A Fabulous UMass Amherst INFORMS Party with Even Exchange Students from the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) in Ukraine

Yesterday, we had our UMass Amherst INFORMS party and, despite the very cold weather and that it is now the final exam period, it was fabulous!

As is our tradition, we brought hot Ukrainian food, including two types of varenyky (pierogies) and kovbasa (kielbasy),  plus many desserts. Thanks to the faculty that made it: Professor Senay Solak, the Chair of my department,  Professor Iqbal Ali, the former Cbair of my department, and Professor Hari Balasubramanian of the Riccio College of Engineering. Thanks to all the Chapter Officers who could attend: Josh Gladstone, Dana Hassani, Semih Boz, and Sindhoora Prakash. A special shoutout to the Chapter President Samira Samadi for her excellent work on the logistics for this lovely event marking the 2025 end of the semester and for bringing delicious Middle Eastern pastries. Catering was provided by award-winning UMass Dining.

Below is a collage of photos.

It was extra special to have 4 exchange students: Vaktoriia Baliuk, Oleksandra Horusieva, Karyna Lutsenko, and  Nataliia Pavelko from the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), who have been studying at UMass Amherst, join us, as well as, Professor Nataliia Bychkova from Amherst College, who brought confections from Ukraine to share. The students, after completing their final exams, will be returning to Ukraine. We hope to welcome a new cohort for Spring 2026. This exchange program was made possible through a global partnership established between UMass Amherst and KSE shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia on February 24, 2022.

I am so grateful for this wonderful community and am honored to have served as the Faculty Advisor to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter since its inception in 2004.

Wishing everyone warmth, peace, pleasant adventures, and a lovely Holiday Season. Thank you for the support.

The Fall 2025 Supernetwork Center Newsletter is Now Online!

In the Fall 2026, we will be marking the 25th Anniversary of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, an incredible milestone, which we hope to celebrate in an appropriate fashion. Since Fall 2001, a historic time, I might add, I have had the honor and pleasure of serving as the Director of  the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, which I founded.

In order to keep our supporters and the public informed as to the Center's activities, we publish a newsletter, now in Fall and Spring editions.

I am delighted that the Fall 2025 edition of The Supernetwork Sentinel, the newsletter of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management, has now been published.

The Fall 2025 newsletter, along with all previous ones, going back to Fall 2003, can be accessed on the following link: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/newsletters/sentinel.html

It has been a terrific couple of months, with outstanding conferences, significant recognition, as well as journal article acceptances and publications.

Wishing everyone a peaceful Holiday Season and a Great New 2026 Year!

Honored to Be Named a Fellow of The OR Society

The official good news arrived a few weeks ago and, this past week, I received the certificate.

I am humbled and thrilled to have been named a Fellow of the Operational Research (OR) Society,  which is based in the United Kingdom.

It has been quite an amazing year, thanks to both The OR Society and to another professional society that I am a member (long-time one) of - that of INFORMS.

On December 5, 2024, I delivered the Blackett Lecture at The Royal Society in London, thanks to The OR Society, and blogged about the magical experience here: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2024/12/an-incredible-blackett-lecture.html

Below is a collage of photos to capture this truly memorable experience:

An article that I wrote about my  Blackett Lecture was published (and is feely accessible this year) in The OR Society flagship journal The Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2025.2494706

And, just this past week, on the day before Thanksgiving, an article that I wrote with my Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Samirasadat Samadi, on tariffs, supply chain networks, and labor was published in JORS: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2025.2592758

I am so grateful to outstanding professional societies for providing us with communities and support.

Thank you to The Or Society Fellows Committee, its Board, and to those who wrote letters of support for me!

Many thanks also to INFORMS for recognizing my work (and thanks to my students and collaborators) with the 2025 President's Award: https://www.informs.org/News-Room/INFORMS-Releases/Awards-Releases/Anna-Nagurney-Honored-with-2025-INFORMS-President-s-Award

Our work continues.

Our Paper on Tariffs and Labor in Global Supply Chain Networks is Accepted!

We are delighted to report that there is an update on the paper in this post. Today, on the day before Thanksgiving, it was published on the journal website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2025.2592758?src=

There are two streams of research that I have been heavily engaged in and they are the impacts of tariffs on both producers and consumers plus the integration of labor into supply chain networks and I have even published a book on the subject: Labor and Supply Chain Networks: 

https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/bookser/Labor-book.html

I have been working with my PhD student, Samira Samadi, on investigating impacts of tariffs on labor, including employment, and integrating the two streams of research.

I am delighted that, this past week, we heard from the Editor in Chief (EIC) of the Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS), Professor Kostas Nikolopoulos of the Durham University Business School in the United Kingdom, that our paper, "Ad Valorem Tariffs in Global Supply Chain Networks and Impacts on Labor," has been accepted in this outstanding journal.

The journal now requires both an abstract and a practitioner abstract and both are below.

We very much enjoyed researching and writing this paper, which also includes a case study on soybeans, and investigates quantitatively the impacts of tariffs on major countries affected, including China and the US. The mathematical model is that of a competitive global supply chain network under oligopolistic competition and the tariffs are ad valorem ones, which are now widely applied to many products, including commodities. 

A preprint of the paper can be found on the Supernetwork Center website: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/articles/TariffsandLaborinGlobalSupplyChainNetworks.pdf

We are grateful to the EIC, the Associate Editors, and to the two anonymous reviewers for the professional handling of our paper and their constructive comments and suggestions.

Wonderful Celebration of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter's Cum Laude Award and My INFORMS President's Award

Last Friday, we had a delightful celebration at the Isenberg School of Management of two awards received recently at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta.

Since I have been a Visiting Professor in Sweden, not only at KTH in Stockholm, but also over a multiyear period at the University of Gothenburg's School of Business, Economics and Law, I learned there the importance of celebrations! For example, at the latter, we would regularly meet, as a group, to enjoy a "fika" with delicious pastries, cakes, and coffee (and great conversations) to celebrate journal publications and other achievements.

Hence, the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter sent out invitations - and produced the nice poster below for the event last Friday.

This year's President, Samira Samadi (who is also my PhD student), ordered a fruit platter and various pastries plus coffee and the students surprised me with a Congratulations chocolate cake.

Earlier, I had blogged about my receipt of the INFORMS President's Award, an honor I am so deeply grateful for: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2025/10/deeply-honored-to-receive-informs.html and Samira wrote this lovely post on the Chapter Award received and my President's Award on the Chapter website: https://websites.umass.edu/umassinf/2025/11/02/two-awards-one-incredible-2025-informs-annual-meeting-experience/

It was wonderful to celebrate the Chapter's receipt of the Cum Laude Award from INFORMS plus my President's Award and below are a few photos from the event. Many thanks to all who support us. 

Josh Gladstone is our chapter expert at cutting up cakes! Last year's Chapter President, Ismael Pour, is overseeing his progress in the photo above with Yongdong Chen providing support. 

The Memorial Tribute to the Great Hani Mahmassani at INFORMS

All those who had the pleasure of knowing Hani Mahmassani, who passed away on July 15, 2025 at the age of 69, will never forget him. He has left us with an incredible void, but lucky are we who were his friends, and/or his students,  and/or colleagues, or collaborators.

Many thanks to Yue Wang of the University of Arizona, who prepared this poster notice for the  Transportation Science and Logistics (TSL) Society memorial tribute event in honor of Hani Mahmassani that took place last week at the INFORMS Conference in Atlanta.

The session began with a Zoom presentation by Roberto Roberti of Italy, this year's recipient of the Stella Dafermos Mid-Career Award, and then it was time for our panel, which was chaired by Karen Smilowitz of Northwestern University, a colleague of Hani's.

At the beginning, we gathered for a photo with Pat Mokhtarian, of Georgia Tech, who joined us. Pat was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, as Hani had been earlier.

Srinivas Peeta of Georgia Tech had prepared the nice collage poster of photos that some of us had also contributed to.

The talks were incredibly touching with Srinivas Peeta speaking about Hani, as his PhD advisor, and colleague, with numerous photos over the years of many luminaries in transportation science. He emphasized what a great researcher Hani was and also an outstanding organizer, integrator, and mentor. 

In my presentation, which is available here:  https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/Hani-Tribute-INFORMS-Nagurney.pdf, I included photos taken over many years of activities, including service ones, I had engaged in with Hani. So many memories came flooding back and I can hear his voice. Hani always inspired us to reach higher and to do more. He stretched us professionally and personally with his many kindnesses and support.

Marco Nie, a colleague of Hani's at Northwestern, had used ChatGPT for his presentation slides, and it was fascinating to see what was picked up by AI in terms of the contributions of Hani's research to transportation science, such as his work on bounded rationality and traffic assignment, and dynamic traffic network equilibrium.

Mike Hyland of UC Irvine, and a former PhD student of Hani's, spoke from the heart about how it was to work with Hani, who only slept a few hours a night. Hani was always willing to listen and to push the frontiers of transportation research and practice. He supervised over 75 PhD theses. 

We then took the group photo below. Thanks to all who were able to join us for this touching memorial session in honor of Hani Mahmassani. 

Thank you, Hani, for your friendship, scholarship, leadership, and for being a visionary.

For the In Memoriam, co-authored by Karen Smilowitz and Marco Nie, and published in the journal Transportation Science, see here: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/trsc.2025.memorial.v59.n6

The In Memoriam ends as follows: "In 1997, Hani wrote a tribute to Robert Herman in Transportation Science. He closed his tribute with the following words that ring so true to us as we remember Hani: “I will miss him, and so will many others, but will always know that I am a richer person for having known him.”"

Slide Decks of Our Talks at INFORMS in Atlanta Are Now Posted on Topics from War Risk Insurance to Tariffs and Rerouting to Remembering the Great Hani Mahmassani

My immediate research group had five presentations at the recent INFORMS Conference, which took place in Atlanta, October 26-29, 2025.

I am delighted that the slide decks of all the above presentations have now been posted on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals.html.

Below is a photo of the speakers and the organizers (thanks to Himadri Sen Gupta and Andrés González for the invitation) of the Resilient Networks session in which Ismael Pour, my PhD student, presented our paper on integrated crop and cargo war risk insurance with applications to Ukraine. This paper we co-authored with Borys Kormych of the Odesa Law Academy and it was published in the International Transactions in Operational Research and is available free access: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/itor.70038?af=R

My PhD student, Samira Samadi, presented two papers (since I had to speak on a panel memorializing Hani Mahmassani, who passed away on July 15, 2025).

Samira's first paper presentation, which was on fresh produce quality deterioration under transportation congestion and disruptions, was on work we did with Deniz Besik of the University of Richmond. Her second paper, which we co-authored, was on tariffs and rerouting, and is in press in a volume in honor of Terry Rockafellar's 90th birthday: https://link.springer.com/book/9783032078599.

Dana Hassani delivered a paper of ours in the 8AM session on the last day of the conference. The paper, with Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev of the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), was published in an edited Dynamics of Disasters volume by Springer last December: https://www.springerprofessional.de/en/quantification-of-international-trade-network-performance-under-/50390576

I will blog about the panel in honor of Hani Mahmassani in a separate post but below I share a photo of the entire group that took part. Thanks to Karen Smilowitz and to the Transportation Science and Logistics (TSL) Society of INFORMS for allowing us to memorialize Hani in a session originally scheduled for the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, who could not make it (Cynthia Barnhart of MIT was recognized this year). Hani was an earlier recipient of this award.

 

Terrific INFORMS Magazine Editorial Advisory Board (MEAB) Meeting in Atlanta

Many thanks to INFORMS for the extraordinary conference in Atlanta, October 26-29, 2025! The conferees returned inspired and with renewed energy. It was a conference that set new high standards and was so enjoyable with about 7,000 conferees from around the globe.

In addition to the talks, business meetings, social networking events, and award ceremonies, this Annual Meeting serves as the venue for various face to face board meetings.

I have been chairing the INFORMS Magazine Editorial Advisory Board (MEAB) for several years now and very much enjoy working with fellow Board Members and INFORMS staff. The MEAB oversees such excellent publications as ORMS Today, Analytics Magazine, and also ORMS Tomorrow.

I'd like to thank INFORMS Editor Kara Tucker and Mary Leszczynski, Director of Marketing at INFORMS, and Board Members: James Cochran of the University of Alabama, Trilce Encarnacion of the University of Missouri–St. Louis, Lavanya Marla of the University of Illinois, Patricia Neri of Underwriters Laboratories, Thiago Serra of the University of Iowa, Anand Subramanian of the Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Jun Zhuang of the University of Buffalo, and our newest member Carlos A. Zetina of FICO Express for a very productive, engaging meeting this past Monday morning at 8AM. Jun Zhuang took the below expert selfie of us. It is such a pleasure to serve as the Chair of MEAB. Many thanks also to Tinglong Dai of Johns Hopkins University, who was triple booked and could not join us but followed up with a warm message.

Carlos even brought delicious chocolates from Montreal for us! 

More info on MEAB and its members: https://pubsonline.informs.org/magazine/orms-today/resources. I thank both Gokce Esenduran of Purdue University and Emily McIntosh of  Ernst & Young for their service. Their terms have now expired. 

Link to issues of ORMS Today: https://pubsonline.informs.org/magazine/orms-today

Many thanks to all the contributors to these very engaging, informative professional publications!

Congratulations to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter!

The INFORMS Conference in Atlanta, which took place October 26-29, 2025, was fantastic! There were about 7,000 conferees, who enjoyed the scientific presentations plus keynotes and plenaries, many social networking events, tutorials, business meetings, and also award ceremonies. It was wonderful to have participants who are students, academics, and practitioners from around the globe!

On Monday evening of the conference, the INFORMS Chapter Awards event took place. As the Faculty Advisor to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter since 2004 (when the Chapter was founded), I was delighted to see the Chapter recognized with the Cum Laude Award for its activities.

The evening began with welcoming remarks from Elena Gerstmann, the Executive Director of INFORMS, and Mark E. Lewis, the President-Elect of INFORMS.

Then we had the pleasure of hearing from Vinod Cheriyan, the Chapter Representative to the Subdivisions Council of  INFORMS, and listening to the dynamic keynote by Sina Ansari.

The students were thrilled to receive the award plaque and we took a group photo.

This Student Chapter is an outstanding collaboration between PhD students in Operations Management at the Isenberg School of Management and Industrial Engineering PhD students at UMass Amherst. All who are interested in Operations Research and Analytics are welcome to join. Last year's Chapter President was Ismael Pour and this year's Chapter President is Samira Samadi.

For more information about the Chapters, its Officers, and activities, please visit the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter website: https://websites.umass.edu/umassinf/

It was wonderful to have even a former member, now a Professor, Dr. Heng Chen of Kansas State University, join us.

Congratulations to the students! We plan on holding a celebration on campus soon.

Deeply Honored to Receive the INFORMS President's Award

On the evening of October 26, 2025, the lovely INFORMS Awards Ceremony took place at its Annual Meeting in Atlanta.

I was deeply honored and humbled to be recognized with the INFORMS President's Award: 

I received the good news via a phone call from the 2025 INFORMS President David Hunt, and did not share the news publicly until INFORMS issued the press release below in October.

https://www.informs.org/News-Room/INFORMS-Releases/Awards-Releases/Anna-Nagurney-Honored-with-2025-INFORMS-President-s-Award

The award ceremony was elegant and what made it extra special for me was to have, in the audience,  my PhD students (present and former ones), colleagues, friends, INFORMS staff, and also my husband. I am grateful to David Hunt and to Past Presidents Laura Albert and Julie Swan (both of whom served on the committee) for this very meaningful honor. I appreciate the leadership of the INFORMS Executive Director Elena Gerstmann. Pelin Pekgun was wonderful in making many warm announcements.

Below, I share a photo of the award plaque, which my husband kindly carried back to Amherst yesterday, and other photos. Many thanks to former President's Award recipient, Pinar Keskinocak, for sending me the photo of the two of us!

And INFORMS, so efficiently, put up the video recording of my award acceptance speech on its YouTube channel, which is very thoughtful and kind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=-2GAGCgnaGE I had had a rehearsal for my speech earlier that Sunday, which speaks to the professionalism of INFORMS!

Thank you, David Hunt, and thank you, INFORMS, for the support, the leadership, and also for the incredible community that is INFORMS! Let's continue to devote our efforts so that everyone can realize their full potential.

Our Paper is Published in the Latest Issue of the Ukrainian Analytical Digest Focused On: Recovery, Resilience, and Resources

This past week our paper, "Rebuilding the Crossroads of Ukraine: Bridging the Gap Between Damage, Recovery and European Aspirations," co-authored by Oleh Nivievskyi and Dmytro Goriunov of the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) and me, was published in the latest edition of the Ukrainian Analytical Digest. The issue is focused on: Recovery, Resilience, and Resources.

It is especially thrilling that our paper is the lead article in the issue. The issue is an excellent one and we acknowledge the assistance and guidance of its Editor, Eduard Klein, throughout the reviewing process.

The full issue is available for free and can be accessed here: https://css.ethz.ch/publikationen/uad/details.html?id=/n/o/1/4/no_14_recovery_resilience_and_resourcesn

And, just over a month ago, we had the pleasure of hosting Oleh Nivievskyi in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series and he spoke on our paper!

Working with Ukrainian colleagues has been a bright light in Russia's horrific, illegal war on Ukraine, which continues. To-date, we have had the honor of collaborating (and publishing) with colleagues at KSE, at the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv, and at the Odesa Law Academy. Their courage and dedication to their research as well as hard work in sustaining higher education during wartime is incredibly inspiring. Such collaborations are an outgrowth of the outstanding global partnership between UMass Amherst and KSE established through a series of MOUs shortly after the full-scale invasion of February 24, 2022.  We acknowledge the great work of the UMass Amherst Office of Global Partnerships and the Senior Vice Provost for Global Affairs Kalpen Trivedi.

Proud to Have Had Our Work Presented at the Disaster Risk Reduction Conference in Kyoto, Japan

Last week, my collaborator, Professor Myroslava Kushnir of the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv, presented our paper, "Social Network Analysis of Civilian Support Networks for the Ukrainian Military," at the The 10th IFIP WG5.15 Conference on Information Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction (itdrr) in Kyoto, Japan: https://lnkd.in/eAu3_qyN. 

The paper will be published in the conference proceedings. Myroslava was a Virtual Scholar in the outstanding global partnership between the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE),  thanks to the UMass Amherst Office of Global Affairs and the Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst.  I have been working with Myroslava for over two years now and it has been a pleasure to collaborate with her.

Myroslava, in the above photo, is standing with Professor Renata Konrad of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), who presented a poster at this conference. Our collaboration with Professor Konrad produced a paper that was published in the ISCRAM, Münster, Germany, 2024 Proceedings: https://lnkd.in/eFkZ94nB

Myroslava very much enjoyed the conference as well as being in Japan. I have been to both Tokyo and Yokahama for conferences and had extraordinary experiences there and wonderful memories.

Myroslava returned safely back to the Ukrainian Catholic University, where she teaches. I would have loved to have gone to this conference in Kyoto but, with my teaching schedule and upcoming INFORMS conference in Atlanta (next week), I could not make it. I am very proud and happy that she went, after traveling a great distance,  and presented our paper. Thanks also to the reviewers of our paper for their helpful comments and suggestions!

Looking Forward to the 2025 INFORMS Conference in Atlanta!

All five presentations are now done! The 2025 INFORMS  conference will definitely be a whirlwind conference. It will take place October 26 -29, 2025. I am so looking forward to the talks, the social events, serendipitous encounters, the exhibits, and the various business meetings and special luncheons.

Detailed information on the conference is available here:https://meetings.informs.org/wordpress/annual/

Three of my PhD students will be coming - Ismael Pour, Samira Samadi, and Dana Hassani. 

Ismael will present our latest paper on integrated crop and cargo war risk insurance, co-authored with Borys Kormych of the Odesa Law Academy, which was recently published in the January 2026 issue of the International Transaction in Operational Research, and is available free access: 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/itor.70038?af=R. 

I will speak on the panel in honor of Hani Mahmassani, who passed away on July 15, 2025. The panel is chaired by Karen Smilowitz, the Editor of Transportation Science and fellow panelists are: Srinivas Peeta, Michael Hyland, and Marco Nie. The panel will be a moving tribute to a leading scholar, educator, mentor, and friend, who is deeply missed.

Samira will present two of our papers (because my schedule is loaded with many meetings and conference events) - a paper, co-authored with Deniz Besik of the University of Richmond on a continuing passion of ours - impact on fresh produce quality of various supply chain disruptions - and the  paper, "Multicommodity Trade, Tariffs, and Rerouting," that is forthcoming in a very special edited volume: Convex and Variational Analysis with Applications: In Honor of Terry Rockafellar’s 90th Birthday, with Themistocles M. Rassias and Panos M. Pardalos as Editors, Springer Nature Switzerland AG; see: https://link.springer.com/book/9783032078599

Dana will present a paper of ours that was also recently published: "Quantification of International Trade Network Performance Under Disruptions to Supply, Transportation, and Demand Capacity, and Exchange Rates in Disasters." This paper was co-authored with colleagues at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE): Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev and appears in: Dynamics of Disasters- From Natural Phenomena to Human Activity, Ilias S. Kotsireas, Anna Nagurney, Panos M. Pardalos, Stephan Pickl, Chrysafis Vogiatzis, Editors, Springer Nature Switzerland AG; see:https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-74006-0#toc

And on the first evening of the conference, I will receive the INFORMS President's Award, for which I am deeply grateful and very honored:  https://www.informs.org/News-Room/INFORMS-Releases/Awards-Releases/Anna-Nagurney-Honored-with-2025-INFORMS-President-s-Award

Excellent INFORMS Tune-Up Event Hosted by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter!

Yesterday, the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter held its annual INFORMS Tune-Up event at which PhD students, who are chapter members, practice the presentations that they will give at the upcoming INFORMS Annual Meeting. This year, the conference will take place in Atlanta, Georgia, October 26-29, 2025. The website for the conference is here: https://www.informs.org/Meetings-Conferences/INFORMS-Conference-Calendar/2025-INFORMS-Annual-Meeting

The presenters and their titles are on the poster below.

It was great to have speakers from the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department (MIE) at UMass Amherst as well as from the Operations and Information Management (OIM) Department.

I very much enjoyed all the talks. Ali Jafari and Yukti Kathuria are from MIE and Samira Samadi, Ismael Pour, and Dana Hassani are from the OM side of OIM. The latter three are also my PhD students.

The audience included faculty and students and valuable comments and suggestions were given on the presentations and there were also great questions. It was an excellent practice session.

The presentations by Ali and Yukti focused on on unsupervised learning approaches and Bayesian networks to healthcare, respectively, and those by Samira, Ismael, and Dana were on food quality under trade disruptions, integrated crop and cargo war risk insurance, and the quantification of international trade network performance, respectively.

Samira's presentation was based on  a paper that we co-authored with Professor Deniz Besik of the University of Richmond.

Ismael's paper was based on a paper that we co-authored with Professor Borys Kormych of the Odesa Law Academy and which is the lead article in the January (2026) issue of the International Transactions in Operational Research. It is available for free here: 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/itor.70038?af=R

Dana's paper, in turn, was also co-authored with me, and with colleagues at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev. The paper was published in the latest Dynamics of Disasters  (2024) co-edited volume: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-74006-0_7

Special thanks to faculty: Professor Peter Haas of the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, UMass Amherst, Professor Hari Balasubramanian of MIE,  and Professor Zihao Qu of OIM for taking the time to support the students and offering their suggestions. 

I took the nice photo below:

The pizza, fresh fruit, and coffee were delicious.

This student chapter will be recognized at the INFORMS Atlanta conference with the Cum Laude Award on October 27. We will have a nice group there to receive the award and to also celebrate!

I have been the chapter's Faculty Advisor since its inception in 2004 and have very much enjoyed seeing how the students have grown professionally and socially. I stay in touch with many once they receive their PhDs and go on to careers either in academia or industry!

Our Spatial Price Network Equilibrium Paradox Paper is Published

It was thrilling to see our paper, "A Spatial Price Network Equilibrium Paradox," published this past week in the Springer journal Optimization Letters!

The paper I co-authored with Ladimer S. Nagurney and Ismael Pour, who is one of my PhD students at the Isenberg School of Management. The work builds on the famous Braess Paradox and reveals through numerous examples that: the addition of a new route from a supply market to a demand market may result in the supply price being lowered; the route costs being increased, and the demand price (the price that the consumers pay) also being increased relative to their values prior to the route addition. This result shows that there could be negative effects for both producers and for consumers and is especially relevant to the case of agricultural commodities. Hence, farmers may suffer in terms of lower prices for their products, and consumers in terms of higher prices that they pay! It is, hence, critical to investigate the impacts of the supply chain network topology, from a network design perspective, that includes the route topology.

This paper was first presented at the conference in Halkidiki in honor of Professor Panos M. Pardalos: 

https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-outstanding-pardalos-70-conference.html

Ismael also presented the paper at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle last Fall and the slide deck can be downloaded here: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/INFORMS2024-Presentation-NPS.pdf

The paper went through two revisions and can be accessed through the Springer journal website:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11590-025-02244-y

We have done a lot of research on the Braess Paradox and even hosted the visit of Professor Dietrich Braess when I was a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. More info on the paradox on the Supernetwork Center website: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/braess/braess-new.html

Outstanding Presentation by Dr. Oleh Nivievskyi on Rebuilding Crossroads of Ukraine

Yesterday we had the honor and great pleasure of hearing Dr. Oleh Nivievskyi present at the Isenberg School of Management in the UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series! Dr. Nivievskyi's seminar title was, "Rebuilding Crossroads of Ukraine: Bridging the Gap Between Damage, Recovery, and European Aspirations." Dr. Nivievskyi is a Full Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) and a Siemens Research Fellow at the Freie University of Berlin. He is  a co-founder of the KSE Agro-Food Center.

His presentation was based on a paper, now in production in the Ukrainian Analytics Digest, which is edited by Eduard Klein, and which is co-authored with Dmytro Goriunov of KSE and me. We expect the paper to be published in an issue later this month.

Professor Nivievskyi had a few travel kerfuffles but made it to Northampton on Thursday via Amtrak from DC after flying from Europe. We picked him up at the train station and then had a lovely dinner at the Whately Inn al fresco.

He overnighted at the UMass Amherst Hotel and had a quick tour and meetings with students in the morning, followed by his outstanding presentation, and then lunch at The Commonwealth Restaurant.

It was wonderful to have a fabulous audience that included several exchange students from KSE plus our OIM Department Chair Professor Solak. Thanks to everyone for the great questions and discussions! It was thrilling to have two faculty from Amherst College, who are Ukrainian, join us for lunch.

The UMass Meet and Greet service provided a comfortable ride to the Springfield Union Station for his journey to NYC for some KSE business.

Along with my Isenberg PhD student, Dana Hassani, we had published several papers with Nivievskyi in such journals as Transportation Science, the European Journal of Operational Research, and the Journal of Global Optimization,  and a paper in the recent Dynamics of Disasters edited volume; see my recent post: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2025/07/working-with-colleagues-in-ukraine-is.html. It was very special that Nivievskyi could meet my PhD students in person, including co-author Dana.

We organized this event on short notice but one has to take advantage of opportunities. Having face to face engagements between scholars and students is very enriching education-wise and also personally!

Many thanks to the UMass Amherst Office of Global Affairs for the support of the partnership with KSE!

Welcoming my New PhD Student to the Isenberg School of Management

It has been a dynamic first two weeks of the new academic year at UMass Amherst! I have been busy teaching my Transportation & Logistics class at the Isenberg School of Management and also with PhD comprehensive exams (3 for our Operations Management (OM) PhD students, 2 of whom are my students) plus many additional meetings.

A highlight of a new academic year is always meeting new students.  I was delighted to meet my new OM PhD student, Sarvagya Jha, who is from India. He joined me and my three other PhD students: Dana Hassani, Samira Samadi, and Ismael Pour, in my office. I then took the photo below next to my framed mathematics academic genealogy tree, which, through my PhD advisor at Brown University Stella Dafermos, goes back to James Maxwell, Isaac Newton, and Galileo Galilei, which is quite inspiring, I must say. The academic genealogy was presented to me by my former PhD student Dong "Michelle" Li, who is now a tenured Associate Professor at Babson College in Wellesley,  MA.

You can read more about my academic genealogy on my blog here: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-academic-family-tree-going-back-to.html

Good luck to all students on the new academic year!

Kudos to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter!

It is hard to believe that the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter was founded in 2004! I have been lucky to have served as its Faculty Advisor from its very inception and have seen so many of our wonderful student members graduate and excel professionally, whether as academics or practitioners. We have built an extraordinary community of students (and also faculty) that are advocates for, users of, and appliers of Operations Research (OR) and the Management Sciences (MS) and Analytics, working on making the world a better place.

The members come from the Isenberg School of Management, the College of Engineering, and the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst but all students, who are interested in OR/MS and Analytics, are welcome. Typically, the student members are PhD students but we have also had undergraduate students as members. Our invited seminars are advertised at UMass Amherst and are also open to the public.

On August 15, 2025, even though it was the summer still, we celebrated outstanding 2024-2025 officers and members with a special event. I presented award certificates in the beautiful Business Innovation Hub at the Isenberg School of Management to Officers: Ismael M. Pour, Samira Samadi, Semih Boz, Josh Gladstone, G. Busra Karkili, Yukti Kathuria, Sindhoora Prakash, Parisa Lotfibagha, and Mohammad Derakhshi and to Members: Yongdong Chen and Dana Hassani and thanked them for their service! Thanks also to faculty: Professors Arzum Akkas and Chaitra Gopalappa, who were able to join us. The pizza and salads provided by University of Massachusetts Amherst Dining were delicious as was the chocolate cake from Whole Foods. PhD students are so important to the intellectual life of a university. 

It is an honor to serve as this INFORMS Chapter's Faculty Advisor. Looking forward to another exciting academic year with chapter activities. Many thanks to all who support us! Additional photos and information on the Chapter activities can be found on its website: https://websites.umass.edu/umassinf/