Tracking Down Who Was the First Female Full Professor in OR in the World and Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

In the past few days I have been quite busy and not just with the preparation of plenary talks for conferences this month and the writing of papers. I have been approached through emails by males in both the US and the UK to answer (or to try to answer) the following question - who was the first female Full Professor of Operations Research (OR) in the world? This question arose, and it is an important one, because of the passing of Dr. Ailsa Land, short of her 94th birthday, on May 16, 2021.  I had written a blogpost celebrating her and also Marguerite Frank, both then of age 93. Dr. Land was the recipient of the Harold Larnder Prize, the Beale Medal (first female to receive these major awards), and will also receive posthumously the EURO Gold Medal at the EURO 2021 Conference in Athens, Greece, next month. 

Please refer to this obituary for Dr. Land, prepared by the institution she had received her PhD from and had worked at for many years - the London School of Economics (LSE).

Graham Rand and Laszlo Vegh (who was prominent in the blogpost I noted above) were preparing another obituary for Dr. Ailsa Land and were wondering whether she may have been the first female Full Professor of  OR in the world. She received this title at LSE in 1980. I was also contacted by Mark Eisner, who chaired for many years the INFORMS History & Traditions Committee that I had also served on, trying to determine who was the first such female professor in the US to achieve the rank of Full Professor in OR. And, of course, my PhD advisor at Brown University, Stella Dafermos, about whom I have blogged on multiple occasions, came to mind, as did Judith Liebman, who, like Stella, received a PhD in OR from Johns Hopkins University. Stella received her PhD in 1968 and Judith in 1971. We knew that Judith had become Full Professor at the University of Illinois in 1984. I had written several obituaries when Stella Dafermos passed away in 1990 but these did not contain the year at which she became a Full Professor.

Time was running short and this morning a message came from the UK: "We are running out of time Anna." No pressure on me, of course! I then sent a message to Stella's husband, a Chaired Professor of Applied Math at Brown (and had sent multiple messages to others in the meantime), Dr. Constantine Dafermos. He graciously went to campus and told me that Stella became a Full Professor at Brown University in 1982 with appointments both in the Division of Applied Mathematics and Engineering. There is more to this, but left for another time and post.

I also sent a message out on Twitter and am grateful to all those across the globe who are trying to identify whether there was a female in OR who became a Full Professor before 1980.

In the meantime, Graham Rand, with support, has completed another obituary for Dr. Ailsa Land, and we feel quite "safe" in that she was the first female Full Professor of OR (called Operational Research) definitely in the UK, and probably in the world! If additional information to the contrary becomes available, you will hear from me. 

But the plot thickens. In trying to identify what year exactly Stella Dafermos became a Full Professor at Brown and I know that she was the first female Full Professor in both Applied Mathematics and in Engineering because I was her first PhD student and we worked closely together on many papers I came upon several "news releases" from Brown University that attributed others as being the "first." Stella, sadly, passed away at age 49 on April 1990, so she can't speak for herself but I can, so  I am.  The following article, from Brown University Engineering, no less, identifies the first female Full Professor of Engineering as getting this appointment in 2008 -- 26 years after Stella!

And this article, states that the first female tenured professor in the Division of Applied Math at Brown came in 2010!

Giving credit where credit is due is imperative and I hope that my alma mater, Brown University, makes appropriate corrections! How easily, it seems, major institutions, and that includes research universities, can "forget" the legacy of females. 

I shared the above "oversights" with Professor Constantine Dafermos today, and he wrote me back a message that I will treasure, which included, in part: "... the obstacles that women of that generation had to overcome cannot be overemphasized. It is a good fortune that the success of several, though not enough, outstanding women like you have turned things around." 

As a scientist and as a researcher, we seek the truth. Much work remains to be done and speaking out plays a role. Thank you for reading! And, if anything needs correcting, please, let me know!

Another Female Full Professor!

Attaining the rank of Full Professor in academia is quite the achievement and, typically, to reach this rank, one, after receiving a PhD, becomes an Assistant Professor, then gets promoted with tenure (if all goes well) to Associate Professor, and, after a few more years (and, hopefully, no politics to interfere), attains the rank of Full Professor.

There are also chaired/named professorships, which are honorific-type of appointments that usually come with expanded resources and are, most often, given to Full Professors that merit special recognition.

As a named professor, who has graduated 15 PhD students, I follow the careers of my former students closely and am thrilled by their professional successes.

One of my former doctoral students, Tina Wakolbinger, who received her PhD from UMass Amherst in 2007, with a concentration in Management Science, and who was until recently an Assistant Professor at the Fogelman College of Economics and Business at the University of Memphis, has, as of May 15, assumed her new faculty appointment.

Dr. Wakolbinger is now a Full Professor of Supply Chain Services and Networks at the Institute for Transport and Logistics Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Vienna, Austria! She began teaching a course on Global Supply Chain Management there in English this past week.

Tina, along with Professor Dietrich Braess, and me, translated the famous Braess (1968) article, which included the paradox named after him, from German to English. Together, we also wrote several research articles that have appeared in such journals as Naval Research Logistics and Computational Economics. Her doctoral dissertation title was: A Dynamic Theory for the Integration of Social and Economic Networks with Application to Supply Chain and Financial Networks.

To achieve the rank of Full Professor in only a few years after attaining a PhD is quite the achievement and to get such a position in one of the most glorious cities in the world and in the largest public business university in Europe deserves accolades!

Dr. Wakolbinger actually received the offer last summer shortly after we were at the Computational Management Science conference in Vienna.

For more information on Dr. Wakolbinger's dissertation, and that of my other students, click here. The official announcement of her Professorship is here.

Congratulations to another female Full Professor!

A Female Academic Who Did It in Reverse Order and a Painful Anniversary

The recent AAUW report, which I blogged about, has certainly stirred up the waters, and I thank Dana Chivvis of AOLNews for further disseminating the important news about this study on how sterotypes and bias hurt women in math and science.

Now for some background on my personal history. In a sense, I was lucky, since I chose, while I was a doctoral student in Applied Mathematics at Brown University, a female as my dissertation advisor. Her name was Dr. Stella Dafermos, and she was the ONLY female who had an appointment in either the Division of Applied Mathematics or in Engineering (let's say that she was "double-counted," something I have experienced as well). She was also a mother with two children and her husband, Dr. Constantine Dafermos, was a very well-known applied mathematician, who was a Professor at Brown. I was Stella's first doctoral student and the impact that she had on me was tremendous. She was only the second female to receive a PhD in Operations Research in the world and she died at age 49 of cancer. I wrote her obituary in the top journal "Operations Research," and she was one of only a handful honored in that way.

On April 5, 2010, we mark the 20th anniversary of the death of this great female scholar, whose numerous research contributions in transportation, networks, spatial economics, game theory, algorithms, and variational inequalities have made and continue to make a great impact. Oh, the adventures that we had with Stella during conferences in Canada, Holland, Greece, Japan, the USA, among other places.

Now I am conducting research on paradoxes and the work that Stella and I did together and published I am now using years after (and many others have, in the meantime, as well). She had an uncanny intuition and great attention to detail and exceptional creativity.

As for "doing it in reverse order," female academics do not have it easy. First, I got tenure (after 4 years, which is unusually quick). Then I became a Full Professor (8 years after my PhD) -- the first one in the history (or should I say "herstory") in the Isenberg School (and the number of letters that were solicited for my Full is probably a record but one has to make sure that a female is "good enough," I guess). Then I had a child and after a month of "sick leave," granted to me less than willingly, I was back to teaching. That major event followed with my getting my driver's license (and that is quite the story in itself) but I had felt that I could be quite objective researching transportation, networks, and logistics, w/o a driver's license. Besides, while growing up in Yonkers we almost always took public transportation and spent a great deal of time in NYC and, as an academic, most of the interesting invitations that I was receiving required air travel. Robert Moses never got his license and neither did Barbara Walters, so I always thought that I was in rather "good company."

We need female faculty in technical fields to show new generations of students what is possible. Remember, once you solve that research problem that you have been struggling with, and all the pieces of the puzzle fall beautifully in place, that feeling is close to ecstasy. Noone can take that feeling away from you but also, remember, you had better publish that result, as well.