UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Tunes Up for National Conference in Houston

The 2017 Annual INFORMS conference is taking place in Houston, Texas, October 22-25, 2017, and today I had the pleasure of attending the tune-up for the conference that was organized by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter.  Although everyone is very busy it is very important to support the doctoral students, and the tune-up, which has become an annual tradition, allows the students to not only practice their conference talks and to receive feedback, but the audience members learn about some of the exciting research in operations research and management science that is being conducted on our campus.

We had blocked off a two hour time slot this Friday afternoon at the Isenberg School of Management for 5 presentations as in the nice poster that the students prepared below.

Both doctoral students from the Isenberg School and from the College of Engineering presented today and I thoroughly enjoyed the presentations on a diversity of important topics, ranging from supply chains (capacity competition and outsourcing), game theory and blood donations, energy and Mexico with a goal of achieving climate change goals, deep uncertainty and energy modeling, as well as network models for the spread of diseases.

I was impressed by the professionalism of the slides prepared as well as by the delivery of the presenters. These students are ready for their presentations in Houston. It was special to also see the enthusiasm that they have for their research.

The students even had brought refreshments including pizza!

Below are photos taken of the individual speakers, followed by a group photo that I took.

 

The doctoral student presenters today hail from Mexico, Turkey, India, Sierra Leone, and Mongolia!

They, along with other students from UMass as well as faculty, will be joining me on Monday evening at the Hilton in Houston to receive the Magna Cum Laude Award from INFORMS for the activities of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter this past year, an honor richly deserved.
This is the 12th award from INFORMS in the past 12 consecutive years.

And, during a short break this afternoon, I found out that a paper (one of seven) that  I am a co-author of that we are presenting at INFORMS Houston got accepted for publication in the journal Omega and we has just finished the slides this morning! Gratifying to have hard work rewarded.

Safe travels to all those heading to INFORMS Houston and see you soon!