UMass Football on the Super Bowl Stage with Victor Cruz with the Giants and James Ihedigbo on the Patriots Team

I live in idyllic, historic Amherst known for its great colleges and university, the beauty of its natural landscape, and the many writers, scholars, and scientists that have spent time here.

We have also produced our share of outstanding athletes and two of them are football players and both played at UMass Amherst. I have gone to my share of football games because Fall is beautiful here in New England and the UMass Minute Marching Band that plays at half-time puts on a show that should not be missed. It was led for decades by George N. Parks.

UMass has always been an underdog when it came to college football (you probably have a favorite college team that you cheer for) on the national stage.

Now, however, UMass will be at the Super Bowl with Victor Cruz playing for the Giants (based in NY) and James Ihedigbo playing for the Patriots (based in Boston).

What I enjoy (perhaps most) about these two players is their stories. Just last night I was reading The New York Times about the Catholic high school that Cruz attended in Patterson, New Jersey (I started my "academic" career at St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic School in neighboring Passaic). Although his high school has closed, the reporter interviewed a nun who had taught there (deja vu for me, too) who recalled his smile and his love of football.

Now Cruz and his salsa moves on the playing field are even being imitated by Madonna, who will be singing at the half-time show at the Super Bowl tomorrow.

Ihedigbo's Amherst connections are even stronger since he played football at Amherst High School (and was recently inducted into its Hall of Fame) before playing for UMass Amherst. During the off-season he helps out poor children in Nigeria, the country where his parents were born.

Both these football players were coached by Don Brown at UMass Amherst (he has since left and is now at UConn) and there is a wonderful article in the Daily Hampshire Gazette about Brown and his two former players that he will be watching at the Super Bowl tomorrow. In the article, Brown recalls Cruz's "irrepressible spirit on the field."

"He always had a smile on his face, always came to practice with loads of energy," said Brown, who still sees that energy. "He ran routes in practice like he'd run them in a game. He made everybody have a good time around him and kept everybody loose."

And: "While Cruz played with joy, Ihedigbo was fueled by passion. The safety from Amherst was one of the few players whose fire on the field and on the sideline matched Brown's. Ihedigbo arrived at UMass as a walk-on and quickly established himself as an integral part of the Minuteman defense."

Brown called him "one of the best leaders he's ever coached."

Don Brown deserves congratulations along with these two former UMass Amherst football players!

And for those who appreciate sports management programs, our program at the Isenberg School of Management has its share of graduates in the Patriots and the Giants organizations.

How to Ace the Second and the First Interview for an Academic Faculty Position

Now is the heavy interview season for faculty jobs and many candidates, who are soon-to-be PhDs, or may already have them in hand, are traveling near and far for their on-campus interviews.

Typically, the first-round interview takes place at a conference or it may be in the form of a phone or a Skype interview. Make sure you look professional for the latter and always be very well-prepared. Do your homework about who will be interviewing you and the school, college, or university.

The second interview is, typically, an on-campus interview and for such interviews one needs to keep up a high energy level and a high enthusiasm level. The day(s) may be long, beginning with a breakfast meeting, numerous meetings with faculty, staff and administrators (sometimes even with Associate Deans or Deans and a Provost) as well as with students. You may even get a tour of the campus and a real estate tour.

The day will include a lunch and often-times a dinner plus a research presentation and perhaps even a teaching presentation, which may take place on the same day.

If you have made it to an on-campus interview, congratulations -- someone is clearly interested in you.

Yes, academics, and even faculty-in-training, need a lot of stamina and the on-campus interview is a venue where you will be checked out by all those who meet you and interact with you as a potential life-long colleague, should you get (and accept) an offer from the institution (and, ultimately, also get tenure).

This is a time to ask appropriate questions and to treat everyone that you meet with respect and courtesy.

This is also a wonderful opportunity for the candidate who is being interviewed to observe and to ask questions.

You will be asked questions about your research (especially your dissertation and most likely future research), plus your teaching style and interests. In today's job market, it is almost essential to have some teaching experience, ideally not just as a teaching assistant, but, especially if you are looking for a faculty position in a business school, as an instructor of a course for which you have had full responsibility (2 courses are even better assuming that your student teaching evaluations were solid -- hopefully, they were stellar).

It also helps to have a documented record of scholarly journal article submissions (and at least 1 or 2 acceptances).

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice article on what you can expect from a campus (second) interview that builds on its successful earlier article on first-round interviews. It also has advice for those who are getting PhDs and are not looking at academic faculty positions.

Finding the right college or university for you to start your professional academic career is like finding a mate and marching down the aisle to get married. It takes time and patience (and some courtship type of rituals) but when the match is good everyone benefits -- from the institution to the students and the new faculty member and colleagues.

Good luck and enjoy the journey!

Risk Management and the National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security Announced

I am pleased to see that President Obama has announced a National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security, which is a well-written document that I will share with my students in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare course since our next topics will be the differences between commercial supply chains and humanitarian ones, followed by risk management and vulnerability.

According to a recent article in Transport Topics, "DHS, State Dept. Directed to Devise Plans to Guard Against Supply-Chain Disruptions," which appeared in the January 30, 2012 edition (I have the hardcopy version), both the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department have been directed to guard against supply chain disruptions. According to the article, Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security stated at a briefing at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, recently, that: We must continue to strengthen global supply chains to ensure that they operate effectively in time of crisis, recover quickly from disruptions and facilitate international trade and travel.

Indeed, resilient supply chains are essential to our global economy.

Capturing the associated risk in global supply chains is critical to this effort and our most recent work contains a quantitative framework based on generalized networks, physics principles, risk management, and optimization to capture the complexity of a challenging global supply chain --- the medical nuclear one.

Our paper, "Securing the Sustainability of Global Medical Nuclear Supply Chains Through Economic Cost Recovery, Risk Management, and Optimization," Anna Nagurney, Ladimer S. Nagurney, and Dong Li, can be downloaded from the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website. In it, we model the time-decay of radioisotopes used in medical diagnostic procedures, and also the risk associated with such highly perishable and hazardous, critical products.

This is the second study that we have produced on medical nuclear supply chains.

Our first,"Medical Nuclear Supply Chain Design: A Tractable Network Model and Computational Approach," Anna Nagurney and Ladimer S. Nagurney, focused on the design of such supply chain networks, whereas our most recent one focuses on optimizing the operations and also considers the transition from highly enriched uranium targets to low enriched ones.

We co-authored an Op-Ed on this medical nuclear supply chain topic, Viewpoint: Passage of American Medical Isotope Production Act of 2011 will help ensure U.S. nuclear medicine supply chain, that appeared in the Sunday Republican - July 10, 2011.

An Ode to Dr. Joseph L. Balintfy and Food Management Science

This blogpost is being written for this month's INFORMS blog challenge which is: O.R. and Food.

When the theme was selected, special memories flooded back and I knew that I had to write about the Food Management Scientist Extraordinaire -- Dr. Joseph L. Balintfy.

I first met Dr. Balintfy when I came to my interview at UMass Amherst for a faculty position, after receiving my PhD at Brown University. When I was hired at its Business School (now the Isenberg School), my senior colleague in Management Science was Dr. Joseph L. Balintfy. He had been born in Hungary and operations research / management science involving mathematical models and algorithms associated with menu planning, diets, food preferences over time, food price indices, and many other food-related issues and problems were his life's work.

Dr. John F. Raffensperger of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, wrote a beautiful blog piece, Balintfy Made the World Better with O.R. after Professor Balintfy's passing on December 30, 2008 (an obituary also appeared in OR/MS Today). Raffensperger's tribute contains many valuable links to Balintfy's contributions.

I knew Professor Balintfy not only as a scholar but also as a truly original human being. He was married to Lily Lancaster, who was a nutritionist, and was working on her doctoral dissertation in Management Science at UMass. I had the pleasure of serving on her dissertation committee. Her dissertation was highly original -- planning how food should be displayed aesthetically on a plate. I still remember some of the lessons -- don't have all the food be yellow or all white (although I know of some children who might think otherwise).

Parties over their elegant home on Blue Hills Road in Amherst were special. Not only were the guests served elegant, delicious cuisine, in a house filled with oil paintings, but after each meal we would be "treated" to a nutritional and calorie breakdown of what we had just consumed using, of course, software that Balintfy had developed for such purposes. He had a company that sold food management science software to schools, hospitals (even in Scandinavia I recall him telling me) but what continued to frustrate him was the difficulty of selling his menu planning software to certain prison systems (including one in New Jersey). When it came to food preferences, the wardens wanted to minimize the prisoners' utilities rather than to maximize them and they would say to Balintfy: if the prisoners don't like grapefruit that is what we will serve them!

At one of the lavish parties at the Balintfy home, I met Jane Garvey and her husband, our long-serving sheriff, who were neighbors. Jane Garvey later became the head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and was responsible for air traffic during 9/11. She has been honored for her amazing leadership on multiple occasions and last Spring I received an honor named after her (quite special).

Balintfy's productivity was well-known and he worked closely with his students. I found an online list of some of the reports that his Food Management Science group had produced and you can salivate at the titles.

Fascinatingly, William P. Pierskalla, writing in a report, "Nurse Scheduling: A Successful Multi-Site O.R. Implementation -- Why? " back in 1975, stated: As was pointed out at the ORSA-TIMS_AIIE Meeting in Atlantic City two years ago, the only multi-site successful implementation of an operations research study in health was the menu-planning and dietary inventory model developed by Joseph L. Balintfy.

Joe Balintfy was always true to himself and he left not only his work but many amazing memories for those who had the experience of knowing and working with him.

New Female Amherst College President Tweets

Lately, there have been articles on leaders, including the CEO, Rupert Murdoch, who are now tweeting and how their personas, and, perhaps, leadership styles, are coming through. The New York Times had such a column on Murdoch yesterday.

Now, the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) has an article on the new President of Amherst College, Dr. "Biddy" Martin, who took over the Presidency from Anthony "Tony" Marx this past Fall (he is now head of the New York Public Library).

The article begins in a wonderful way, speaking about Amherst, the town that I live in, as being idyllic.

It also discusses the challenges that Dr. Martin faced in her former leadership position at the University of Wisconsin and asks why she left there to assume the Presidency of a small, outstanding liberal arts college (that actually is more diverse than many institutions).

The CHE article also has some inside information that I was not aware of -- of how Amherst College is essentially run by a "Committee of Six" with weekly 3 hour Monday meetings.

It quotes Dr. Martin as saying: "Everyone warned me about it," she says of the power of Amherst's faculty. "Someone just recently told me that a former president of Dartmouth is alleged to have said: 'Being president at Williams is a fun job. Being president at Dartmouth is a hard job. And being president of Amherst is an impossible job.' There's a reputation of faculty being ­really hard on presidents."

It also notes the anti-professionalism credo at this liberal arts college (and I can personally attest to this since I have had Amherst College students in my office trying to figure out how they can take courses at the Isenberg School of Management and the College of Engineering with the Amherst College restrictions). Yes, we are part of the Five College system but that does not mean that students from Amherst College (as I have found out) can take any course that they are interested in at UMass Amherst.

I do wish Dr. "Biddy" Martin all the best in her new leadership role. I think that she will be outstanding. Students are starting to notice already.

You can follow President Martin on Twitter.

The article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

How the US Can Compete and Win in Global Supply Chains

I was delighted to read Thomas L. Friedman's Op-Ed column Made in the World in yesterday's New York Times that quoted Yossi Sheffi of MIT.

Sheffi was my host at MIT when I held an NSF Visiting Professorship for Women.

Yossi Sheffi is the author of Urban Transportation Networks in which many of the papers of my dissertation advisor, Stella Dafermos, are cited, and one of my papers as well, although it was published just shortly after I received my PhD from Brown. He has graciously made this book available for download.

Of course, he is also the author of The Resilient Enterprise, which focuses on supply chains and how to minimize and respond to disruptions. I refer to his books in various courses that I teach at the Isenberg School from my Transportation & Logistics course to the new Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare course that I am presently teaching.

According to Friedman's column: But America can thrive in this world, explained Yossi Sheffi, the M.I.T. logistics expert, if it empowers “as many of our workers as possible to participate” in different links of these global supply chains — either imagining products, designing products, marketing products, orchestrating the supply chain for products, manufacturing high-end products and retailing products. If we get our share, we’ll do fine.

And here’s the good news: We have a huge natural advantage to compete in this kind of world, if we just get our act together.

One of my primary areas of research is supply chain networks, and I fully concur with Friedman's ending paragraph:

If only — if only — we could come together on a national strategy to enhance and expand all of our natural advantages: more immigration, most post-secondary education, better infrastructure, more government research, smart incentives for spurring millions of start-ups — and a long-term plan to really fix our long-term debt problems — nobody could touch us. We’re that close.

Our approach to supply chains focuses on the network system as described in my Supply Chain Network Economics: Dynamics of Prices, Flows, and Profits book.

Information on some of our latest research on supply chains, from medical nuclear ones to pharmaceutical and even fashion ones, can be accessed on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website.

One Girl's Romp Through MIT's Male Math Maze -- The Play to be Peformed at Mount Holyoke

On my way home from UMass Amherst today, I spoke with a neighbor of mine, Dr. Margaret Minsky (I am sure that you recognize the surname, especially if you have had some computer science), who, appropriately, has a PhD in Computer Science from MIT.

Then, coincidentally, when I arrived home, the headline of an article in the Amherst Bulletin immediately caught my attention (and it came with a photo):

MATH WHIZ: Play recalls tough days at male-dominated MIT.

The article was about a play written by Gioia de Cari. It was the late 1980s when Gioia de Cari was a doctoral student in math at MIT, having earlier received a degree in math from UC Berkeley.

She spent 4 years at MIT, earned her master's degree, wrote part of her dissertation, but did not complete it.

The experience for her at MIT was very different from that at UC Berkeley. She even would change her attire to try to figure out how to best fit in and a male professor expected her to serve cookies at a seminar. It was even suggested to her by professors and students that she'd be happier at home raising children.

Eventually, she realized that theater was her passion and she became a full-time actor but she started writing down her "math stories" in a journal and had started working on plays. She also began to wonder whether the climate had improved for females in math.

Then came the Larry Summers bombshell. de Cari was at the academic conference at Harvard in January 2005, when Dr. Summers, then the President of Harvard, suggested that innate differences between men and women, rather than discrimination, could be one reason that fewer women succeeded at math and science.

Her reaction to the media response and backlash to Professor Nancy Hopkins of MIT walking out of the conference, led her (she said that she felt an obligation) to complete the play: Truth Values: One Girl's Romp Through MIT's Math Maze. It took her ten years to write.

The play will be presented Monday, Feb. 6, at Mount Holyoke College's Rooke Theatre at 7:30 p.m.

The Springfield Republican has a terrific article about the play and the playwright:

Gioia De Cari's 1-woman play at Mount Holyoke College to explore the question 'Are women inherently inferior to men in math and science?'

The article also quotes the wife of a colleague of mine, who served for a long time as the chair of the math department at Mount Holyoke, Dr. Margaret Robinson, who said:

“The topic is what graduate school in mathematics is like, in particular for women,” "But those studying science, computer science, physics, chemistry and biology will also relate."

The performance is also “good theater,” she said.

I was a doctoral student in Applied Math at Brown University in the 1980s and can honestly say I consciously chose as my dissertation the only female faculty member in Applied Math, Dr. Stella Dafermos. She also had a faculty appointment in Engineering and, yes, she was also the only female faculty member in Engineering.

In 2005-2006, I was a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University, and you can read some of my reflections on meeting Dr. Summers on this blog (and we even got treated to dinner at his presidential home).

I had spent two years at MIT (one year in Engineering and one year at the Sloan School of Management) in the late 1980s and 1990.The climate has been changing and there are now more female faculty that I can name off the top of my head (several of whom I know quite well). Interestingly, they all received their PhDs from MIT or had a chair of their doctoral dissertation from MIT.