Rest in Peace, Professor Hani S. Mahmassani

I received the heartbreaking news that Professor Hani S. Mahmassani, a superstar in transportation science and operations research, passed away on July 15, 2025, from his colleague, Northwestern University Professor Karen Smilowitz. It is truly hard to process that this brilliant scholar and dear friend has passed away. I am sure that many tributes and special memorials will follow but I had to take the time to write my reflection. 

Karen also shared with me the following official message:

NUTC is greatly saddened to share the loss of our dear friend and colleague, Dr. Hani Mahmassani, William A. Patterson Distinguished Chair in Transportation, professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Northwestern University Transportation Center at Northwestern University. Dr. Mahmassani passed away this morning, July 15, 2025, at 7:15 AM CDT at Northwestern Memorial Hospital following a sudden cardiac arrest. He was 69 years old. 

Dr. Mahmassani was an outstanding and internationally renowned leader of transportation science and logistic community. During his long and prolific career, spanning more than four decades, Hani made significant contributions to transportation science in various fields: from dynamic network modeling and optimization, to traffic flow theory, intelligent transportation systems, dynamic vehicle routing, travel behavior, decision theory, and logistics systems design. Hani is a member of the National Academies of Engineering, arguably the highest professional honor an engineer can receive. Hani was an exceptional mentor who advised more than 75 doctoral students, many of whom now hold positions on top universities worldwide, showing his high commitment to developing future leaders in transportation. 

Dr. Mahmassani will be remembered by all as a dedicated and enthusiastic member of the transportation community, and our hearts go out to all his friends, family and academic colleagues, particularly his sons Amine and Ziad and his brothers Ghaleb, Maher and Malek.

Information regarding a celebration of life service for Dr. Mahmassani will be shared in the coming weeks.

Hani I have known for decades and I have served on multiple prize committees with him and have engaged in many special activities, which he initiated, as a super dynamic thought leader and innovator. He had served as the Editor in Chief of the flagship journal Transportation Science, a position that Karen Smilowitz now holds.

Last year, I nominated Hani for INFORMS Fellow and, at the INFORMS Fellows Luncheon in Seattle last October, we celebrated his election, along with 11 other inductees, including Grazia Speranza and Celso Ribeiro, with whom I already shared the very sad news. Hani had  been earlier elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) but was thrilled to become an INFORMS Fellow and the announcement below appears on the NU Transportation Center's webpage. 

Below are photos taken at the INFORMS Fellows luncheon in Seattle. Hani was presented with his award plaque by then INFORMS President Julie Swann. In the group photo Hani is with Celso Ribeiro, Grazia Speranza, Janny Leung, who chaired the Fellows selection committee, and me. I saw Celso, Grazia, and Janny recently at the EURO Conference in Leeds.

Hani had also been recognized by the INFORMS Transportation Science & Logistics Society with the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award. Robert Herman had been his mentor when he was at UT Austin, after receiving his PhD from MIT.

Hani was incredibly generous with his time and support of scholars as well as practitioners. For example, he even agreed to serve on the Stella Dafermos Mid-Career Award (inaugural) committee that I chaired and I blogged about that experience https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2022/10/congratulations-to-niels-agatz-on-his.html. Stella had been my PhD advisor at Brown University and was a friend of Hani's. She passed away at age 49 in 1990. Neils Agatz was the first recipient of this award.

In 2018, I had the great pleasure of speaking at the Smart Cities Analytics Workshop at Western University in Canada with Hani and others that I am sure that some of my readers will recognize:

I blogged about the great experience: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2018/10/smart-cities-analytics-terrific.html

In my lecture slides of my Transportation & Logistics class I have photos of Hani and in my Humanitarian Logistics & Healthcare class I speak about his great work on evacuation networks. Hani was an incredible thought leader, who regularly appeared in the media, and who mentored so many scholars and students. 

I remember fondly the events that he organized at Northwestern University, including the event on the publication of the book  "Forecasting Urban Travel," co-authored by David Boyce and Huw Williams, which I was honored to take part in; see https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2015/10/fabulous-launch-of-forecasting-urban.html and also the outstanding event - a Network Design Symposium in honor of Martin Beckmann (who was on my PhD committee): https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-transportation-symposium.html

And, in 2005, at the INFORMS meeting in San Francisco, David Boyce and I organized 2 sessions in honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of  Studies in the Economics of Transportation, and the photo below was taken after the sessions. Beckmann and McGuire were present, along with their spouses. Winsten had passed away the year before. Hani is on the far left in the photo.

Hani was also the Editor in Chief of Transportation Science when Dietrich Braess, Tina Wakolbinger and I published the translation of the famous Braess paradox (1968) paper from German to English along with a preface by David Boyce and me on how Braess came up with the idea. See: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/trsc.1050.0127 and https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/trsc.1050.0126

And I am so pleased that Hani, David Boyce and I published the following article together: http://www.civil.northwestern.edu/docs/Boyce/retrospective_on_beckman.pdf

Below is a photo of Hani and the rest of the award committee, including me, when Michael Florian received the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award, back in 1998. With us is Marius Solomon, who has since passed away, Mark Daskin, Gilbert Laporte, and Teo Crainic.

Thank you, Hani, for your outstanding contributions, your selflessness, generosity, great wisdom and knowledge, and kindness and for all the memories. Your legacy will live on through all those who were blessed to have had you in their lives and through your outstanding scientific work.

And Sobhi Mahmassani, a nephew of Hani's, was a student in my Transportation and Logistics class at the Isenberg School of Management and an OM major!

Deepest condolences to Hani's family, friends, students (present and past) and to all the colleagues around the world!

Working with Colleagues in Ukraine Is Inspiring

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, I have been deeply involved in supporting higher education there. I had already been quite active, due to my affiliation with the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) as both a member of its Board of Directors (BOD) and its International Academic Board over several years, but, in March, 2022, my connections intensified since I was elected one of the four Co-Chairs of the BOD of KSE https://kse.ua/community/stories/board-of-directors/.  Shortly thereafter, my university - UMass Amherst - established a global partnership with KSE. The partnership included both a student exchange student program (very successful) as well as a Virtual Scholar in Residence Program to reduce brain drain from Ukraine. We have now had two sets of cohorts of Virtual Scholars and I have enjoyed working with several of the scholars.

My colleagues in Ukraine inspire me and I believe that the research that we have done together is strengthened through our collaborations.

I am honored and delighted that Professor Myroslava Kushnir from the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv and I have had our latest paper accepted for presentation at the Information Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction Conference at Kyoto University https://itdrr.org/conference/itdrr2025/. Our paper, "Social Network Analysis of Civilian Support Networks for the Ukrainian Military," emphasizes that Russia’s war on Ukraine is not only a geopolitical conflict but also a humanitarian, ecological, social and economic disaster. Our study applies Social Network Analysis (SNA) to explore the interaction structure between civil society organizations (CSOs) and military units in Ukraine during the ongoing full-scale war. Dr. Kushnir has been a Virtual Scholar in both cohorts. Our first joint paper, "Civilian-Military Integration in Ukrainian Defense Supply Chain," co-authored with Renata Konrad of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, was published in the Proceedings of the International ISCRAM Conference: https://ojs.iscram.org/index.php/Proceedings/article/view/49

And just a few days ago, at the great EURO Conference in Leeds, UK, I presented a paper co-authored with my Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Ismael Pour, and Professor Borys Kormych of the Odesa Law Academy. The paper, "Integrated Crop and Cargo War Risk Insurance: Application to Ukraine," was recently published in the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/itor.70038 Professor Kormych had also been a Virtual Scholar in the two cohorts. 

And, with Virtual Scholar Pavlo Martyshev and Professor Oleg Nivievskyi of KSE, we have published 4 papers, along with my Isenberg School of Management PhD student Dana Hassani. I am very proud of this work. The papers that have appeared in journals are: 

"A Multiperiod Multicommodity Capacitated International Agricultural Trade Network Equilibrium Model with Applications to Ukraine in Wartime," Dana Hassani, Anna Nagurney, Oleg Nivievskyi, and Pavlo Martyshev, Transportation Science 59(1): (2025), pp 143-164,

"Multicommodity International Agricultural Trade Network Equilibrium: Competition for Limited Production and Transportation Capacity Under Disaster Scenarios with Implications for Food Security,"Anna Nagurney, Dana Hassani, Oleg Nivievskyi, and Pavlo Martyshev, European Journal of Operational Research 314(1): (2024), pp 1127-1142,

"Exchange Rates and Multicommodity International Trade: Insights from Spatial Price Equilibrium Modeling with Policy Instruments via Variational Inequalities," Anna Nagurney, Dana Hassani, Oleg Nivievskyi, and Pavlo Martyshev, Journal of Global Optimization 87: (2023), pp 1-30.

Plus, we have the following paper: "Quantification of International Trade Network Performance Under Disruptions to Supply, Transportation, and Demand Capacity, and Exchange Rates in Disasters,"Anna Nagurney, Dana Hassani, Oleg Nivievskyi, and Pavlo Martyshev, published in Dynamics of Disasters - From Natural Phenomena to Human Activity, I.S. Kotsireas, A. Nagurney, P.M. Pardalos, S. Pickl, C. Vogiatzis, Editors, Springer Nature Switzerland AG (2024), pp 151-179.

Dana Hassani has received 4 research awards (2 from the OIM Department and 2 from the Isenberg School) for his publications. These are significant recognitions.

I have written additional article with Professor Nivievskyi and am extremely proud of the paper, "Ukraine - Addressing the Domestic Crisis and the Effects of the War on Global Food Systems," which was published by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: https://www.pas.va/en/publications/scripta-varia/sv154pas/nivievskyi.html

I have also worked with Professor Elena Besedina of KSE. She was a Virtual Scholar in the first cohort. The paper that we co-authored is: "A Multicommodity Spatial Price Equilibrium Model with Exchange Rates and Non-Tariff Measures for Agri-Food International Trade," Anna Nagurney and Elena Besedina, Operations Research Forum 4: (2023), 84.

My colleagues and collaborators in Ukraine have dealt with drones and missiles and losses of family members and friends and much too much time in shelters. They continue to teach and to conduct research under very challenging conditions. What they do to support their students and knowledge discovery in wartime is heroic. I thank them from the bottom of my heart and look forward to peace and prosperity for Ukraine and its freedom-loving citizenry.

Humbled to Be a Highly Cited Female in Operations Research (OR)

While "diversity" now is being ostracized in the US with the new administration, scientific interest in gender issues continues to be quite intense.

One of my primary fields is Operations Research (sometimes referred to in the UK and Europe as Operational Research). It is a discipline that focuses on quantitative methods for decision-making and I love it!

A fairly recent paper, entitled, "Women Just Wanna Have OR: Young Researchers Interview Expert Researchers," co-authored by Lavinia Amorosi, Rossana Cavagnini, Veronica Dal Sasso, Martina Fischetti, Valentina Morandi and Alice Raffaele, and published in 2021 in Operations Research Forum, interviewed "a group of prominent female professors and affirmed researchers in STEM belonging to different generations, with dissimilar careers and experiences." I was delighted to be interviewed and the article may be accessed here:   https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43069-020-00039-8

In 2024, the Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS) published its first discussion paper (suggesting the relevance of the topic): "Gender Equality: Opportunities and Challenges for the OR Community," by Paula Carroll and Annunziata Esposito Amideo: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2024.2343343 This article was followed by a commentary to which twelve individuals (not all female) contributed. Many of the contributors I am delighted to know professionally. I very much enjoyed writing my contribution to the discussion. The commentary can be accessed here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2024.2344969

One theme that caught my attention was citations of the publications of female authors and that there were (very) few females in the top 100 authors in Operations Research.

I am humbled that I am on the list as is Grazia Speranza (who also contributed to the JORS commentary) and whom I recently saw at the EURO Conference in Leeds! 

I am number 56 out of the top 100:

So there are two females in the top 100 authors in OR according to Google Scholar.

And, by the way, I had the pleasure of handling the nomination of Grazia for INFORMS Fellow and she was elected in 2024. We celebrated at the Seattle meeting and you can read my post here: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-outstanding-informs-conference-in.html

I am standing next to Grazia in red in the top photo on the left of the above collage. Joining us are Celso Ribeiro (who I also saw in Leeds) and Hani Mahmassani (I also nominated both of them) and Janny Leung, who was also at the EURO Conference.

I believe that awareness will generate action but, most importantly, we need to support one another and to celebrate successes. The field of Operations Research is incredibly rich in both theory and application and is highly relevant in addressing many of the world's most important problems. We need to welcome and work with all the great minds in our profession!

And, for some additional reading, which is quite provocative and entertaining, please see the article, "If Dantzig had a Sister," by Alice Raffaele and Anand Subramanian, published in ORMS Today: https://pubsonline.informs.org/do/10.1287/orms.2024.01.06/full/ Anand is the genius behind the Subject_to video interviews of Operations Researchers. I am a huge fan of his and treasure the photo below taken at the EURO Conference in Leeds.

A Walk Down Memory Lane - I Thoroughly Enjoyed Presenting on 20 Years of EURO Conferences

Congratulations to the European Association of Operational Research Societies (EURO) on its 50th anniversary, which we recently celebrated at the great EURO Conference in Leeds, UK, June 22-25, 2025  https://euro2025leeds.uk/outline-programme/. I am writing this post, which is the 5th one in a series on this conference, while in Edinburgh.

It was a very busy, engaging conference for me, with 2,000 delegates from across the globe. I was honored to give 3 presentations. The first two (on tariffs and trade in the Making an Impact session, and on war risk insurance in the Insurance and finance session) I have already blogged about.  My third presentation was: "Reflections on Wonderful OR Experiences at EURO Conferences Over 20 Years."

This talk I gave on the last day of the conference. I  am very grateful to Professor Gerhard-Wilhelm "Willi" Weber for inviting me to speak in the session: "Celebrating 50 Years of EURO."

The session presenters and their titles:

Reflections on Wonderful OR Experiences at EURO Conferences Over 20 Years

Anna Nagurney

Why the 1970’s Was an Important Era in Operational Research, with Personal Reflections

Jyrki Wallenius

Lessons I learned from EURO

Emilio Carrizosa

Fifty years of Data Envelopment Analysis

Ali Emrouznejad, Anna Mergoni, Kristof De Witte.

The session was chaired by the Immediate Past President of EURO - Professor Anita Schöbel.

I have posted the slide deck of my presentation on the Supernetwork Center website: 

https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/EURO20YearsNagurney.pdf

In my slide deck I have many photos of conferees at EURO Conferences in Reykjavik, Poznan, Glasgow, Dublin, and Copenhagen. I was touched that several colleagues, whose photos I had included in my presentation, came to my talk in Leeds! 

Afterwards, we took a group photo, which included the session chair,  Professor Anita Schöbel,  the session organizer, Professor Gerhard-Wilhelm "Willi" Weber, and Graham Rand, who was mentioned in several of the presentations, including mine.

The EURO conference have been expertly organized, with excellent scientific sessions, and, above all, I now can consider many of the wonderful researchers and practitioners that I have met at these conferences to be friends. Science is about research, education, and, most of all, it is about people!

Presented Our Integrated War Risk Insurance Paper at EURO in Leeds

The outstanding EURO 2025 conference in Leeds is now over and delegates have disbursed. Scientific conferences are essential to knowledge exchange and also to networking and building communities.

It was an honor to present our recently published paper, "Integrated Crop and Cargo War Risk Insurance: Application to Ukraine," in the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) at this conference.

The paper was co-authored with my Isenberg School of Management PhD student Ismael Pour and Professor Borys Kormych of the Odesa Law Academy in Ukraine. Professor Kormych was a Virtual Scholar, in the first and second cohorts, thanks to the partnership between UMass Amherst and the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE). We enjoyed our collaboration very much.

The paper can be accessed here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/itor.70038?af=R

The paper was presented on Monday, June 23, 2025, in a very relevant session on Data Science in  Insurance and Finance. Information on the session is below.

Integrated crop and war risk insurance

Anna Nagurney, Ismael Pour, Borys Kormych

Finding robust profiles of mental well-being across Europe

Irene Albarran

Premium calculation using Parametric Quantile Regression for insurance count data

Fabio Baione, Davide Biancalana, Aurora Ferri

Implementing non-dominated sorting into asset preselection within portfolio problem

Tomáš Tichý, David Neděla, Sergio Ortobelli Lozza

We took a selfie of the speakers and the session chair.

Thanks to all who came to our session, including Christina Phillips! The link to our slide deck, from which our full presentation can be downloaded, is here: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/EURO-2025-NPK.pdf

Outstanding Making an Impact Lightning Talks: Honored to Speak on Tariffs, Trade, and OR

This post is the third in a series on the EURO Conference, which took place in Leeds, UK, June 22-25, 2025.

I was honored and delighted to have been invited by Ruth Kaufman to deliver a lighting talk in the Making an Impact session on Monday morning, June 23, of the conference at 8:30AM. All 13 speakers, from several different continents, showed up. The full list of speakers, their presentation titles, and abstracts can be found here: https://euro2025leeds.uk/making-an-impact/. The breadth of topics was fantastic and included algorithms for fighting crime, reducing food waste on airplane flights, and emergency ambulance service planning. 

My presentation was on Tariffs, Trade, and OR.

This session was a truly outstanding beginning to this scientific conference.

Below is photo of the speakers with Ruth Kaufman and Jane Parkin, followed by a photo of the audience.

I have been publishing on tariffs (of different types) for quite a few years now, so I very much enjoyed preparing and delivering my presentation, which is now posted on the Supernetwork Center website: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/EURO2025_MakinganImpact-Tariffs,%20Trade,%20and%20OR.pdf

Excellent Journal Editorial Board Meetings at the EURO Conference in Leeds

The outstanding EURO Conference in Leeds, UK, is now over and this is the second blogpost in a series about this conference. I have been coming to this OR conference since 2006, which was in Reykjavik, Iceland.

One facet of these conferences that I very much enjoy is the editorial board meetings. I have the honor of serving on both the editorial boards of the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) and the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR). ITOR is the flagship journal of IFORS (International Federation of Operational Research Societies) and EJOR is the flagship journal of EURO (European Association of Operational Research Societies), which, at this year's conference, we celebrated its 50th anniversary. EURO is part of IFORS.

Celso Ribeiro, the EIC of ITOR, travelled all the way from Brazil and our lunch time meeting on Monday, June 23, 2025, was wonderful. The journal is doing very well with thousands of submissions each year. A highlight for me is always seeing Celso and also fellow Associate Editors. 

I enjoyed meeting Sunil Tiwari, who is in the above photo with Kathy Stecke and me. Kathy was the first conferee that I encountered and that was at our hotel in the elevator in Leeds.

And, on Tuesday, June 24, 2025, Elsevier, the publisher of EJOR, treated us to a nice lunch and the EIC, Roman Slowinski, shared with us a lot of good news about EJOR. I had the pleasure of being seated next to Michael Yearworth, one of the main editors,  and Shaunna Whittle, publisher of EJOR.

Below is a collage of  photos taken at the editorial board meeting and after lunch.

Thanks so much to the Editors, and to all the Associate Editors, reviewers, and authors of articles published in these important journals that advance scientific knowledge in OR as well as its relevance to so many disciplines!