Alan Alda, Marie Curie, and an Update on Our Work on Supply Chains in Health Care

Problems to research are all around us -- now more than ever.

All that one has to do to identify the important and interesting problems in order to help make the world a better place, is to keep one's eyes open and to observe; to read a lot -- news, journal articles, and books; to communicate with others, through both local forums, as with students and colleagues, through conferences, email, social networking, etc., and to experience life. Travel helps, as well, in order to view the world outside of the silos and to better understand what are the major issues.

Successful research, however, requires incredible focus, dedication, and passion, and a book that captures the life of an amazing researcher and scientist, like no other, is Madame Curie, a biography of Marie Curie, written by her daughter, Eve Curie. I decided to read this beautiful biography of Marie Curie this summer, after hearing that Alan Alda (yes, of M*A*S*H* and other fame) had written a play about her that was performed at this year's World Science Festival (WSF) in early June in NYC. Coincidentally, Alda, also around that time, even managed to give a commencement address at a local prep school in our area, from which his granddaughter was graduating.

I feel as though Madame Curie was inspiring me throughout this summer, with a nudge from Alan Alda who loves science and has been an active proponent of the WSF (I had the terrific experience of speaking on the Traffic panel at the 2009 WSF). The WSF is the brainchild of Dr. Brian Greene, a renowned physicist at Columbia University, and his wife, the journalist, Tracy Day.

This summer, coincidentally, after purchasing the Curie biography, I became absolutely fascinated by medical nuclear supply chains and the shock that the US has not even been producing nor processing the most commonly used radioisotope for cancer and heart diagnostics led me to do research on this critical supply chain. But, I needed a collaborator who was skilled in the underlying physics and, luckily, my husband has a PhD in physics, with a concentration in low temperature experimental physics, and we needed to get the news out, which we did through an Op-Ed piece, along with the paper, Medical Nuclear Supply Chain Design: A Tractable Network Model and Computational Approach, Anna Nagurney and Ladimer S. Nagurney, which I will be presenting at a conference at McGill University in Montreal next week.

As noted in our paper, since molybdenum decays with a 66.7 hour half-life, approximately 99.9% of the atoms decay in 27.5 days, making its production, transportation, and processing all extremely time-sensitive. In fact, its production is quantified in Six-day curies end of processing denoting the activity of the sample 6 days after it was irradiated to highlight this (and, yes, named after the Curies). Note that not only did Marie Curie receive a Nobel prize but she actually received 2, in Physics and in Chemistry, and shared the former prize with her husband, Pierre Curie, and with Becquerel.
In our nuclear medical supply chain paper, we needed a theoretical result (our model is a generalized network optimization model in which the arc multipliers capture the various losses due to radioactive decay, etc.) in order to be able to obtain an elegant formulation for analysis and computations. Propitiously, and this also speaks to passion as being a necessary condition for good research, one of my doctoral students, who is very interested in health care, and another doctoral student, who is researching time-sensitive product supply chains, began working on blood supply chains.

Our paper, Supply Chain Network Operations Management of a Blood Banking System with Cost and Risk Minimization, Anna Nagurney, Amir H. Masoumi, and Min Yu, has now been accepted in the journal, Computational Management Science, and it contains a result that we needed in both in our medical nuclear supply chain modeling work as well as in a followon paper, Supply Chain Network Design of a Sustainable Blood Banking System, Anna Nagurney and Amir H. Masoumi, to appear in Sustainable Supply Chains: Models, Methods and Public Policy Implications, T. Boone, V. Jayaraman, and R. Ganeshan, Editors, Springer, London, England, 2011.

On an ending note, Marie and Pierre Curie's other daughter, Irene Curie, and her husband, also were awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry. Amazing accomplishments and among members of two generations of a family.

Do Women Scientists Have to be Made of Steel or Titanium?

As I noted in an earlier blogpost, the 2011 World Science Festival, which concluded last week in NYC, had a feature event on Women in Science.

Gina Kolata of The New York Times, brought together several of the women scientists that had taken part in the Spotlight: Women in Science event for a roundtable in which she posed questions to them about the challenges that they had faced, their successes, and asked them for advice that they would offer to their daughters regarding science.

In the Q&A, one heard of the support that institutions need to provide for scientists to be able to do their work and one point specifically resonated with me. Dr. Joy Hirsch, who is a neuroscientist at Columbia, stated: There is one very important component here that is worth raising, and I think that is the need for institutional procedure and commitment to bring women on board. When I was at Yale, I was the chairman of the Status of Women Committee for a long period of time. During that time Yale as an institution had a major commitment to raise the visibility and the numbers of women, and we did exactly as you described without a compromise at all in quality. It is not that we just teach our women to be self-promoting and to be excellent. We must also, I think, take the responsibility of teaching our institutions to be receptive and proactive and even aggressive in this manner.

I have written about the demands that universities put on female academics in terms of service. Isn't it time that universities also start to seriously promote their achievements?!

Also, these top female scientists emphasized the importance of visibility in the profession and of traveling and speaking at conferences, etc. I concur and early on in my career would even fund travel out of my own pocket. Now I have reached a point in my career that much of my travel is funded by sponsors and organizations.

It will be interesting to see whether daughters of female scientists elect to go into science or will "generations be skipped," given that they see how hard their mothers have worked and are working. Then again, we have chosen to have such amazing lives in which no two days are the same, the travel brings you to fascinating places and you get to meet such interesting people, and to work on problems that truly challenge you.

And, yes, as they concluded, we do need to be made of titanium and not just steel.

World Science Festival 2011 -- Spotlight: Women in Science

The 2011 World Science Festival (WSF) begins June 1 in NYC and runs through June 5. It will consist of 50 different events over 5 days and, should be as fabulous as previous WSFs!

Although I would have liked to have seen more female mathematicians and scientists in this year's lineup there is a "Spotlight: Women in Science," which includes another former Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Science Fellow, Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan, a physicist at Yale. She was at Radcliffe in 2008-2009.

I was also a Radcliffe Fellow, in 2005-2006, and had the honor and great fun of taking part in the WSF in 2009 as part of the Traffic panel. You can read some of my reflections and view a video from this event here.

Dr. Brian Greene and his wife, Tracy Day, are the brains and innovators behind this fabulous festival.

If you get a chance to attend at least one event, I am sure that you will certainly long remember it!