An Incredible Blackett Lecture Experience at the Royal Society in London

We returned yesterday from London, in time for me to teach my last Transportation and Logistics class of the Fall 2024 semester this morning.

It was a whirlwind week. My husband and I flew from Boston Logan on December 3 (after I taught my class), and, after a few hours of sleep, we had the pleasure of taking part in an Isenberg School get together hosted by my former PhD student, Dr. Stavros Siokos, the co-founder of Astarte Capital. It was a lovely event with Dean Anne P. Massey taking part as well as Senior Associate Dean Bill Brown, plus several Isenberg School development folks, alums and friends.

And, on December 5, it was time for my Blackett Lecture and the annual awards given out by The Operational Research (OR) Society of the United Kingdom. 

The venue was The Royal Society. This society is the oldest scientific society, dating back to 1660. The event was lovely - beautifully organized with the awards taking place first, followed by my one hour Blackett Lecture, a cocktail hour, and then a delicious dinner. The OR Society will be posting a video of my lecture on its youtube channel soon as well as professional photographs on its Flickr.

I was incredibly honored to have the opportunity to deliver my Blackett Lecture, "NetwORks and Policies: OR to the Rescue," at the beautiful venue and to an audience of amazing colleagues, academics and practitioners, as well as friends and invited guests. I would like to acknowledge the President of The OR Society Gilbert Owusu for the warm introduction and for so expertly handling the Q&A, and Gavin Blackett, Carol McLaughlin, Sarah Davies, and Caitlin Griffin of  The OR Society for the hospitality. Special thanks to Graham Rand, Edmund Burke, and Robert Fildes for the conversations and welcome. It's not every day that one gets to be in a photograph next to an oil painting of the Nobel laureate and Founder of OR in the UK - Patrick Blackett! 

It was an honor to have the Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst Dean Anne P. Massey and Senior Associate Dean William Brown in attendance as well as Diane Isenberg and University of Massachusetts Amherst PhD alumnus Stavros Siokos. Recognizing so many in the audience because of professional interactions over the years, made for a very enjoyable experience - thank you all! The slide deck of my presentation has been posted: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/BlackettLecture-Nagurney-2024.pdf

Some additional background on becoming the 2024 Blackett Lecturer can be found here: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2024/11/deeply-honored-to-have-been-selected-to.html

Congratulations to all the award recipients recognized at this very memorable event. The impact of our great discipline is humbling and inspiring. Working together we can continue to make positive change. 

Many Thanks to the INFORMS History & Traditions Committee and to Its Chair

At the recent INFORMS Annual Meeting, which took place in Seattle, WA, I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel on: What Does Our Past Tell Us About Our Future, with esteemed colleagues: Linus Schrage of the University of Chicago and Tom Magnanti of MIT. Christopher Ryan of the University of British Columbia served as the moderator.

I had done a lot of research for my presentation and have now posted it. In my presentation, I emphasized how important it is to also include herstories and to feature female operations researchers both for historical purposes and also to inspire younger generations. 

The INFORMS History & Traditions website includes "profiles of more than 230 historic individuals as well as the historic institutions, methodologies and application areas with which they are associated." There is a Committee (I had served for several years on it) that meets regularly and suggests additions to this website and tracks its correctness, etc. 

I was very touched and very honored to have been contacted before our panel took place by Linus Schrage, the Chair of the INFORMS History & Traditions Committee, saying that I should be included on this website.  He worked in securing a writer for my biography and went back and forth with me to make sure that everything had my approval.

Above is a photo of the names on the M-N page and I marvel to be on this list with many that I have cited and some I have even enjoyed conversations with! All the biographies can be accessed here. I am only the 5th female to be thus recognized, and this tribute will make me work even harder and mentor students, collaborators, and others who reach out to me.

My biography, thanks to the INFORMS History & Traditions Committee, can be directly accessed here.

Beautiful that my biography page also includes a link to the interview with me conducted by Anand Subramanian for his outstanding Subject_to series on Youtube.

Deeply Honored to Have Been Selected to Deliver the 2024 Blackett Lecture at the Royal Society in London

You probably remember the day that you received some wonderful news and also the day that you received sad news.

This post is about the former.

I was at a conference in Kalamata, Greece in honor of the 70th birthday of Panos M. Pardalos last summer when the great news arrived. I had been selected by The Operational Research (OR) Society to deliver the 2024 Blackett Lecture at the Royal Society in London. Honestly, as I was reading the letter, the tears started to flow since I was so touched that my hard work was being recognized. 

Patrick Blackett, after whom the lecture is named, was the founder of  OR in the United Kingdom. In the US, we, typically, say "Operations Research." He was also awarded a Nobel Prize in physics.

The abstract of my lecture as well as a link to registration can be found here.

The letter from The OR Society, signed by the Executive Director Seb Hargreaves and by the President of The OR Society, Gilbert Owusu, is below.

I have been enjoying preparing my lecture, which will give a panoramic view of OR and policies from tolls for congested urban transportation networks to tariffs and quotas for agricultural supply chain networks. I will be bringing in a lot of personal experiences as well.

I am thrilled that there will even be guests from New England coming.

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!

The Outstanding INFORMS Conference in Seattle!

Last week I had the pleasure of taking part in the INFORMS conference in Seattle, which took place October 20 through October 23. It was a whirlwind conference since my research group had 5 presentations. I gave an invited talk on a paper on defense critical supply chain networks and labor, which was recently published in the Handbook of Management of Threats. Thanks to Shima Mohebbi for inviting me to speak in her game theory session. My 3 PhD students also presented papers. Dana Hassani spoke on our recent paper, now published online in the INFORMS journal Transportation Science, and co-authored with Kyiv School of Economics colleagues Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev. Samira Samadi spoke on our work with my PhD student Ismael Pour on spatial price equilibrium models with commodity losses. And two days after her presentation in Seattle, the paper was published! Ismael delivered a paper co-authored with Ladimer S. Nagurney and me on a spatial price network equilibrium paradox. For both Samira and Ismael it was their first INFORMS conference!

The panel that I spoke on was a "Committee's Choice" one and it was a great honor to join fellow panelists Tom Magnanti and Linus Schrage, both of whom need no introductions. Chris Ryan was an excellent moderator.  The panel was on What Our Past Can Tell Us About Our Future. I took the perspective of Herstory.

There were editorial board meetings for several journals that I serve as an Associate Editor of  (Journal of Global Optimization and Optimization Letters plus the International Transactions in Operational Research)  - it was great to see fellow editorial board members.

Another highlight was having my Labor and Supply Chain Networks book and the Handbook for the Management of Threats displayed at the Springer booth at the Exhibit Hall.

I thoroughly enjoyed talks and  the INFORMS Fellows lunch. 3 of my nominees got elected this year and there were 12 Fellows, so it was extra special to celebrate with them - Hani S. Mahmassani, Celso Ribeiro, and Grazia Speranza. I also very much enjoyed the WORMS lunch.

Several former PhD students, who are successful professors now, joined me: Pritha Dutta and Grace Ke, and Dmytro Matsypura, who traveled all the way from Sydney, Australia. It was delightful to also see Patrick Qiang.

It was terrific to have the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter recognized with the Magna Cum Laude Award.

The below collage of photos captures some of the highlights.

INFORMS organized so many additional meetings and networking events at this conference, which I also appreciated. We were kept very busy but the conference was very enjoyable with over 7,300 registrants from around the globe! More info on this conference.

The Supply Chain Resilience (SCRIPS) Workshop in DC and More!

Last week I had the great pleasure of attending the SCRIPS (Supply Chain Resilience Issues, Problems and Solutions for the Homeland Security Enterprise) Workshop in Washington DC. The workshop was extraordinary, bringing together experts from government, academia and industry. The venue was excellent - the Texas A&M Bush Center, very close to The White House. 

It was an honor to be invited to deliver the keynote: Supply Chain Resilience Research: Insights from Agricultural & Food Supply Chains.

There were 3 themes to this workshop: the agricultural and food industry, the semiconductor industry, and ports. The organizers were incredibly prescient with the workshop taking place October 1 and 2, 2024, and the  East Coast and Gulf Coast dock workers set to go on strike at midnight on October 1!

I had anticipated a possible dock workers strike and wrote this article for  The Conversation: "Brown bananas, crowded ports, empty shelves: What to expect with the US dockworkers strike." The article was updated, once the strike was announced, before my keynote on October 1. I was busy going back and forth with my Editor.  The strike ended, preventing an economic disaster, within 3 days, and I had this article published in The Conversation: "Dockworkers pause strike after Biden administration’s appeal to patriotism hits the mark." 

I'd like to take the opportunity to thank the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Supply Chain Resilience Center, the Center for Accelerating Operational Efficiency (CAOE) at Arizona State University and the Cross-Border Threat Screening and Supply Chain Defense Center (CBTS) at Texas A&M University, both DHS Centers of Excellence, for hosting this workshop. Special thanks to Ronald Askin for inviting me to speak with gratitude also to: Ross Maciejewski, Hilary Shackelford, and Pompelli Greg, who did an amazing job leading our food/ag industry break sessions. Appreciation is extended to: Cynthia Gerber, Manish Bansal and Sara Saberi for taking and sharing some of the nice photos in the collage below. Thanks to ALL for their participation and the incredibly inspiring insights and discussions.

It was terrific to see colleagues that I know from Operations Research from multiple universities at the workshop as well as to have CDC, FEMA, and, of course, DHS representatives taking part in the workshop.

It rained periodically during the workshop but, propitiously, the rain would stop when Robert, who is responsible for the amazing Ukraine Rally DC, would be out. I had brought my Ukrainian flag and, both last Monday and Tuesday, I joined him and others.

It was very special to meet refugees from Ukraine and even Kiran and Alan, who had worked in the Peace Corps in Ukraine, and I spoke Ukrainian with them!

My time in DC was incredibly rewarding and very special! And, while walking on the street back to my hotel one evening, a gentleman cried out my name and starting hugging me. He had just arrived from Mexico, was very familiar with my research, and was starting his new job at The World Bank the next day. He also knows our UMass Amherst Chancellor Javier Reyes, who is from Mexico. What a small world it is!

Congratulations to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University on its 25th Anniversary!

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard is truly a very special place. I had the great honor of being a Science Fellow in 2005-2006, just a few years after its founding in 1999. It was an incredible year for me with wonderful new friendships made, the writing of my Supply Chain Network Economics book, and many experiences plus collaborations, including with the now Dean of SEAS, David Parkes. Radcliffe also supported my collaborator Patrizia Daniele of Catania, Italy, and she wrote her Dynamic Networks book while at Radcliffe. She also worked with me and Parkes. The Science Fellows were housed at Putnam House and there were engineers, physicists, mathematicians, and computational linguists with us. Radcliffe, at that time, had several buildings for the Fellows. We joined one another for delicious lunches and talks as well as receptions and special events. Since that fabulous year, I have been back to visit many times, and have been a Summer Fellow at Radcliffe twice. I also co-organized with David Parkes an Exploratory Radcliffe Seminar focusing on dynamic networks. Radcliffe now has its own quad and all Fellows are housed in the same building. I love the garden and fountain and there are also often art exhibits.

So, when I heard that Radcliffe would be celebrating its 25th anniversary on September 26 and 27, I had to join, despite a busy teaching schedule, office hours, hosting of  a speaker, and also an All School Meeting of the Isenberg School! To-date, there have been about 1,200 Radcliffe Fellows. 

On September 26, Radcliffe, to kick off its 25th anniversary, hosted an outstanding panel. The session began with introductory remarks by Radcliffe Institute Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, who shared some of the history of the Radcliffe Institute and also noted her predecessors as Dean. When I was at Radcliffe, Drew Gilpin Faust was the Radcliffe Dean, and I told her that she would become the next President of Harvard and she did the year after my Fellowship year! The Science Dean my year was the outstanding, very inspiring computer scientist Barbara Grosz.  Brown-Nagin also shared a terrific video of an astronomy discovery by Radcliffe Fellows, which included Alyssa Goodman, whom I have met.

The panel, consisting of two Nobel laureates in Economic Sciences, Claudia Goldin and Oliver Hart, both of whom had been Radcliffe Fellows,  was moderated by the present President of Harvard, Alan Garber. Claudia was a Radcliffe Fellow the same year that I was and here you can see the full 2005-2006 list: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2005/06/radcliffe-names-2005-06-fellows/

President Garber was an outstanding moderator and I was very impressed by his delightful sense of humor! He reminisced about carrying punch cards across campus, as a student, and always being worried about dropping them. When Claudia spoke, she brought back so many memories of that magical year. She mentioned Geraldine Brooks and her husband Tony Horwitz (who sadly passed away not that long ago) and said that Claudia Olivetti became her best friend. Coincidentally, Claudia is Italian as is my collaborator, Patrizia Daniele. I recall fondly many conversations over lunch together about Berlusconi. Claudia spoke beautifully about what economics is and noted that there are too few females majoring in economics. Male undergrads think econ is finance, so they major in it whereas females also think that econ is finance, so they shy away from it. She emphasized that economics is about people! That reminded me of the essay that I wrote for ORMS Today: In the End, It's All About People!   Oliver Hart, when asked about the influence of technology on his work, said that, as a theoretical economist, he just needs a yellow pad and pencil. He said that he does use technology to communicate with his collaborators but misses the trips that he would take to collaborate face to face. Claudia said that having access to AI would have saved her lots of drudgery type work.

Both Claudia and Oliver are so passionate about their research and that was incredibly energizing and inspiring to hear. 

Information on the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and its Fellowship Program can be found here.

And here is a post on the 10th anniversary of Radcliffe in which I have several photos from our Fellowship year and in the photos are several individuals noted above.