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!