Opportunities for Doctoral Students to Speak at Regional Conferences

There are so many advantages to going to professional conferences from the networking and exchange of ideas and research results to seeing new places and even practicing your public speaking skills.

It is especially important for doctoral students to have opportunities to present at conferences.

Our major professional conferences usually take place only once a year from the INFORMS conference to the POMS conference. However, if you keep your eyes open you might find that there are conference opportunities in your region. Sometimes you may even still be able to sleep in your bed.

For example, 6 years ago we co-organized the First (and so far the only) Northeast Regional INFORMS conference at UMass Amherst. 

We had a blast. With a team that included Professor Hari Balasubramanian of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department at UMass Amherst and Dr. Les Servi of MITRE, plus a lot of help from the wonderful UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, the conference was a big success. It took place in May with flowers blooming. Plenary addresses were delivered by Dr. Brenda Dietrich of IBM, Professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland of the MIT's Media Lab, and Professor David Simchi-Levi of MIT. Dietrich spoke on a Smarter Planet; Pentland on Building A Nervous System for Humanity: Making Health, Financial, Logistics, and Transportation Networks Work; and Simchi-Levi on Flexibility - From Theory to Practice. Tutorials were given on Transforming U.S. Army Supply Chains and Modern Design of Experiments - Recent Advances in Screening Methods. In addition, panels were organized on: The Academic Job Search Process, Research in Academia and Industry, and How to Run a Successful INFORMS Student Chapter.

The Isenberg School of Management Dean Dr. Mark A. Fuller provided welcoming remarks.  Mary Magrogan of INFORMS and Tracy Byrnes (now Cahall) of  INFORMS came out to support us and were a great help.

I posted some photos from this conference on this blog. 

When I saw that the Decision Sciences Institute (DSI) would be holding its Northeast Conference (NEDSI) this month in Springfield, Massachusetts, I thought that this would be a nice opportunity for doctoral students in Management Science at the Isenberg School to present their work. Some of my former doctoral students have presented at DSI but I have never been to this conference.

Springfield is only about 30 minutes from Amherst, Massachusetts and is the site of the Basketball Hall of Fame, some wonderful museums, and the Dr Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden.

The chair of the NEDSI conference is Dr. Minoo Tehrani of Roger Williams University, where one of our former doctoral students, Dr. Farbod Farhadi, is on the faculty of its business school. The university is located in beautiful Rhode Island on the ocean.

The NEDSI conference brochure was posted online today with the program.

My group will be presenting 3 papers there:

1. A Game Theory Model for Freight Service Provision Security Investments for High Value Cargo, which I co-authored with my doctoral student, Shivani Shukla, my former doctoral student, Dr. Sara Saberi, now a professor at the Foisie School of Business at WPI, and Professor Ladime S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford. Shivani will be presenting this paper.

2.  Supply Chain Network Capacity Competition with Outsourcing: A Variational Equilibrium Framework, co-authored with my doctoral student, Deniz Besik, and former doctoral student, Dr. Min Yu, now Professor at the Pamplin School of Business at the University of Portland. This paper is now in press in the Journal of Global Optimization. Deniz will present the paper.

3. Competition for Blood Donations: A Nash Equilibrium Network Framework, co-authored with doctoral student Pritha Dutta, whose dissertation I am co-chairing. Pritha will present our paper.

There will be a banquet on Saturday, as part of the conference, which will be a nice reward for the doctoral students' hard work!