Supernetwork Center Associates Shine at INFORMS Conference in Seattle

In my previous blogpost, I wrote about the fascinating experiences I had in delivering the opening keynote at the recent Operations Research Conference in Mexico City. However, since I am also teaching this semester, I could not attend the INFORMS Conference in Seattle, because it would not be right to miss classes over a two week period. Moreover, I believed it important to support the Mexican OR Society. This was one of only two Annual INFORMS conferences that I have not been at in over two decades. I appreciate all the messages that I have been receiving that I was missed - thank you very much!

However, our research was presented at INFORMS Seattle and also very special recognitions received by several Supernetwork Center Associates.

In particular, three of my joint papers were presented:

The above talks can be downloaded from the Supernetwork Center site at the Isenberg School of Management and are based on papers recently published in the journals: Transportation Research E, International Journal of Production Economics, and the European Journal of Operational Research. Many thanks to the organizers of the sessions that the above first and third presentations appeared in! Below are photos of the two presenters of those talks.

Usually, at every INFORMS Conference, I host a dinner for Supernetwork Center Associates, many of which are my present or former doctoral students, who are now very successful professionally. Although this year I could not, it was wonderful to receive the photo below.

In the above photo (l-r) are: the females in the front row: Professor Min Yu of the University of Portland, Professor Ke Ke of Central Washington University, Professor Pritha Dutta of Pace University, my PhD student Deniz Besik, and Professor Sara Saberi of WPI. And, in the back row (l-r) are the males: my PhD student Mojtaba Salarpour, Professor Jose Cruz of UConn, and Professor Patrick Qiang of Penn State. Professor Shivani Shukla of the University of San Francisco presented on our cybersecurity research but is not in the photo. Professor Dmytro Matsypura of the University of Sydney also did not make it to the photo (but more on his award follows).

I was delighted to hear that Dr. Matsypura (who was my PhD student at Isenberg) received the INFORMS ENRE (Energy, Natural Resources and the Environment) Best Publication Award in Environment and Sustainability at the conference for his paper on wildfire fuel management, co-authored with Professor Oleg Prokopyev of the University of Pittsburgh  and with Matsypura's student, Aizat Zahar, and published in EJOR, . The paper can be accessed here.  Below is the photo of the awardees, forwarded to me by Professor Matsypura.

Also, I was thrilled that my doctoral student, Deniz Besik, received the Bayer - Women in OR Scholarship and was recognized at the Analytics Society Business meeting at INFORMS Seattle. I had nominated Deniz for this award. Deniz, amazingly, already has 6 published journal articles and will be received her PhD in May 2020. She also took part in this year's Doctoral Student Colloquium immediately before the INFORMS Conference.

Thanks to Dr. Polly Mitchell-Guthrie for her tweet with the image below.

And, Professor Jose Cruz of UConn organized a session on Sustainable and Responsible Supply Chain Management in which multiple Supernetwork Associates spoke.

I was Chair of the 2019 INFORMS Volunteer Service Award Committee, having served on this committee also the two previous years (and was honored to also be a recipient of this award in 2016). Congratulations to Dr. Scott Nestler and Dr. Stefan Karisch for receiving this award this year. Dr. Sadan Kulturel-Konak, a member of this year's committee, presented this award in Seattle in my place.

It was also very gratifying that there were two additional recipients of major awards at INFORMS in Seattle, both of whom I had written letters for.

Plus, even before I flew to Mexico, as the Faculty Advisor to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, I supported the students who practiced their talks in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Tune-Up!

Many thanks to all the companies, universities, publishers, and societies for personal invitations to attend even brunches and meetings at INFORMS Seattle! These were all very much appreciated.

And, in closing, congratulations to all the award recipients and thanks to all the volunteers that help to make INFORMS such a fabulous professional society!

You can find many photos, courtesy of INFORMS, posted on its Flickr page.