I Enjoyed Speaking at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland

This past Friday, I had the pleasure of delivering a talk in the Department of Decision, Operations & Information Technologies (DO&IT) Research Seminar Series at the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland in College Park. I flew out after teaching on Thursday, October 31, 2024, which was Halloween, and returned late on Friday, November 1, 2024.

The title of my presentation was: "Agricultural Supply Chain Networks: Labor, Trade, Policies, and Resilience." The hospitality extended to me was wonderful. I very much enjoyed breakfast with PhD student Jiannan Xu and a delicious lunch with Chaired Professor Zhi-Long Chen, along with a great conversations. Meetings with Professors Raghu Raghavan, Xiaojia Guo, Alex Estes, and Ashish Kabra were delightful (and much too short). It was terrific to also hear some stories from Professor Bruce Golden as well as Professor Michael Fu, both of whom I had seen at the INFORMS Fellows Luncheon the previous week at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle! I enjoyed also chatting with Professor Wedad Elmaghraby. 

I had been to the University of Maryland several times since I had been on the Organizing Committee of the International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction a couple of years. However, this was my first trip to the Smith School of Business. There are a remarkable number of parallelisms between programs there and at the Isenberg School of Management, so the conversations were both informative and very interesting!