In the month of August I was busy finishing up a paper on disaster relief, doing galleys, serving as the Chair of the INFORMS Computing Society (ICS) Student Paper Award Committee (with 36 paper submissions), serving on the INFORMS Service Award Committee (thanks to our fabulous volunteers), and getting ready for the new academic year. A big shoutout and thanks to my ICS committee members: Professor Sergiy Butenko of Texas A&M and Professor Frank E. Curtis of Lehigh University for their great work!
Plus, I have been preparing two plenary talks that I will be giving in a few days in England. The very special events that I will be speaking at are the Early Career Researcher (ECR) Workshop and OR60 - the diamond anniversary conference of The Operational Research (OR) Society! Both are conveniently timed back to back and located at Lancaster University. I gave a Master Class there on Network Equilibrium last March to the STORi PhD students and enjoyed the experience tremendously. The Operations Research faculty at Lancaster are extraordinary and Lancaster University was the first university in England to have a Chair in OR, right at its founding in 1964!
I have completed my talks and, in preparing them, I did a lot of research into the history of Operations Research (Operational Research in England). Both Professor Rand as well as Dr. Will Thomas (who also serves with me on the INFORMS History and Traditions Committee) were very helpful in answering a few questions that I had. My talks will be informative and I hope very inspirational. In my OR60 plenary I will also envision what the OR100 conference in 40 years will be like - looking into the future of our discipline and its impact. I can hardly wait!
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