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/

The 2nd Virtual Conference on Ukraine was OUTSTANDING!

I'd like to thank KTH The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, for hosting our 2nd Virtual Conference on Ukraine August 22 and 23, 2025. It was truly outstanding. It was an intellectual feast with 3 Nobel Laureates in Economic Sciences: Daron Acemoglu, Roger Myerson, and Paul Krugman delivering keynotes along with Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Subal Kumbhakar. 

I was honored to also give a keynote (the first one) and have posted my presentation as well as that of my Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst PhD student Ismael M. Pour on the Supernetwork Center website: https://lnkd.in/gncCNfTK.

I would like to thank the President of KTH Royal Institute of Technology Anders Söderholm for his warm welcoming remarks as well as fellow members of the Organizing Committee: Lars Harvigson, Almas Heshmati, Hans Lööf, Paul Nystedt, Roman Sheremeta and Hans Westlund. I am grateful to all the presenters of papers as well as to the panelists who joined me in discussing: Challenges of Ukraine's Post-War Reconstruction. Thanks also to those who joined us from many different countries and engaged with us. The networks that we are building in support of Ukraine in terms of research, higher education, and policy-making are inspiring.

So many fascinating research questions are  percolating from this conference. The full program can be downloaded here: https://www.kth.se/ukraine-conference.

Thanks to UMass Amherst for issuing this nice press release: https://www.umass.edu/news/article/anna-nagurney-co-organizes-virtual-conference-featuring-three-nobel-laureates-map

Tomorrow we mark Ukraine's Independence Day in commemoration of the Declaration of Independence of 1991. Slava Ukraini.