We Must Not Forget Ukraine's Plight

UPDATE: Since this blogpost was published, I am delighted that our Letter to the Editor was posted online on masslive.com on February 18, 2026. It can be read (one needs to scroll down) on the following link https://www.masslive.com/opinion/2026/02/lets-see-action-on-audit-of-state-legislature-letters-to-the-republican.html

As we approach the 4th anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, it is important to appropriately acknowledge it.

Last week, Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney and I had a Letter to the Editor published in the biggest western Massachusetts newspaper: The Springfield Republican. The letter, "We must not forget Ukraine's plight," appeared in the hard copy of this newspaper on February 12, 2026. It has not yet appeared online on masslive.com.

Below I am posting it (apologies for the small print).

We worked diligently on this letter and are grateful that the publisher of The Springfield Republican, Larry Parnass, accepted it.

It has been shared with relatives and also with Razom for Ukraine and the UNWLA (Soyuz Ukrainok), organizations who have been outstanding advocates for support of Ukraine.

And, in my previous post, I provided information on a panel of faculty and exchange students from Ukraine that I organized and that I will moderate, with support from the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2026/02/panel-at-isenberg-school-to-mark-4th.html

Slava Ukraini!

Panel at the Isenberg School to Mark the 4th Anniversary of Russia's Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine

On February 27, 2026, a special panel of faculty from Amherst College and UMass Amherst and exchange students from the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) , who recently arrived at UMass Amherst, will take place at the Isenberg School of Management.

The panel was organized to mark the 4th anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Below is the poster designed by this year's President of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, Samira Samadi, who is also my PhD student.

The panelists will consist of faculty: Professors Nataliia Bychkova and Myroslav Kryven of Amherst College and my colleague at the Isenberg School - Professor Bogdan Prokopovych as well as the KSE exchange students: Alisa Mikjieieva, Olesia Rozhanska, and Yuliia Zaitseva.

UMass Amherst signed a series of MOUs with KSE, shortly after the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, and, to-date, we have had two cohorts of Virtual Scholars in Ukraine working with faculty at UMass Amherst. The 2023-2024 cohort had 25 Virtual Scholars at various universities in Ukraine and the 2024-2025 consisted of 10 Virtual Scholars, all of whom were "matched" with faculty at the Isenberg School of Management.

And, since 2023, UMass Amherst has welcomed multiple exchange students from KSE. The students on the panel are now taking classes at UMass Amherst. One is majoring in psychology and two in business economics.

The panel, I am sure, will be very timely and informative.

Thrilled that Our Paper on Tariffs and Effects on Labor in Supply Chains is Published Free Access in JORS!

My Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Samira Samadi, and I are thrilled that our paper on ad valorem tariffs and their effects on labor in competitive supply chains is now published in the Journal of Operational Research (JORS). JORS is the flagship journal of the Operational Research Society, which is based in the United Kingdom.

The paper is titled, "Ad Valorem Tariffs in Global Supply Chain Networks and Impacts on Labor." The model is a game theory one of firms competing in an oligopolistic manner, each one seeking to maximize its profits, in the presence of tariffs. The firms seek to determine the optimal production of commodities and their distribution as well as the labor needed, with wages and productivity of labor included.

Illustrative examples are provided along with a global soybean trade case study. Numerical results reveal how such tariffs shift trade flows, reshape labor allocation, and affect demand prices as well as profits, with labor shortages and cost disruptions further negatively compounding the effects.

The Editor in Chief, (EIC) of JORS, Kostas Nikolopoulos of Durham University, has kindly made the paper free access and the link to it is below: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2025.2592758

With tariffs having wide impacts, both locally and globally, this is one of the very first papers to quantify the effects on labor, trade flows, and profits. We thank the EIC for the expert handling of our paper as well as the anonymous reviewers who provided valuable feedback on the original paper.

Excited to Be Teaching My Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare Class

The morning temperatures in Amherst, MA have been below 0 degrees the past few days and it has been a challenging winter with a lot of snow.

However, yesterday the new "spring" semester at UMass Amherst began and it was energizing to meet the students in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class. The course meets Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 8:30AM at the Isenberg School of Management.

The students come not only from the business school but also from the School of Public Health, the Riccio College of Engineering, and even the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences.

I arrived in the classroom at 8:00AM because I wanted to make sure the technology was working well.

The first student arrived shortly thereafter and he drove from Boston (about 2 hours). He is working towards 2 Master's degrees at the Isenberg School - an MBA and a Master's in Business Analytics. Another student is also working on these two degrees and has 3 children under the age of 4. I was so impressed and inspired by the students - I asked them to share some background about themselves and their interest in the course, and also to provide a "fun fact."

One student is a lawyer and several of the students have traveled widely even during the January break (to Croatia and Japan). One of the students is on an athletic team and will be traveling a lot to games.

I told the students that I have some excellent guest speakers lined up and am also planning on a field trip. They were very excited about having a field trip.

The students give us hope (much needed these days).

I am very much looking forward to an engaging and exciting semester.

Thrilled to Receive the Galleys for Our Tariffs, Rerouting, and Supply Chain Paper for the Rockafellar Volume

It has been a very busy "winter break" with the revising of a 50 page paper with collaborators, the reviewing of multiple journal articles, and also the handling of papers submitted to journals as an Associate Editor. And, of course, the holiday season, with the accompanying festivities also needed attention! Plus, I have also been busy updating my lectures for two classes that I will be teaching this spring at the Isenberg School of Management.

I was delighted to receive from the publisher Springer galleys for the paper, "Multicommodity Trade, Tariffs, and Rerouting," which is in press as a chapter for a very special edited volume in honor of Tyrrell "Terry" Rockafellar on the occasion of his 90th birthday! The volume is titled, "Convex and Variational Analysis with Applications." The volume is edited by Professors Rassias and Pardalos and was originally scheduled for publication in mid December 2025 but now the publication date on the Springer page is March 16, 2026: https://link.springer.com/book/9783032078599.

The paper, which I co-authored with my Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Samirasadat "Samira" Samadi, will be chapter 16 in this special volume.

The galleys (I was delighted) were in great shape and no changes were needed!

Thanks to the typesetters for their outstanding work. We are very much looking forward to the publication of this volume, which I am hearing will have 27 chapters.

Honored to be a Highly Ranked Scholar, Thanks ScholarGPS

I was delighted to be notified during the holiday season  in an emailed message from ScholarGPS that: Your prolific publication record, the high impact of your work, and the outstanding quality of your scholarly contributions have placed you in the top 0.05% of all scholars worldwide according to the most recent 2025 ScholarGPS.

The notification provided additional information that can also be found on the ScholarGPS website: https://scholargps.com/

ScholarGPS provided me with both my Lifetime ranking - #7 in Supply Chains, #14 in Network Model, and #83 in Business and Management (and also Highly Ranked Scholar in All Fields of Scholarly Endeavor).  I was thrilled to hear that I am  #4 in Game Theory over the past 5 years, a methodological framework that I utilize in much of my supply chain modeling work.

I enjoy doing research tremendously (and publishing both journal articles as well as books plus also OpEds, etc.) and aim to make my research, with great students and collaborators,  relevant to pressing global issues.

Nice to have the following certificates from ScholarGPS:

Our Paper on Integrated Crop and Cargo War Risk Insurance with Application to Ukraine is Published!

The front page of today's Sunday New York Times has an article on Odesa, Ukraine, which is painful to read. This very important port city for Ukraine for trade has been subject to relentless bombing for the past few weeks with even a silo of sunflower oil attacked and the oil spilling into the Black Sea. Residents of Odesa have had to suffer from the bombing, and shortages of water and electric power.

We are all connected. A wonderful colleague at the Odesa Law Academy, Borys Kormych, has been a Virtual Scholar through our global partnership between UMass Amherst and the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) in two cohorts. In the most recent one, my Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Ismael Pour, and I have had the honor and pleasure of collaborating with him. We always worry how our colleagues, collaborators, and friends are doing in the illegal, horrific war perpetrated on Ukraine and Ukrainians.

An outcome of our collaboration  is the paper, "Integrated crop and cargo war risk insurance: application to Ukraine," that was published in the January 2026 issue of the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/itor.70038?af=R A reprint of the paper can be downloaded here: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/articles/IntegratedWarInsurance.pdf

Today the President of Ukraine Zelenskyy will be meeting with President Trump in Mar-a-Lago.  

Peace with security must return to Ukraine. 

After almost 4 years of the full-scale invasion by Russia, with billions of dollars of destruction and so much suffering and loss of lives, the war needs to end with the aggressor also paying for all the consequences.