Monday, May 8, 2023

Do You Remember Your First Journal Article Acceptance? Celebrating Several "Firsts!"

Last Wednesday, we had the great honor of hosting the Rector of the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) Dr. Tymofii Brik at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The day began with a 2 hour symposium, under the auspices of the International Programs Office, which is directed by the Vice Provost for Global Affairs Dr. Trivedi Kalpen. The visit of Rector Brik and the day's events were to mark the outstanding 1 year partnership between UMass Amherst and KSE. Below is a photo taken after the symposium with 13 scholars from Ukraine zooming in and with (l-r) Professors Uzzo Muysal, Lauren McCarthy, Rector Brik, yours truly, Ina Ganguli, Alicia Johnson, Vice Provost Trivedi, and Professor Bogdan Prokopovych in front with the Ukrainian flag. The symposium consisted of introductory remarks by university leaders, as well as by Rector Brik, and had a total of 4 panels. Faculty hosts of scholars through our partnership participated and we took a joint photo featured below.

And, shortly before the very busy, inspiring day began, we received a message from Springer Nature with great news that the paper, "Exchange Rates and Multicommodity International Trade: Insights from Spatial Price Equilibrium Modeling with Policy Instruments via Variational Inequalities," co-authored by Dr. Oleg Nivievskyi and Dr. Pavlo Martyshev of KSE and by my Isenberg School of Management PhD student Dana Hassani and me, had been accepted for publication in the Journal of Global Optimization!

This is the first paper acceptance for my PhD student Dana Hassani and the first paper that we have co-authored with scholars in Ukraine that we have been working with through our partnership!

Both Dr. Nivievskyi and Dr. Martyshev spoke at our symposium on the first panel, "Agricultural Supply Chains in Ukraine in Wartime," which I moderated.



 
We acknowledge the anonymous reviewers of our paper and the Editor for the constructive comments and suggestions on the Acknowledgment section of our paper. We also acknowledge the support provided by the UMass Amherst - KSE partnership, which has been a bright beacon of light in wartime and has helped to reduce brain drain from Ukraine.