The Fall 2025 Supernetwork Center Newsletter is Now Online!

In the Fall 2026, we will be marking the 25th Anniversary of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, an incredible milestone, which we hope to celebrate in an appropriate fashion. Since Fall 2001, a historic time, I might add, I have had the honor and pleasure of serving as the Director of  the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, which I founded.

In order to keep our supporters and the public informed as to the Center's activities, we publish a newsletter, now in Fall and Spring editions.

I am delighted that the Fall 2025 edition of The Supernetwork Sentinel, the newsletter of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management, has now been published.

The Fall 2025 newsletter, along with all previous ones, going back to Fall 2003, can be accessed on the following link: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/newsletters/sentinel.html

It has been a terrific couple of months, with outstanding conferences, significant recognition, as well as journal article acceptances and publications.

Wishing everyone a peaceful Holiday Season and a Great New 2026 Year!

The Spring Supernetwork Newsletter Is Published!

I am delighted to share that the 2025 Spring Edition of The Supernetwork Sentinel, the newsletter of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I founded in 2001 and continue to serve as the Director of, has now been published.

It was an extraordinary spring semester with many activities and news items to report.

It is wonderful to see that our research is making impact and that we continue to be sought by the media for our expertise on supply chains and various policies, including tariffs. This summer will be busy with conferences and also with work on international trade as well as food security.

The Spring 2025 newsletter, as well as all other earlier newsletters, can be accessed here: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/newsletters/sentinel.html

Thank you for the support!

Congratulations and Kudos - Virtual Center for Supernetworks in 2023

As the Founding Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, which was established at the Isenberg School in 2001 (shortly before 9/11), I find it important, as another year draws to a close, to reflect upon the achievements of the Center and its Associates during these challenging times.

2023 was a remarkable year, in which we celebrated 15 Virtual Scholars in Ukraine, part of the UMass Amherst - Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) partnership. In the spring 2023, we had the honor and pleasure of helping to host the visit of the President of KSE, Dr. Tymofiy Mylovanov in February and the visit of the Rector of KSE, Dr. Tymofii Brik, in May, at which we also took part in a symposium featuring faculty hosts at UMass Amherst and the Virtual Scholars in Ukraine. Many thanks to the International Programs Office at UMass Amherst, including Vice Provost for Global Affairs Dr. Kalpen Trivedi, and to the Isenberg School and the Provost's Office for the outstanding support of this very important program that helps to reduce brain drain from Ukraine.

For the EJOR paper, "Multicommodity International Agricultural Trade Network Equilibrium: Competition for Limited Production and Transportation Capacity Under Disaster Scenarios with Implications for Food Security," Dana received the inaugural prize from my OIM department, for this A level publication with a monetary award of $750. In May, 2023, Center Associates Professors Deniz Besik and Pritha Dutta and I published the paper, "An Integrated Multitiered Supply Chain Network Model of Competing Agricultural Firms and Processing Firms: The Case of Fresh Produce and Quality," in EJOR.

And, with Professor Elena Besedina of KSE, we published a paper in Operations Research Forum. Much of our research with colleagues in Ukraine focuses on agricultural supply chains and impacts of Russia's war on them with the importance of alternative routes for exports quantified as well as the use of various policies for international trade enhancement.

We welcomed a new Center Associate, Dr. Gabriela Colajanni, with whom, and with Center Associates Professor Patrizia Daniele and Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney, we have been actively publishing on UAVs (drones).

Our research papers can be found on the Supernetwork Center website.

In addition, as part of the partnership, UMass Amherst welcomed 4 female undergraduate students from KSE! We hosted a special panel with them through the auspices of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter and there is now even a video of an additional interview posted on the chapter's youtube channel. It has been an extraordinary experience interacting with these remarkable ambassadors for Ukraine as they enjoy their experiences at UMass Amherst very much. Our great Isenberg School Dean Anne P. Massey even hosted a lunch in their honor.

And, this past summer, I had the honor of co-organizing another Dynamics of Disasters (DOD) conference, which took place in Piraeus, Greece, and attracted conferees from many different countries. We are now in the process of editing the Proceedings volume. 

Speaking of books, I was thrilled that my Labor and Supply Chain Networks was published by Springer in 2023. It's wonderful to see al the libraries that now carry it.

Shortly after the DOD conference, and with a lovely meeting with Center Associate Professor Patrizia Daniele and her family in Madrid, I headed to the IFORS conference in Santiago, at which I delivered a keynote talk. It was wonderful to see colleagues from around the globe at this conference.

INFORMS in Phoenix served as a reunion for several of us, and it was wonderful to see Center Associates Professors Deniz Besik, Dmytro Matsypura, and Shivani Shukla there with Professor Zugang Liu also taking part. At this conference the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter was recognized with the Magna Cum Laude Award. I have had the honor of serving as the chapter's Faculty Advisor since 2004, whehn the chapter was established.

And big congratulations are in order to Center Associates Shivani Shukla and Dong "Michelle" Li, both of whom were recognized with promotion and tenure this year at their respective institutions of the University of San Francisco and Babson College.

Congratulations also to Center Associate Sara Saberi of  WPI, who was appointed the Norton Assistant Professor in 2023.

We continue to be very engaged with the media - some of our writings can be found here and interviews here.

For photos of various Center activities please see https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/cfoto/centerphotos.html

Thank you for the support. Let's work together to make 2024 a better year than 2023 with all the pain and suffering now on our planet.

Sharing Successes and Thanks with Your Benefactor

I have been very lucky to not only have met the benefactor of my chaired professorship but to also have enough of a relationship with him that I can communicate and share experiences with him.

In 1998, I became the John F. Smith Memorial Professor at Operations Management at the Isenberg School of Management. I was the first female appointed to a chaired professorship in the University of Massachusetts system, consisting of 5 campuses, including the UMass Medical School in Worcester.

Part of having a chaired professorship, I believe, is stewardship, and that should entail not only, according to its definition, of:  responsible planning and management of resources, but also staying in touch with the benefactor/donor, if that is at all possible. The chaired professorship that I hold was made possible by John F. Smith Jr. or "Jack Smith," an alumnus of the Isenberg School of Management, class of 1960, who endowed the professorship in honor of his father, who was also a UMass Amherst alumnus, but of its Stockbridge School. Jack Smith Jr. was the chairman of the board of General Motors from 1996 to 2003 and the CEO from 1992 to 2000.  He has been a member of Delta's Board of Directors since 2000, so, clearly, transportation is in his "blood" and we have a common passion for operations management. What has always impressed me about Jack Smith, is his incredible intellect and memory as well as ideas for innovation.

Yesterday, I shipped off a package to Jack Smith, with two letters, one detailing some of the accomplishments of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, that I founded and have directed since 2001, and our great students at the Isenberg School, and a holiday letter. I also enclosed in the package three books: Competing on Supply Chain Quality, co-authored with my former PhD student, Dr. Dong "Michelle" Li, Dynamics of Disasters: Key Concepts, Models, Algorithms, and Insights, co-edited with Professors Ilias S. Kotsireas and Panos M. Pardalos, and STEM Gems,  by Stephanie Espy, in which I was honored to be one of 44 inspiring female role models in STEM for my work on networks. All these books were published in 2016 so they should make for some pleasant holiday reading.

Jack Smith has come back to UMass and the Isenberg School on several occasions, since I became a chaired professor,  and we also have a classroom named in his honor. He, along with other luminaries, such as Ken Feinberg and Jack Welch, also UMass Amherst alums, serves as an honorary co-chair of the UMass Rising Campaign. A video for the campaign, in which I also speak, can be accessed here.

In fact, one of the seeds for supernetworks and our center germinated when Jack gave a talk at UMass and spoke about interfaces between telecommunications and transportation in the context of vehicle mobility and it was clear that networks of networks or supernetworks would be an area that would generate theory and applications for years to come, which it has! Our Supernetworks book, which I co-authored with Dr. June Dong was published in 2002.

Below are some photos taken on one of Jack's visits to the Isenberg School, when he visited the Supernetworks Lab. Many of the Center Associates featured in the photos, have since received their PhDs, and are now professors. Several, who were undergraduates then, such as David Soffer and Christina Calvaneso, are having fascinating professional careers in business.  A full list is available here.

This blogpost is also a thank you to Jack Smith, whose support has enabled us to have a thriving, award-winning  UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, a center that builds bridges and has collaborators from multiple continents, and a home where speakers and visitors always feel a warm welcome.

The Best Gifts for an Academic Mom on Mother's Day

I'd like to wish all mothers out there a very Happy Mother's Day and to acknowledge all those who are no longer with us.

It's been a truly fabulous week and I feel very lucky.

As the Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, I have the privilege and honor of working with a great team of faculty, industrial partners, and students. This past Friday, I sent out the following message to my team.  All of those recognized in the message below were or are my PhD students in Management Science at the Isenberg School with the exception of my great collaborator Professor Daniele in Italy and the "other Professor Nagurney," who is my husband.

Also, the photo below is of Professor Patrick Qiang with his lovely family taken shortly after his receipt of Promotion & Tenure.

  
Dear Supernetwork Center Associates:

I wanted to share with you some of the wonderful news and my CONGRATULATIONS! The next Supernetwork newsletter will be packed with Kudos.

1. I just heard from Dr. Patrick Qiang that he received a letter from the President of the Penn State University system, stating that he has been granted a promotion to Associate Professor with tenure! Congratulations to Dr. Qiang! (Plus, at yesterday's commencement on his campus, he was honored with the Campus Teaching Award!)

2. Dong "Michelle" Li successfully defended her doctoral dissertation on May 4, and, after many campus interviews and frequent flier miles, accepted a great offer from the AACSB accredited School of Business at Arkansas State University. She follows in the footsteps of Professor Tina Wakolbinger (since Memphis is only an hour away) and Professor Ke Ke, whose first academic position was at the University of Arkansas in Monticello. Congrats to Dr. Li! (Michelle is my 18th PhD student to receive the PhD.)

3. Professor Jose M. Cruz has received the UCONN School of Business  Faculty Service/Outreach Excellence Award.  This award is presented annually to a faculty member for outstanding achievement in service/outreach. Jose has received 2 Ackerman Scholar awards and two teaching awards in previous years, so UCONN should just start naming their awards after him.

4. Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business has been appointed Senior Editor for the premier journal, Production and Operations Management, in the Disaster Management Department.

5. Sara Saberi received the Isenberg School's Outstanding Doctoral Student Researcher Award - she follows in the footsteps of Professor Min Yu of the University of Portland  and Dong Li. Also, Sara is today at the POMS doctoral colloquium in Washington DC.

6. Professor Patrizia Daniele has organized sessions for the EURO Glasgow conference and I will be seeing her there as well as Professors Wakolbinger and Toyasaki, who will also be coming to the Dynamics of Disasters Conference that I am co-organizing in Greece. Professor Wakolbinger organized a stream and a session at Glasgow and Professor Amir Masoumi of Manhattan College will be speaking in the session.

7. Dr. Padma Ramanujam of SAS came back to campus to speak at an invited panel at an ISSR conference at which Shivani Shukla also had a poster on our latest cybersecurity research (with Professor Patrizia Daniele and the other Professor Nagurney, who will be on sabbatical this coming academic year).

Happy Mother's Day to everyone and keep the great news coming! I am a very proud Academic Mom.

The great news items above represent the best gifts that I could get as an Academic Mom!


Anna Nagurney, Ph.D.
John F. Smith Memorial Professor
Director, Virtual Center for Supernetworks
Department of Operations and Information Management
Isenberg School of Management
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003

Congrats to Recipients of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) from Obama

I heard today the wonderful news that one of my UMass Amherst colleagues, Professor Sandra Petersen, is one of the fourteen recipients of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM), which was announced by President Obama at the White House.

A few years back I had served on  the committee making the selections.

According to the press release issued by the National Science Foundation:
PAESMEM recognizes outstanding efforts of mentors in encouraging the next generation of innovators and developing a science and engineering workforce that reflects the diverse talent of America. The mentors will receive their awards at a White House ceremony later this year.

The recipients of the individual awards and the organization award are truly extraordinary and are listed in the release on NSF's website:

Individual awards

• Luis Colón, State University of New York- Buffalo. Established program to increase minority students, especially Hispanics, in the chemical sciences field
• Anne E. Donnelly, University of Florida. Successfully guided dozens of undergraduate and graduate STEM students, many through creation of a mentoring program so fruitful it spread to other universities
• Lorraine Fleming, Howard University. Director of the school's Science, Engineering and Mathematics mentoring program that prepares students academically, socially and professionally for a career in STEM
• Shelia M. Humphreys, University of California, Berkeley. Improved recruitment, retention and success of underrepresented groups in Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
• Murty S. Kambhampati, Southern University at New Orleans. Engaged high school and undergraduate students in research, successfully boosting graduation rates
• Raymond L. Johnson, University of Maryland. Guided many minority students, at his home institution and across the nation, to complete degrees in mathematics, which has notoriously low retention rates
• Gary S. May, Georgia Institute of Technology. Created new mentoring models, including collaborations with other institutions and researchers, which have increased the participation of minorities in science and engineering
• John Tilak Ratnanather, Johns Hopkins University. Created a system to support deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals in STEM
• John Matsui, University of California, Berkeley. Co-founded a renowned undergraduate diversity program in the school's Biology department, a model replicated at schools throughout the U.S.
• Beth Olivares, University of Rochester. Mentored hundreds of students through the STEM pipeline and advocated for STEM opportunities for low-income students both regionally and nationally
• Elizabeth A. Parry, North Carolina State University. Worked to increase the accessibility of engineering to students--from kindergarten through university--and their parents
• Sandra Petersen, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Director of a consortium of research colleges and minority-serving institutions which has tripled enrollments of underrepresented groups in STEM fields
• John B. Slaughter, University of Southern California. Developed numerous mentoring programs, at both the national and university level, to boost minority participation in STEM; also served as the first African American director of NSF (1980-82)
• Julio Soto, San Jose State University. Mentored hundreds of students, both personally and through nationally funded programs he developed

Organizational award

• The GeoFORCE Program, University of Texas at Austin. An outreach program encouraging minority rural and inner-city youth to study geosciences and engineering.

Congratulations to the PAESMEM recipients for your outstanding work in mentorship in STEM!

Back in 2007,  I served on a panel with Dr. Petersen at the Isenberg School, which was organized by Dr. Barbara Pearson and it was on Women in Science Climate. The provided panelist presentations that are available still are below:

• Sandy Petersen: On progress and strategies at UMass (through the Neagep):  
• Anna Nagurney: On the contribution of professional organizations  http://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/nagurney-awis.pdf
• Jane Fountain: various publications at  http://people.umass.edu/jfountai/publ_reviews.htm

   I still have the message from Dr. Pearson, which said: "Our panelists were all great and we had lively and constructive comments and questions from the audience. We were happy to host Mass-AWIS and some K-12 teachers, community college faculty, and 5-College colleagues. Thank you to TWIST, Research Liaison & Development, the Center for Virtual Supernetworks and the student chapter of INFORMS, as well as the NEAGEP Interns for their sponsorship and help. It is encouraging that several groups are working toward raising awareness of issues of “inequalities” and taking steps to resolve them."

Endowed Professorships at the Isenberg School of Management

Today (yes, it is a Sunday of the Labor Day weekend), we heard the good news from our Dean, Dr. Mark Fuller, via en email message, that two of our faculty have been appointed to Endowed Chaired Professorships. Specifically, Hossein B. Kazemi, a professor of finance at Isenberg, is the new Michael and Cheryl Philipp Professor of Finance.  Kazemi is actually the second holder of the Philipp Professorship - Professor Tom Schneeweis, who recently retired, was the first and assumed it in 2000.

                                   Dr. Hossein Kazemi

Professor Chris Agoglia, who is the chair of our Accounting Department  is the inaugural Richard Simpson Endowed Professor in accounting. This chair honors the legendary Simpson, who taught at our school for 50 years retiring at about age 80. I wrote about Professor Simpson on this blog in a piece entitled, Business Profs Who Make a Difference.

Dr. Chris Agoglia

Kazemi received his PhD from the University of Michigan and is also the Director of CISDM. Agoglia received his PhD from UMass Amherst.  

There are now 7 faculty holding endowed chairs at the Isenberg School of Management so this page will have to be updated!  Our Dean holds the Thomas O'Brien Endowed Chair, named after our long-serving former dean, who because of his outstanding efforts, we have the "Isenberg" School of Management. The Management department has 3 endowed chairs:  Professor Steven Floyd is the Eugene M. Isenberg Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Professor Charles Manz is the Nirenberg Professor of Leadership, and James Theroux  is the Flavin Family Chair in Entrepreneurshi.

I hold the John F. Smith Memorial Professorship of Operations Management and have held this chaired professorship since 1998. It is in honor of the father of Jack Smith Jr., '60, the former CEO of General Motors, who endowed this chair, and is one of our alums. Just last week, I wrote a long letter to Jack Smith thanking him for his support and telling him of the fabulous year at the Isenberg School - especially of the happenings in our new Operations & Information Management department and the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I founded in 2001 and direct. 

Named professorships come in all "shapes and sizes." There are endowed professorships, which, typically, last until one leaves, retires, or gets carried out. There are even what are sometimes called "folding chairs." These tend to be short-term honorific professorships and may have a set lifetime or be renewable with other holders. Some named professorships may be for only Assistant Professors but, typically, these are for Full Professors, the highest strata of the academic food pyramid.

In any event, please join me in congratulating both Professors Kazemi and Agoglia!

Our Dean in his message stated that:  Our most valuable resources are those individuals that can do it all at a high level: research, teach, serve, and lead; and who are firmly committed to all aspects of our mission including undergraduate and graduate education as well as scholarship.

NSF Grants Should Matter Even in Business Schools

Last Friday, I spoke at Texas A&M University and had a wonderful discussion at breakfast with several students from their  INFORMS Student Chapter who were wise beyond their years. Talking with speakers that they had brought to College Station every week had given them information and knowledge (and not just of the technical variety) as well as academic "street smarts."

So, they "picked my brain" about various topics and were especially interested in what I perceived as the differences between being a Professor at a business school versus an engineering school. These were doctoral students in engineering with a good background in Operations Research so they were trying to figure out, assuming that they would become academics, what kind of school would be a good "home" for them. Analytics talent is prized now in both business and engineering schools because of the demand in industry, government, and numerous other organizations, and this is great for all the quant types out there!

The students were aware that, in business schools, typically, the teaching load is higher, and that more emphasis is put on teaching. They noted a speaker (this surprised me) who told them  that the unhappiest 3 years of her life were those that she spent while a prof at a business school -- she is now at an engineering school. They also were aware (savvy, aren't they?!) that in business schools there is emphasis on publishing in what are referred to as "premier" journals whereas in engineering schools getting grants does matter and may be a necessary condition for promotion and tenure if not a sufficient one.  Let's admit it that starting salaries in business schools, which may be a bit discipline-dependent, are also higher, sometimes substantially higher, than those in engineering schools.

As a chaired professor at a business school (the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst) but one who also holds affiliated appointments in two different engineering departments at UMass Amherst, I clearly wear many "hats" and the interdisciplinary scope of my research and activities fuels my creativity and research. Also, since some of my support while a doctoral student at Brown University was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF), given to my dissertation advisor at Brown, Dr. Stella Dafermos, I have always felt that getting grants, which are peer-reviewed,  is important to one's scientific recognition, plus, it allows you to do the following (of course, this depends on the size and type of grant):

1. Support additional doctoral students, which I have done and am presently doing under our NSF grant: NetS: Large-Scale: Collaborative Research: Network Innovation Through Choice project, in which we are working on envisioning and constructing a Future Internet Architecture known as ChoiceNet. This is truly an exciting project involving a multidisciplinary, multiuniversity  team of engineers, computer scientists,  and my doctoral students and me. The lead PI is my colleague, Professor Tilman Wolf of the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst. This is only one of several NSF grants that I have been so lucky to have received over my professional career. Without NSF support, I would not have started the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at UMass Amherst, nor would I have graduated as many successful PhDs as I have had, nor had amazing opportunities through its International Programs, its earlier Faculty Awards for Women Program and its Visiting Professorship for Women Program, under which I spent a great year at MIT in Engineering.

Plus, I have supported quite a few undergraduates at the Isenberg School through the NSF's Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program.

2. Fund travel for students and others supported by the grant. Even though we may spend time in virtual worlds it is essential that we meet face to face at conferences, at workshops, and at other professional venues to exchange ideas. There is only so much $$$ in departmental travel budgets and chaired professor budgets for this activity so financial support from grants helps tremendously.

3. Supplies from the latest computers to even books can be purchased for students' and researchers' use as well as software and other materials.

4. Summer support can be acquired which allows sustained periods of time for focused research activity without distractions.

5. Recognition by one's peers that NSF support provides gives one confidence and, for a female, this is of tremendous value.  It never gets "easy" and there are always roadblocks put in your way and challenges and I say that as a chaired professor. I enjoyed the post on Nine Things Successful People Do Differently on the Harvard Business Review blog network, especially Point 6. Have grit. Grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty. Studies show that gritty people obtain more education in their lifetime, and earn higher college GPAs. Grit predicts which cadets will stick out their first grueling year at West Point. In fact, grit even predicts which round contestants will make it to at the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The good news is, if you aren’t particularly gritty now, there is something you can do about it. People who lack grit more often than not believe that they just don’t have the innate abilities successful people have. If that describes your own thinking …. well, there’s no way to put this nicely: you are wrong. As I mentioned earlier, effort, planning, persistence, and good strategies are what it really takes to succeed. Embracing this knowledge will not only help you see yourself and your goals more accurately, but also do wonders for your grit.

And let me celebrate that another colleague of mine in my Operations & Information Management Department at the Isenberg School, Professor Senay Solak, has also had an NSF grant with multiple universities since starting as an Assistant Professor just over 5 years ago. (Another colleague, Professor Ahmed Ghoniem, has been receiving funding from Qatar in terms of other grants, and, most recently, to work on the FIFA World Cup in Qatar for 2022 -- so cool!)

Plus, let us not forget that receipt of NSF grants enhances the stature, visibility, and reputation of your business school and your university!

Moreover, look at some of the fascinating projects that NSF has funded that were given to faculty at Business Schools: at the Eller School at the University of Arizona for ethics research (our Dean's alma mater), to a consortium, which includes Stanford and Haas at UC Berkeley for innovation, and even at Wharton for a workshop. Of course, the Sloan School at MIT has had many faculty receive NSF grants including the prestigious CAREER awards and even a PECASE award given to Professor Georgia Perkais, who is my academic sister, because her advisor at Brown was also Stella Dafermos, who, sadly, passed away while Georgia was her student and Professor Tom Magnanti, a good friend of Stella's, and of OR/MS renown,  took over as her advisor.

Latest News from the Supernetworks Center

The 2012 Summer edition of The Supernetwork Sentinel, the newsletter of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, that I founded almost 11 years ago,  is now online.

It has been an amazing couple of months, with presentations given around the world, new grants awarded and research and teaching accolades received by the Center Associates.

I sometimes wonder how we manage to accomplish as much as we do -- clearly, we have a passion for what we do and we have a great team that enjoys collaborating and working together.


All of our newsletters can be found on this page.

Supernetwork Center Associates will be at the POMS Conference in Chicago

The POMS (Production and Operations Management Society)  Annual Conference takes place next week in Chicago, Illinois, April 20-23, 2012.

The theme of this year's conference is Socially Responsible Operations.


The Virtual Center for Supernetworks Center Associates will be well-represented at this conference,

Below is a list of the papers that members of our team will be presenting:

Supply chain network design of a sustainable blood banking system (A. Nagurney and  A. H. Masoumi),

A supply chain network oligopoly model for pharmaceuticals under brand differentiation andperishability  (A. H. Masoumi, M. Yu, and A. Nagurney),

The influence of technical, market and legislative factors of e-waste flows (F. Toyasaki, T. Wakolbinger, A. Nagurney,  and T. Nowak),

Multiproduct humanitarian healthcare supply chains: A network modeling and computationalframework (A. Nagurney, M. Yu, and Q. Qiang),

Global supply chain network competition under exchange rate uncertainty (Z. Liu).

Also, my doctoral student, Amir H. Masoumi, will be taking part in the POMS Doctoral Student Colloquium and Zugang Liu will be taking part in the Emerging Scholars Program. Amir will also be at the mini-conference on Humanitarian Operations and Crisis Management next Thursday in Chicago.


I am sure that the Chicago POMS Conference will be a great success.

Supernetwork News

There certainly was a lot to report in the 2012 Winter Edition of The Supernetwork Sentinel, which is the newsletter of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst. From keynote talks, invited conference presentations, and seminars in Paris, Montreal, Miami, Raleigh, Rapid City, Charlotte, and even Amherst; new titles, awards, and other distinctions, plus many paper acceptances, as well as publications, it has been a very productive time since our 2011 Fall Newsletter was published.

All of our newsletters can be found on this page.

As Center Director, I thank all of our terrific supporters.

Congratulations and Kudos from the Supernetwork Center

At the end of every year, I highlight special achievements and activities of the past year of the Center Associates at the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I founded 10 years ago at the Isenberg School of Management and that I continue to direct.

These are noted in a special Congratulations and Kudos page. What a great year 2011 was research-wise, teaching-wise, and professionally service-wise, despite tornadoes, Hurricane Irene, and the multiple day power outage after the freaky Halloween snowstorm in the Northeast.

From teaching awards at multiple universities, research and mentorship accolades, numerous conference presentations and panels (Transportation Research Board meeting in DC, AAAS meeting in DC, IEEE Supernetwork Conference in Shanghai, INTRIM in Montreal, NetGCoop in Paris, SAMSI in Raleigh, POMS in Reno, RSAI in Miami, and INFORMS in Charlotte), and plenary talks (China, France, and the US), and even help with conference organizing (SBP in Maryland and the Regional INFORMS Conference at UMass Amherst), and, of course, research publications and even commentaries, it is amazing what this great team, which now has members on 3 continents, has accomplished and has had a lot of fun throughout.

This year we were not only interviewed but even filmed in NYC.

It takes a great team to create synergies and to do important research from sustainable supply chains to humanitarian logistics and healthcare to dynamic networks from electric power to transportation. It also takes a great team to do what needs to be done from helping out with student chapters to bringing speakers in and just being supportive of others.

By working together so much more can be done (and it is much more enjoyable) than going at problems alone. For photos of some of our activities, click here.

Thanks for the support and best wishes!

The Supernetwork Center is Marking Its 10th Anniversary -- See Our Fall Newsletter

This Fall we will be marking the 10th anniversary of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, which was established at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst on November 21, 2011. As the Founding Director of this Center, I have had the privilege to work with outstanding Center Associates, including graduate and undergraduate students, as well as faculty at universities on four different continents, and leaders in industry. In our 2011 Fall newsletter, The Supernetwork Sentinel, I reflect on some of the notable achievements of the past decade as we mark this milestone.
The full newsletter can be downloaded, in pdf format, here.

For all the published issues of our newsletter, see our newsletter page.

Remembrances from the IEEE Supernetwork Conference in Shanghai

The Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Conference on Supernetworks and System Management, which took place in Shanghai, China, have now been indexed by IEEE and are online.

I also have a hardcopy of the Proceedings in which my paper, Spatial Price Equilibrium and Food Webs: The Economics of Predator-Prey Networks, written with the "other" Professor Nagurney, appears as the lead article. The editors of the proceedings are: Professors Fu Yuan Xu and June Dong.

The Business School of the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology did a wonderful job providing us with remembrances of the conference, which are featured in the photo above, including a silk scroll of the famous Shanghai Bund.

It's great that the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst has its logo featured on the conference proceedings cover as well as the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I direct and SUNY Oswego, which was one of the sponsors, and the home institution of Professor June Dong. We also received a lovely laminated photo of all the participants which is now hanging on my office door.

My Student, the President

In 1997, I co-authored with Dr. Stavros Siokos, the book, Financial Networks: Statics and Dynamics, and financial networks are very hot now as both a topic in research and practice due to the financial crisis.

Dr. Siokos had been one of my doctoral students, and I had chaired his dissertation in Operations Research. I am a faculty member in the Isenberg School but have also supervised several doctoral dissertations in the College of Engineering, since I hold courtesy appointments in two departments there. Dr. Siokos is originally from Greece and he needed to complete his dissertation in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst (rather than in Management Science) in order not to serve in the Greek army. The title of his dissertation was: International multi-sector, multi-instrument financial modeling and computation: Statics and dynamics, Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1998.

Together we had co-authored papers which had appeared in such journals as Networks and Annals of Operations Research.

He has had a meteoric career in finance and serves as a Center Associate of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I direct at the Isenberg School of Management.

Dr. Siokos has now been appointed President of Sciens Fund of Hedge Funds Management (which is a fund of funds) and had previously served as a non-executive member of Sciens. This reminds me of supernetwoks, which are "networks of networks."

Dr. Siokos served for many years as the Managing Director within the equities division of Citigroup in London, where he was Global Head of Alternative Execution Sales (program trading, algorithmic trading, Direct Market Access), Global Head of portfolio trading strategies as well as head of the company's pension funds and insurance companies equity structured solutions in Europe. He, since April 2008, until now, was the Deputy General Manager & Head of Asset management, Private Banking, Private Equity & Alternative Investments of Piraeus Bank in Athens, Greece. He has been top ranked in most of the major European Investment and Alternative Execution surveys in the quantitative services sector over the last nine years.

Several of my former doctoral students have achieved the rank of Full Professor as academics and I can now say that a former doctoral student of mine is now a President!

I could not be prouder and like to think that it is the methodologies that he learned and advanced in operations research and the management sciences that have enabled him to flourish in financial services at the global level and to be responsible for a fund worth billions of dollars.

News Highlights from the Supernetwork Center

In today's complex world, it takes a great team to move research and education forward. As the Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, based at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, I must say that I could not be prouder of my team than I am.

In the past several days we have received all sorts of wonderful news.

First, Center Associate Dr. Dmytro Matsypura of the University of Sydney in Australia will be recognized for his teaching and mentoring with the Wayne Lonergan Outstanding Teaching Award (Early Career) from the School of Business at the University of Sydney.

Secondly, Center Associates Dr. Jose M. Cruz of the School of Business at the University of Connecticut and Dr. Zugang "Leo" Liu of Penn State Hazleton have had their paper, "Modeling and Analysis of Multiperiod Effects of Social Relationship on Supply Chain Networks," accepted for publication in the European Journal of Operational Research. Also, Dr. Liu's paper, "Risk Reducation and Cost Synergy in Mergers and Acquisitions via Supply Chain Network Integration," co-authored with me, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Financial Decision Making. The latter paper follows our recent study, "Supply Chain Outsourcing Under Exchange Rate Risk and Competition," which appears in Omega 39 (2011) pp 539-549.

Center Associate Dr. Tina Wakolbinger will begin her new position as a Full Professor of Supply Chain Services and Networks at the Vienna University of Economics and Business on May 15, 2011. Dr. Wakolbinger is the Editor of the WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) newsletter, which just released its first edition. She will be leaving her faculty position at the Fogelman School of Business and Economics at the University of Memphis, where she has been the past almost three years.

Also, Center Associate Dr. Patrick Qiang of the Graduate School of Professional Studies at Penn State Malvern has been accepted into the Emerging Scholars Program at the upcoming POMS meeting to be held in Reno, Nevada.

All of the above faculty member Center Associates received their PhDs from the Isenberg School of Management with a concentration in Management Science. I had the distinct honor and privilege of serving as their dissertation advisor.

Additional news about our present doctoral student Center Associates can be found in an earlier posting on this blog.

What a Year it Was!

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way ... Charles Dickens from his novel, A Tale of Two Cities.

The beginning of 2010 was marked, for many of us, by the news of the horrific earthquake that struck Haiti last January 12; with the suffering of its people continuing to this day. It was followed, only two days after, by a "local" shocking event, that happened only one town over from Amherst, and that circulated around the world -- the suicide of 15 year old Phoebe Prince.

As educators and researchers, the above deeply tragic events, had some of us refocus our energies. And, of course, some of us also had personal and familial tragedies to deal with. But as is said, what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.

At the same time, there were so many "best of times" and some of my highlights, as a professor, I list below.

• My former student and my co-author of the Fragile Networks book, Dr. Patrick Qiang, was honored with the Charles V. Wootan Award last January by the Council of University Transportation Centers in Washington DC for his doctoral dissertation, Network Efficiency / Performance Measurement with Vulnerability and Robustness Analysis with Application to Critical Infrastructure. Last March, Dr. Qiang joined me in giving a tutorial on the theme of our book at the SBP 2010 Conference at NIH. I then further disseminated our research in my tutorial at the ALIO-INFORMS Conference in Buenos Aires, which brought me, for the first time, to the continent of South America.
• A female PhD student of mine, Trisha Woolley (now Anderson) received her PhD in 2010 and assumed her Assistant Professorship at Texas Wesleyan University.Her dissertation title: Sustainable Supply Chains: Multicriteria Decision-Making and Policy Analysis for the Environment. She was my 15th PhD student to graduate and my 6th female.
• We celebrated the graduation of our wonderful undergraduate students from the Isenberg School last May -- another highlight of 2010!
• A former doctoral student of mine, Dr. Tina Wakolbinger, received an offer of a Full Professorship from the Vienna University of Economics and Business, a position which she will start next May, having been an Assistant Professor at the University of Memphis since receiving her PhD in 2007. Her research in humanitarian operations and, more recently, on electronic recycling, and that of my other former students and collaborators, give me hope for a better future.
• Two present doctoral students of mine had notable successes with their research: Min Yu had two papers accepted for publication, including: "Supply Chain Network Design for Critical Needs with Outsourcing," co-authored with Patrick Qiang and me. Also, Amir Masoumi completed the paper, with Min and me, entitled: "Supply Chain Network Operations Management of a Blood Banking System with Cost and Risk Minimization."
• The UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, that I serve as the Faculty Advisor of, received the Magna Cum Laude Award for its activities at the INFORMS National Meeting in Austin, Texas last November. They have started both a Facebook page and are on twitter, thanks to the chapter's new President, Nathan Kollett.
  
• The Network Science conference in Yalta brought me to the country of the birthplace of my parents, Ukraine, whereas the Computational Management Science conference at the University of Vienna brought together so many of my favorite colleagues from around the globe.
• As for the INFORMS conference in Austin, Texas, thanks to all for the wonderful memories!
• Also, thanks to all of my undergraduate and graduate students (both present and former ones) for being so special and so terrific! You will help to change the world for the better!
  

Let me end with the words of a new community service organization, Count Me In, that was started in South Hadley, in response to the tragedy of Phoebe Prince's suicide, and an article on which appears in today's Daily Hampshire Gazette.

This organization has its motto emblazoned on the backs of its t-shirts:

Respond with integrity and kindness/Embrace diversity/Stand up courageously for others/Promote a climate of safety/Eliminate hurtful words and rumors/Care for and listen to others with compassion/Take responsibility for my actions.

The above words should be followed in our daily lives.

Collective Intelligence, Successful Teams, and the Female Factor

Does collective intelligence exist?

This was the question that a group of researchers from MIT and Carnegie Mellon set out to answer and the results of their study have been published in the article, "Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups," in the October 29, 2010 volume of Science.

Clearly, the "design" of groups and teams has implications not only for management and a spectrum of organizations but also for engineering and even military operations (and I would even add educational institutions, including universities).

I came upon a reference to this study in yesterday's Boston Globe, in an article written by Carolyn Y. Johnson, entitled: "Group IQ." The article contains an interview with one of the co-authors, Thomas Malone of MIT's Sloan School, and it also included comments from Iain Couzin of Princeton (who was a fellow panelist with me at the World Science Festival's Traffic panel in NYC in June 2009).

The Science article was co-authored by Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher F. Chabris, Alex Pentland, Nada Hashmi, and Thomas W. Malone.

Pentland is the author of the truly fascinating book, Honest Signals, and we had the pleasure of hosting him in our Speaker Series at the Isenberg School.

He will be presenting a tutorial at the SBP 2011 conference on March 28, 2011 at the University of Maryland.

I was sufficiently intrigued by the Globe article to go and read the Science article.

In the article, the authors define a group's collective intelligence, c, as the general ability to perform a wide variety of tasks. Interestingly, they found that:

The "c factor" is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group!

The moral from this research study and "bosses" should listen up: do not dominate the conversation and include females (may I even say "diversity" matters) in the group if you wish to enhance collective intelligence and problem-solving, since social sensitivity makes a quantifiable difference.

Interestingly, recently, I published a paper on the wisdom of crowds in transportation networks and the disappearance of the Braess paradox, which received a lot of media attention. I expect the intriguing issues being raised by such studies will stimulate further research. In the meantime, I am enjoying very much working with my fantastic and diverse team at the Virtual Center for Supernetworks!

The Winter 2011 Edition of The Supernetwork Sentinel is Now Online

The Winter 2011 edition of The Supernetwork Sentinel is now online. This is the newsletter of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of UMass Amherst. This issue contains highlights of our activities over the past semester from participation at the INFORMS Conference in Austin, Texas to the I3P Consortium Meeting at MITRE Corporation. It also contains information about several conferences that will be taking place next year, which we are actively involved in organizing, and a list of our recent center publications.

This issue can be downloaded in pdf format here.

To access all the editions of this newsletter, please click here.

We wish everyone a happy holiday season and a wonderful New 2011 Year!

IEEE Conference on Supernetworks and System Management in Shanghai

The IEEE Conference on Supernetworks and System Management will take place May 29-30, 2011 in Shanghai, China. The call for papers may be downloaded here.

The University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (USST) will be the venue for the conference.

I am serving as the Honorary Chair of the conference along with Professor WANG Ying-Luo, who is a Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

The Conference Chairs are Professor June Dong of the State University of New York at Oswego and Professor XU Fu-Yuan of USST.

The Program Committee Chair is Professor MA Liang of USST and Professor June Wei of the University of West Florida is the Academic Committee Chair.

Professor SUN Shao-Rong of USST and Professor Patrick QIANG of the Pennsylvania State University Great Valley are the Organization Committee Chairs.

Both Professors June Dong and Patrick Qiang also serve as Center Associates of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at UMass Amherst that I direct.

It is exciting to see the prominence that supernetworks and associated research is getting in China.

I will be one of the keynote speakers at this conference and am very much looking forward to exchanging ideas.

The conference website is here.

Te last time I was in Shanghai was in August 2006.