Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Supernetwork Associates Prominent at POMS Conference in Seattle

This year the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) conference took place May 5-8, 2017, in fabulous Seattle, Washington. The conference happened to overlap, in part, with the Illicit Supply Network Workshop, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, at the University of Texas Austin, and I was already committed to the workshop.

However, I still managed to have two papers of ours presented at POMS: one by my doctoral student, Deniz Besik, and the other by my former Isenberg School PhD student, Dr. Dong "Michelle" Li, now an award-winning Professor at Arkansas State University.
The full presentations of these two talks can be downloaded from the Supernetwork Center site.

Also, although I could not be there, one of my recent books, Competing on Supply Chain Quality,  co-authored with Michelle Li, and published by Springer, was on display at the conference.
Plus, so many of my former doctoral students, now all very successful professors, were also at POMS, including Professor June Dong of SUNY Oswego, standing below with Professor Min Yu of the University of Portland.

It is special how the members of the Supernetwork Center Team at the Isenberg School of Management continue to collaborate and support one another. 

Below in the first photo are  Supernetwork Center Associates Professors Min Yu and Michelle Li with former Supernetwork Center Associate (and also my former Isenberg School PhD student) Professor Fuminori Toyasaki of York University. Deniz, Michelle, and Fuminori, are joined by Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business and Professor Zugang "Leo" Liu of Penn State Hazleton in the second photo below. Tina and Leo also serve as Supernetwork Associates.

And at conferences we get together for a delicious meal whenever we can. Below in the photo are Professors Tina Wakolbinger, Fuminori Toyasaki, and Michelle Li.
Joining Deniz Besik, Professors Michelle Li and Min Yu in the photo above are Professor Heng Chen, an Isenberg School PhD alumnus, now a Professor at the University of Nebraska, and a friend of Deniz's from Northeastern University.

You can search the POMS conference program to find all the fascinating papers presented by the Supernetwork Center Associates on topics ranging from humanitarian logistics to supply chain competition to supplier risk management and robustness analysis, to name just a few!

I could not be at the POMS conference in Seattle but many close members of my academic family were.

And this summer, some of us will reconvene at various conferences, from the Dynamics of Disasters conference that I co-organized with Professors Ilias Kotsireas of Wilfrid Laurier University and Professor Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida, which will take place in Kalamata, Greece, to the IFORS conference in Quebec City. And even before these, I will see Professor Tina Wakolbinger at a conference that she is organizing in Vienna on humanitarian logistics!