, and is now an Assistant Professor at Pace University in NYC.

The POMS conference took place in Washington DC, May 2-6, 2019. Doctoral Student Center Associate Deniz Besik presented some of her latest work, joint with Center Associate Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford and me, on tariff rate quotas and agricultural products. Pritha Dutta presented on research, also conducted with me, on competition for blood donations, a paper, which was recently published in the journal Omega. Dr. Dutta also had a paper published in Operations Research for Health Care in 2020. Center Associates had numerous journal article publications and it is important to recognize that Professor Dmytro Matsypura received the INFORMS ENRE (energy, natural resources and the environment) Best Publication Award in Environment and Sustainability for his paper on wildfires, Wildfire Fuel Management: Network-based Models and Optimization of Prescribed Burning, co-authored with Professor Oleg Prokopyev of the University of Pittsburgh, and Dr. Matsypura's student, Aizat Zahar, and published in the European Journal of Operational Research in 2018. Dr. Matsypura presented the paper and received the award certificate at the INFORMS conference in Seattle in October 2019.

I had the pleasure of being elected a Fellow of the Network Science Society. The award ceremony took place at a banquet during the International Conference on Network Science in Burlington, Vermont, May 29-31, 2019. The citation on my Fellow plaque reads: For sustained contributions to network science, including the formulation, analysis, and computation of solutions to engineered network systems, from congested urban transportation to supply chains, under varied decision-making behaviors.

Center Associate Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy served as a Member of the Program Committee of EURO 2019 in Dublin, Ireland, which took place June 23-26, 2019. Several Center Associates, in addition to Professor Patrizia Daniele; notably, Professor Sara Saberi of WPI and Professor Dmytro Matsypura of the University of Sydney in Australia, spoke at this conference. I had the honor of giving a tutorial on: Game Theory and Variational Inequalities: From Transportation and Supply Chains to Financial Networks and the Internet and was a panelist on two panels: Women in OR and Making an Impact. It was a pleasure to present a paper on global trade and tariffs and quotas co-authored with Doctoral Student Center Associate Deniz Besik and Center Associate Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford.

I had the pleasure of being a keynote speaker at the CIIO 2019 logistics conference and also delivering a guest lecture. Both of these took place at the Naval Academy located on an island in Cartagena, Colombia. I also had the great honor of being a keynote speaker at the VIII Congreso de la Sociedad Mexicana de Investigacion de Operaciones (CSMIO 2019), ITAM Santa Teresa, Mexico, October 16-18, 2019.

The INFORMS Annual Conference had great representation by the Center Associates with Professors Dmytro Matsypura, Jose Cruz, Sara Saberi, Ke Ke of Central Washington University, Michelle Li, Shivani Shukla of the University of San Francisco, and Min Yu taking part, as well as Doctoral Student Center Associates Deniz Besik and Mojtaba Salarpour. Deniz Besik had the honor of being accepted and taking part in 3 Doctoral Colloquia this year: at POMS in Washington DC, INFORMS, and DSI in New Orleans. Also, congrats to Dr. Cruz on being appointed an Associate Dean of Graduate Programs at the School of Business at UConn!

It was also a fabulous year for the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, which I have had the pleasure of serving as the Faculty Advisor of for an incredible 15 years. We hosted outstanding speakers from industry and academia in our Speaker Series. The speakers spoke on topics from smart cities to disaster management in the Arctic, and the optimization of refugee settlement placements, as well as energy, among other topics. On November 13, 2019, we were delighted that Center Associate Dr. Stavros Siokos, traveled from London, England, and spoke in the series. Dr. Siokos is Managing Partner of Astarte Capital Partners LLP, a private equity asset management firm based in London. His presentation title was:  “Investing in Private Markets: Social and Environmental Benefits.”

And, on December 5, 2019, I had the distinct honor of presenting to the Isenberg School's Senior Leadership Team on 18 (plus) years of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks and its activities. The presentation slides can be downloaded here.

Thanks for the support! We wish everyone a Fabulous New 2020 Year!

Below are links to examples of some of our recent publications.

Multitiered Blood Supply Chain Network Competition: Linking Blood Service Organizations, Hospitals, and Payers
Pritha Dutta and Anna Nagurney, Operations Research for Health Care, 23: (2019), 100230.

In Memoriam: Martin Beckmann (1924-2017)
David Boyce and Anna Nagurney, Transportation Science.

Quantifying Supply Chain Network Synergy for Humanitarian Organizations
Anna Nagurney and Qiang Qiang, to appear in IBM Journal of Research and Development.

Strict Quotas or Tariffs? Implications for Product Quality and Consumer Welfare in Differentiated Product Supply Chains
Anna Nagurney, Deniz Besik, and Dong Li, Transportation Research E 29: (2019), pp 136-161.

Global Supply Chain Networks and Tariff Rate Quotas: Equilibrium Analysis with Application to Agricultural Products
Anna Nagurney, Deniz Besik, and Ladimer S. Nagurney, Journal of Global Optimization 75: (2019) pp 439–460.

Competition for Blood Donations
Anna Nagurney and Pritha Dutta, Omega 212: (2019), pp 103-114.

An Integrated Financial and Logistical Game Theory Model for Humanitarian Organizations with Purchasing Costs, Multiple Freight Service Providers, and Budget, Capacity, and Demand Constraints
Anna Nagurney, Mojtaba Salarpour, and Patrizia Daniele, International Journal of Production Economics 212: (2019), pp 212-226.

Supply Chain Network Competition Among Blood Service Organizations: A Generalized Nash Equilibrium Framework
Anna Nagurney and Pritha Dutta, Annals of Operations Research 275(2): (2019), pp 551-586.

Tariffs and Quotas in World Trade: A Unified Variational Inequality Framework
Anna Nagurney, Deniz Besik, and June Dong, European Journal of Operational Research 275(1): (2019), pp 347-360.

How to Increase the Impact of Disaster Relief: A Study of Transportation Rates, Framework Agreements and Product Distribution
Timo Gossler, Tina Wakolbinger, Anna Nagurney, and Patrizia Daniele, European Journal of Operational Research 274(1): (2019), pp 126-141.

Greening the Supply Chain: Insights From One of the World's Leading Scientific Minds - Professor Joe Sarkis

Today we were honored and delighted to have Professor Joe Sarkis, the head of the Department of Management within Worcester Polytechnic Institute's (WPI) Foisie School of Business, deliver the lecture, "Supplier Collaboration and Development for Greening Supply Chains," as part of our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series. The series is organized by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter so a special thanks to the chapter President, Pritha Dutta, a doctoral student in Management Science at the Isenberg School of Management, for handling the logistics and for designing the nice poster below.

The talk was even announced on the UMass Amherst homepage today.

And, interestingly, and coincidentally, if you look closely at the above homepage snapshot you will also see on the left under "News" the article on Seven UMass Amherst Researchers Named among 'World's Leading Scientific Minds.' In this 2016 Thomson Reuters survey of highly cited scientists is also our speaker today, Professor Joe Sarkis, and he is listed in the Engineering category so do check it out. He is renowned for his work on sustainability and supply chains and today he attracted an audience from the Isenberg School of Management, the College of Engineering, the Department of Environmental Conservation, among others. Just look at his Google Scholar citations.

He motivated his presentation by noting a 2016 McKinsey report on Supply Chain Management and emphasizing the importance of greening the supply chain to industry with the "leading edge of thought" should also be the "leading edge of practice." "We should be doing good," he said, and emphasized the gold mine of research in this area and that showed throughout his presentation as did his passion and energy. He has collaborated with researchers from China, from Egypt, and other countries and, I do admit I am now also working on a paper with him and with two of my former doctoral students, Dr. Sara Saberi who just started as an Assistant Professor at the Foisie Schoo of Business, and Dr. Jose Cruz, from the School of Business at the University of Connecticut, whose work was also mentioned in Sarkis' presentation.

He emphasized levels of problems and different methodologies and theories to tackle them - from global problems, such as global warming, to regional problems of deforestation and acid rain, to more local problems of pesticides and waste.

Of course, he had to mention that there are many different definitions of environmental sustainability (and he even authored a paper on this) and recognized the importance of ISO 14000, life cycle analysis (LCA), and carbon and water footprints. When it comes to supply chains it is essential to "close the loop" and deal not only with forward and reverse supply chains separately. He remarked that energy research is also important for supply chain management and stated that teaching informs his research and vice versa. I so agree with the latter statement and continue to be inspired by questions that my students raise.

It was wonderful to have my Isenberg School colleague, Professor Marta Calas, in the audience since she is working with a doctoral student on sustainability and the fashion brand Eileen Fisher. We have published several papers on fashion and sustainability with my former doctoral student, and now Assistant Professor at the University of Portland, Dr. Min Yu.

The relevance of theory, methodologies, and applications were emphasized and he also discussed whether carrots or sticks should be using for green supply chain management.

I very much liked what he said about different boundaries, including temporal ones, and associated decision-making. He also discussed the different types of flows that are relevant and since we work on networks, optimization, game theory, as well as sustainability I liked the flows of material, service, information, and financial ones noted very much. Also, I appreciated him mentioning different industries from food to the textile industry. On the latter, he is working with a collaborator in Egypt. Afterwards, a doctoral student and UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter officer, Ekin Koker,  brought up the automotive industry and sustainability.

Professor Sarkis spoke on his work on "supplier development" and the sharing of knowledge to help suppliers become greener and also about investment in greener technologies.

The theme of different "levels" also resonated, from the individual, to the organizational, the enterprise level, all the way to the circular economy. Also, how leadership in greening the supply chain affects motivation and employees.

When I asked him which paper he was most proud of, he mentioned his paper in Science, with co-authors from China and Italy, "Measuring China's Circular Economy." He also noted his paper with Zhu in the Journal of Operations Management, since it contains theory, methodology, and application and such papers tend to be highly cited. The history behind his Science paper was also fascinating, but you should ask him this.

The audience clearly had a great experience and benefited a lot from the presentation.

After the energizing and very inspiring talk, I took Professor Sarkis, two of his doctoral students from WPI that had joined us, and three doctoral students from UMass Amherst, Pritha Dutta, Deniz Besik, and Rodrgo Mercado,  to lunch at the University Club and the wonderful conversations continued. As Professor Sarkis said at lunch, there is no better life than being a Full Professor at a university!

The food was great and the conversation even better - amazing how some universities are incentivizing researchers to publish in good journals especially those outside the United States. Of course, we also exchanged notes on recent academic hires, the job market, etc. Interestingly, both the Dean of the Foisie School of Business and the Dean of the Isenberg School, Dr. Mark A. Fuller  (I admit I served on the search committee for the latter), are in the Information Systems field.

Many thanks to Professor Joe Sarkis for coming to the University of Massachusetts Amherst today. You are welcome back any time! Thanks to Pritha Dutta for capturing the "Bon Voyage"in the photo below.