A Thank You to Barry List, Communications Director of INFORMS, Who is Retiring

I heard the news this morning, after my Humanitarian Logistics class and office hours. 

The message came via email (after Barry List had kindly retweeted a message that I had sent out on Dr. Michael Johnson's talk tomorrow at the Isenberg School in the UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series),

The message said:

Hi, Anna,

After 18 years serving our association and its membership, I will retire from INFORMS this Friday.

I very much appreciate all the help and encouragement you gave me. I look forward to reading more about all the wonderful research that you and your students are conducting.

Very best wishes,

Barry List
A. Director, Communications
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)


I was simply stunned and, fully agree with  Dr. Paul Rubin who later tweeted: "he is too young to retire."

INFORMS has been my primary professional organization. What makes it truly special is the people - from its members to the INFORMS staff. Barry List was not only someone that many of us enjoyed seeing at INFORMS conferences but also one with whom we regularly communicated with  about professional activities and events. He would always listen and provide support and, as the Communications Director, kept the wonderful news about the research of our colleagues and the growth of our professional society front and center.

His network of contacts and his knowledge of our society members and its activities were vast and he always was a great champion of operations research and the management sciences as well as analytics.  His press releases on INFORMS members' publications and achievements were always a pleasure to read.

I very much also enjoyed being interviewed by him for a podcast Supernetworks.and have listened to the many podcast interviews that he conducted. 

And when there was heartbreaking news such as the passing of Professor George Dantzig, it was Barry List, as the Communications Director of INFORMS,  who shared it with the world. 

Barry, you will be greatly missed. Thanks for the almost two decades with INFORMS and for all the terrific work that you did.

I hope that your wonderful adventures continue!

Strength Through Professional Society Communities and Continuing Education

Everyone wants to and needs to be part of something bigger and to feel productive and be a recognized as a valuable contributor to an important organization.

When you wake up each morning, is it with a smile on your face and excitement, energy, and enthusiasm for the day and your projects? 

We are part of communities -- from the colleges and universities that we, as academics, teach and conduct research at to the companies that the practitioners and leaders in our profession in industries as varied as healthcare to transportation and logistics to financial services and high tech and consulting (to name just a few) contribute significantly to.

We are also, many of us, members of professional societies, which provide us with essential communities and from which we gain strength in so many ways.

With possible challenges in our immediate academic and corporate organizations due to continuing change, economic pressures, fluctuating perspectives in terms of  administration, and even our own values and dreams, professional societies can provide sustenance and support for our entire professional lives.

In addition to the camaraderie and networking opportunities, professional societies provide avenues for continuing education and personal and professional growth.

INFORMS, as the leading association for professional in analytics, operations research and management science, for example, has a plethora of communities that one can be part of, at different stages of one's careers:

From student chapters at various universities:

     End of the semester party of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter

to INFORMS regional chapters:

Trip with some of my students to the INFORMS Boston Chapter Meeting, Burlington, MA, November 23, 2010 - Link to my presentation


to societies within INFORMS:

Transportation & Logistics Society of INFORMS -- several Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award recipients

to fora, such as WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences):
 

Various WORMS activities at the Annual INFORMS Meetings

one receives continuing education in many forms -- information and knowledge from conversations with colleagues and from lectures and talks with additional resources provided by INFORMS such as podcasts and now even INFORMS TV!

And, of course, we gain and learn so much through the wonderful conferences:

from regional ones:

2011 Northeast INFORMS Regional Conference
UMass Amherst, May 6-7, 2011

to the annual national ones, which serve as reunions for many of us, as well as international ones, which take us to exotic locales:

ALIO-INFORMS Joint International Meeting
Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 2010

Moreover, through INFORMS membership, one can find out about new jobs and opportunities -- terrific for students and for those seeking greener pastures or just new challenges.


Finally, with INFORMS' new CAP (Certified Analytics Professional) program you can gain valuable new credentialing. And, one of the first to take the CAP exam, Dr. Irv Lustig of IBM, explains the benefits of this exam in his interview with Barry List, the Communications Director of INFORMS in the video below.




Irv, by the way, was an undergraduate at Brown University, when I was a PhD student there, and I was his TA for Professor Stella Dafermos' OR course (she was my advisor). Needless to say, Irv was very smart and went on to Stanford to get his PhD in OR with Professor George Dantzig, as his advisor.

And, in closure, I emphasize that learning and gaining strength from our professional society communities can also be a lot of fun!

Leadership and WORMS -- Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences

Leadership comes in many forms -- scientific, political, intellectual, academic, business and industry, professional, artistic, and societal from the individual to the familial levels and beyond.

Great leaders have courage and integrity and, through their vision and ability to capture the imagination and support of others,  can elicit fundamental change.

Being a great leader is never easy and one can experience isolation, marginalization, and even discrimination -- it is the work and novel ideas that matter and the documentation of them.

Great leaders care about others and, under what, at times, may seem to be too many constraints, create opportunities and long-lasting effects. You may become a great leader even if your own organization, for whatever reasons,  does not understand or appreciate your contributions.

Leaders help to build communities. 

There is a lot of renewed interest in women and leadership lately with the new PBS production that starts airing next week entitled: Makers: Women Who Make America to Sheryl Sandberg's forthcoming book, Lean In, with a provocative article in The New York Times: A Titan's How-To on Breaking the Glass Ceiling. Sandberg is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook.

One of my favorite communities is WORMS -- Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences.

WORMS is a forum of INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences).

According to the WORMS website, the goals of WORMS are to:

• To encourage interest in the field of operations research and the management sciences;
• To encourage discussion and interaction among individuals having interest in the issues facing women and its relationship to the profession of operations research and the management sciences;
• To advise the INFORMS Board on aspects of issues facing women in the profession of operations research and the management sciences and to keep the INFORMS Board apprised of developments in this area.

WORMS organizes great activities and also recognizes those who have contributed significantly to the advancement and recognition of women in the field of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (OR/MS) through the awarding of the WORMS Award.

Recently, we received the message below, which announces the immediately past and incoming new WORMS Officers.

Dear WORMS Members, 

As the outgoing WORMS President, I wanted to write and officially welcome the incoming WORMS Officers. Our "new" officers as of January 2013 are:

President Laura McLay, Virginia Commonwealth University, lamclay@vcu.edu

President ElectSusan Martonosi, Harvey Mudd College, martonosi@g.hmc.edu

Past President Esma Gel, Arizona State University, esma.gel@asu.edu

SR VP of Meetings  Mary Beth Kurz, Clemson University, mkurz@clemson.edu

JR VP of Meetings Erica Klampfl, Ford Motor Company, eklampfl@ford.com

SP VP of Communications Anna Nagurney, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, nagurney@isenberg.umass.edu

JR VP of Communications Lisa Yeo, University of Alberta, myeo@ualberta.ca

SR Treasurer Guzin Bayraksan, University of Arizona, guzinb@sie.arizona.edu

JR Treasurer Muhong Zhang, Arizona State University, Muhong.Zhang@asu.edu

Secretary Renata Konrad, Worchester Polytechnic Institute, rkonrad@wpi.edu

Please remember to renew your membership for 2013 and let us know if you have any questions/concerns/comments! 

Regards,

Esma Gel 

Past President, WORMS 

Coincidentally, the past several days there have been several professional activities that I have been involved in from the Dynamics of Disasters Symposium that I organized for the 2013 AAAS Annual Meeting in  Boston that took place Sunday, February 17, to the hosting of Professor Tina Wakolbinger for a talk at the Isenberg School, with the great help of our award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMs Student Chapter. 

In the former,  the new President of WORMS, Professor Laura McLay, was a panelist and also blogged about the experience, and Professor Tina Wakolbinger, who traveled all the way from Vienna, Austria, where she is a Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business,  was a discussant (our photo at AAAS Boston is above).

When we hosted Professor Wakolbinger for her seminar this past Tuesday, Professor Ana Muriel of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at UMass Amherst, who is a past President of WORMS, came to the lunch, reception, and presentation, along with a nice group of her students.

 

And, I might add, Professor Wakolbinger is a past Senior VP of Communications of WORMS!

Congratulations to the Inaugural Group of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS)

The American Mathematical Society (AMS) recently announced its inaugural list of Fellows.

Other societies, that I am a member of, have had the "Fellows" distinction (much)  longer from INFORMS  to The Econometric Society to SIAM to RSAI. I am a Fellow of the RSAI.

Needless to say, since AMS just introduced the Fellows recognition in 2012 the list is quite long with the goals of the Fellows Program being, according to the AMS website;

• To create an enlarged class of mathematicians recognized by their peers as distinguished for their contributions to the profession.
• To honor not only the extraordinary but also the excellent.
• To lift the morale of the profession by providing an honor more accessible than those currently available.
• To make mathematicians more competitive for awards, promotion, and honors when they are being compared with colleagues from other disciplines.
• To support the advancement of more mathematicians in leadership positions in their own institutions and in the broader society.

Looking at the list of AMS Fellows took me down memory lane since not only were there names of mathematicians that I had cited in my papers and books and that I serve on editorial boards with and have also interacted with in various professional settings over the years, but there were 15 AMS Fellows from Brown University, my alma mater. From the Division of Applied Mathematics the AMS Fellows are: Constantine Dafermos, Wendell Fleming, Stuart Geman, John Mallet-Paret, Donald McClure, David Mumford, Chi-Wang Shu, and Walter Strauss and the honorees from the Department of Mathematics are: Thomas Goodwillie, Thomas Banchoff, Stephen Lichtenbaum, Hee Oh, Jill Pipher, Joseph Silverman, and John Wermer.

Since I have 3 degrees in Applied Math from Brown and also a degree in Russian Language and Literature (yes, I love languages of all sorts, including computer programming languages)  I know and even had as instructors many of the faculty on the above list in Applied Math. Plus, Constantine Dafermos was Stella Dafermos' husband and she was my doctoral dissertation advisor at Brown. 

Of course, on the list are individuals who already are Fellows of other societies that I mentioned above.

Congratulations to all the AMS Fellows!

Chairing the Fellows Selection Committee

Many professional societies recognize their most distinguished scholars through election / selection as a Fellow of the society. To achieve a fellow recognition signifies recognition by one's peers at the highest level of professional achievement.

Having served on the Regional Science Association International (RSAI) Fellows Selection Committee for the past two years, this year I am chairing the committee.

The RSAI website contains the following nomination information:

RSAI members are invited to nominate distinguished scholars for consideration to become 2011 Fellows of RSAI. The nomination process can be initiated by any member of RSAI and consists of a letter of nomination, detailing the scientific merit and contribution of the nominee and an up to date curriculum vitae. Current Fellows are not allowed to submit nominations. To ensure full consideration by the committee, these materials should be provided in electronic format (pdf preferred) by January 31, 2011 to Anna Nagurney, Chair 2011 Fellows Election Committee at: nagurney@gbfin.umass.edu

The above RSAI website link also contains names of all previously elected Fellows. There are presently 58 living Fellows and two deceased ones (Reginald Gollege and Walter Isard, the founder of the field of Regional Science, who passed away last month at the age of 91).

The Nobel laureate Paul Krugman of Princeton University was elected RSAI Fellow last year. David E. Boyce, Professor Emeritus of the University of Illinois, and Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University, is both an INFORMS Fellow and an RSAI Fellow.

Among the RSAI Fellows are 5 females: Karen R. Polenske of MIT, Ann Markusen of the University of Minnesota, Janice Madden of the University of Pennsylvania, and Aura Reggiani of the University of Bologna, Italy, and yours truly.

The first group of RSAI Fellows was elected in 2002 and consisted of:

• Walter Isard, Cornell University, USA
• Martin Beckmann, Brown University, USA and Technical University of Munich, Germany
• Jean Paelinck, Erasmus University, NETHERLANDS
• David Boyce, Northwestern University, USA.

RSAI has an international membership of over 3,000, more than one third of whom are Europeans. According to its web site, “Founded in 1954, RSAI is an international community of scholars interested in the regional impacts of national or global processes of economic and social change. The work of RSAI draws on the expertise of many different disciplines and this multi-disciplinary approach helps to facilitate new theoretical insights for tackling regional problems. In turn, this provides an increasing opportunity for academics within the Association to engage more fully with planners and policy makers. Building on a strong foundation of quantitative methods, regional science is at the cutting edge of research into new model design for regional analysis and impact assessment. The Association fosters the exchange of ideas and research within regional science through its publications and the international scientific conferences it hosts.”