Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Supernetwork Center Associates Will Present a Lot of Papers at INFORMS Minneapolis

As I have mentioned in an earlier post, the Annual INFORMS Conference serves not only as an outstanding professional and social networking venue at which we also acquire a lot of information on the latest research by presenters from around the globe on operations research, management science, and analytics, but also it is a great place for a reunion!

It is the venue where many of the Supernetwork Center Associates of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management gather!  I founded this Center at the Isenberg School of Management  in 2001 and have been its Director ever since.

Hence, we have been very busy not only with the beginning of the academic year, but also with the preparation of the talks that we will be giving at INFORMS Minneapolis, beginning this Sunday.

This will be an especially thrilling INFORMS meeting for us, since the UMass Amherst Student Chapter will be receiving a Magna Cum Laude Award (its seventh in a series of awards from INFORMS for its activities), Supernetwork Center Associate Dr. Amir H. Masoumi, who is now at Manhattan College, will be receiving the Judith B. Liebman Award (the third Supernetwork Center Associate to be recognized this way), and, yes, you may have heard, I will be inducted as an INFORMS Fellow (this recognition means the world to me -- thank you ever so much).

As the Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, I must say that I could not be prouder of the great work that our Center Associates have been doing. 

Just to give you a sample of our presentation at INFORMS Minneapolis:

Center Associate Professor Jose Cruz of the School of Business at UCONN has organized a great session: Sustainable and Responsible Supply Chain Management, at which 3 papers by members of our group will be presented, including a paper by Professor Trisha Anderson of Texas Wesleyan University and a paper by Professor Tina Wakolbinger of Vienna and Professor Fuminori Toyasaki of York University in Toronto with Thomas Nowak (Tina's doctoral student).

Center Associate Professor Patrick Qiang of Penn State Malvern will be presenting his latest work in a best paper Service Science session -- good luck!

Our Supernetwork Center colleague, Professor Dmytro Matsypura from the University of Sydney in Australia, who is now on sabbatical at the University of Pittsburgh, will be speaking on his work with Professors Kalinowski and Savelsbergh (who was also elected an INFORMS Fellow in 2013).

Amir H. Masoumi (mentioned above) will be presenting our latest work on humanitarian logistics and disaster relief done also with Center Associate Professor Min Yu of the University of Portland. Min will be speaking on our competitive food supply chain research, which was recently published in the European Journal of Operational Research.

My doctoral student, Dong "Michelle" Li, will speak on our work on pharmaceutical supply chains and outsourcing, which is in press in the International Transactions in Operational Research.

And I will be speaking on the network economics of cyber crime, which is the result of a grant and multidisciplinary collaboration with colleagues at UMass Amherst and the Isenberg School.

The above is not even an exhaustive list of the presentations that Supernetwork Center Associates will be giving but it gives an idea of  the breadth and depth of our research activities.

For the latest information on our Center activities, please visit our website.

Looking forward to a super INFORMS conference!