My Academic Mother

It was my second year at MIT.

My first year at MIT, back in 1988-1989, I had spent in the Transportation Systems Division in Engineering, supported by an NSF Visiting Professorship for Women (VPW). During that year, I taught a course and also organized a speaker series to bring Women in Operations Research to MIT, and their talks took place at the MIT Operations Research Center. My dissertation advisor at Brown University had been Stella Dafermos, who held appointments in Applied Mathematics and in Engineering. Stella also had had a VPW earlier at MIT and I had decided to apply and received the NSF grant/award.

My first year at MIT was terrific. I had received my promotion and tenure two years prior (four years after getting my PhD from Brown University in Applied Mathematics, with a specialty in Operations Research) and I was always open for new challenges and experiences.

UMass Amherst, I suspect, was pleased with what I was doing in terms of research and I was lucky to receive a UMass Faculty Fellowship after my VPW, which allowed me to take another year to think, conduct research, and to write, so I elected to stay at MIT. I loved living on Mass Ave (past Harvard right next to a trolley bus station), riding the T, interacting with the students and colleagues at MIT, and taking advantage also of seminars at Harvard. That year, I hosted several visitors from around the world, whom I would treat to the buffet lunch on the top floor of what was then the Sloan School of Management building.

I especially enjoyed running into the Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson, whether in the cafeteria, the snack shop, or the elevator, resplendent always in his bow tie, who seemed to like to eat as much as I did. His query: "Anna, have you proved any good theorems lately?" stays with me. It was a marvelous year and even on Saturdays (I won't mention names) there was always a Full Professor who put on the pot of coffee at Sloan. Surrounded by brilliant, collegial minds in operations research and in economics, life was good!

As Dickens, however, wrote in his Tales of Two Cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

That September, of my second year at MIT, my mother passed away and that April, shortly before she would have turned 50, my dissertation advisor, Stella Dafermos, also died. I received the phone call in my Sloan office just before I was to give a seminar at the OR Center, which I did. Stella's funeral in Providence and her burial in April, 1990 in the cemetery on Blackstone Boulevard, as the snow was melting and the daffodils were popping up, I will never forget.

Within 7 months, I had lost my two mothers.

Stella had been the second female PhD in Operations Research. I was asked to write several obituaries, including one that was published in Operations Research, and, as her first PhD student, this was a special, albeit painful, honor and privilege. In preparing my writeups I conversed with many leaders in OR (including Nemhauser) and we concluded that she had been the second female OR PhD (although some of us had thought that she had been the first). She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, moved on with her husband to Cornell, and then settled at Brown University.

I never had Stella as an undergraduate at Brown, but heard from my fellow Applied Math majors (many of whom were female), including my room-mate, about what a great teacher she was.

After receiving two degrees from Brown and working in the defense sector in Newport, RI, running marathons, and having my companies pay for my Master's degree at Brown, I decided to enroll full-time at Brown and Stella became my advisor. Her grants supported me and in 3 years I completed my PhD. Stella needed a student who was good at computing and since I had really enjoyed computing while at Brown and in industry plus I was always fascinated by transportation and networks, it was a great match. I also sought out the only female faculty member in Engineering and in Applied Math.

We would talk for hours in her office and even in her home, when she would welcome her children from school. Regularly, on Thursdays, she would go up to MIT for the OR seminars.

Together we published multiple papers that appeared in Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Transportation Research B, and several economics and regional science journals.

We would read our papers out loud since not only did the work have to be good but it had to sound good --OR as poetry/literature (non-fiction, of course)! Manuscripts were written and rewritten multiple times until it was time to get them typed-up and then submitted.

Being a teaching assistant for Stella was always enjoyable, and with the likes of Irv Lustig, in classes, it made my job easy (and with Les Servi also at Brown then always pleasant).

Even as a doctoral student, I had opportunities to travel with Stella to conferences (sometimes with my husband as the navigator). At OR conferences, during the academic year, while I was an Assistant Professor, we would often share rooms at conferences (not only to save grant funds but because it was fun).

With Stella, we explored Tokyo, Athens (she was the guide there), and had some of our most memorable adventures in Amsterdam (en route to my first European conference, which was in Delft). We thought we would be settled in our hotel room, and then there would be a knock on the door -- it would be Stella asking us to join her on another adventure (in Amsterdam, we were even offered "family discounts" and on a dinner canal boat ride asked whether we wanted to be seated with our "mother-in-law" or not).

All four of Stella's PhD students (3 of whom were females) are now Full Professors (she died while her 4th student had not yet completed her PhD) and three of my former PhD students have also reached the Full Professor rank.

Stella, you gave us standards that we continue to aspire to.

Your legacy is eternal and your academic children, grandchildren, and cousins thank you.

This blogpost was written for the INFORMS blog Challenge on OR and Families.

For additional perspectives on academic genealogies and words of wisdom, connect with the writings of my fellow colleagues, Mike Trick and Laura McLay.

A Female Academic Who Did It in Reverse Order and a Painful Anniversary

The recent AAUW report, which I blogged about, has certainly stirred up the waters, and I thank Dana Chivvis of AOLNews for further disseminating the important news about this study on how sterotypes and bias hurt women in math and science.

Now for some background on my personal history. In a sense, I was lucky, since I chose, while I was a doctoral student in Applied Mathematics at Brown University, a female as my dissertation advisor. Her name was Dr. Stella Dafermos, and she was the ONLY female who had an appointment in either the Division of Applied Mathematics or in Engineering (let's say that she was "double-counted," something I have experienced as well). She was also a mother with two children and her husband, Dr. Constantine Dafermos, was a very well-known applied mathematician, who was a Professor at Brown. I was Stella's first doctoral student and the impact that she had on me was tremendous. She was only the second female to receive a PhD in Operations Research in the world and she died at age 49 of cancer. I wrote her obituary in the top journal "Operations Research," and she was one of only a handful honored in that way.

On April 5, 2010, we mark the 20th anniversary of the death of this great female scholar, whose numerous research contributions in transportation, networks, spatial economics, game theory, algorithms, and variational inequalities have made and continue to make a great impact. Oh, the adventures that we had with Stella during conferences in Canada, Holland, Greece, Japan, the USA, among other places.

Now I am conducting research on paradoxes and the work that Stella and I did together and published I am now using years after (and many others have, in the meantime, as well). She had an uncanny intuition and great attention to detail and exceptional creativity.

As for "doing it in reverse order," female academics do not have it easy. First, I got tenure (after 4 years, which is unusually quick). Then I became a Full Professor (8 years after my PhD) -- the first one in the history (or should I say "herstory") in the Isenberg School (and the number of letters that were solicited for my Full is probably a record but one has to make sure that a female is "good enough," I guess). Then I had a child and after a month of "sick leave," granted to me less than willingly, I was back to teaching. That major event followed with my getting my driver's license (and that is quite the story in itself) but I had felt that I could be quite objective researching transportation, networks, and logistics, w/o a driver's license. Besides, while growing up in Yonkers we almost always took public transportation and spent a great deal of time in NYC and, as an academic, most of the interesting invitations that I was receiving required air travel. Robert Moses never got his license and neither did Barbara Walters, so I always thought that I was in rather "good company."

We need female faculty in technical fields to show new generations of students what is possible. Remember, once you solve that research problem that you have been struggling with, and all the pieces of the puzzle fall beautifully in place, that feeling is close to ecstasy. Noone can take that feeling away from you but also, remember, you had better publish that result, as well.

Professor Alan J. Goldman, Operations Researcher Passes

Dr. Alan J. Goldman died a few days ago. He was well-known in operations research for his fundamental contributions and for his support of many researchers in this field, going back to his days at the National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he worked for over twenty years. Afterwards, he was a Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences (now called the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where he served on the faculty for over thirty years, including as an emeritus professor.

Dr. Goldman was elected into the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 1989.

The Johns Hopkins University newspaper published a very nice obituary on Professor Goldman. The article has an elegant way of summarizing the discipline of operations research as: the use of mathematics to improve decisions on the design and operation of complex systems.

My doctoral dissertation advisor at Brown University was Professor Stella Dafermos, who, interestingly, received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1968. She was the second female to receive a PhD in Operations Research in the world. I was invited, upon her untimely death at age 49, to write her obituary for the top journal, Operations Research, when she died in April 1990. Hard to believe that almost 20 years have passed since her death. As an aside, I might add that all of her four doctoral students have now achieved the rank of Full Professor, with Professor Steve McKelvey of St. Olaf College achieving this rank just this past week!

Interestingly, the first paper that Stella Dafermos published, which was with her dissertation advisor, Professor F. Tom Sparrow of Hopkins, entitled, "The Traffic Assignment Problem for a General Network," which appeared in the Journal of Research of the National Bureau of Standards, volume 73B, 1969, acknowledges Dr. Goldman. The footnote on the first page at the bottom of the paper reads: This work was undertaken under contract CST-1278 with the National Bureau of Standards. We wish to acknowledge the many constructive comments of Alan Goldman of the Applied Mathematics Division of the Bureau, and Dr. George Nemhauser of Johns Hopkins University. Nemhauser is very well-known in the operations research (OR) community (and is also a member of NAE); after Hopkins, Nemhauser spent time at Cornell, and then moved to Georgia Tech.

In another paper by Dafermos and Sparrow, entitled, "Optimal Resource Allocation and Toll Patterns in User-Optimised Transport Networks" published in the Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, volume 5, 1971, Goldman is again thanked. In a footnote, on the first page, the following appears: The authors thank the National Bureau of Standards and the Ford Foundation for their financial support. They acknowledge the many constructive suggestions of Dr. Alan Goldman ...

The Johns Hopkins University obituary of Professor Goldman notes that over a dozen doctoral students worked under his supervision. I might add that one of them is my colleague, Professor Alan G. Robinson, of the Department of Finance and Operations Management at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst. The academic community is such a "small world!"

Professor F. Tom Sparrow moved from Hopkins to Purdue University and has since retired.

Mathematical Programming Symposium in Chicago and Reflections

We are getting ready for the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, which will be taking place in Chicago, August 23-28, 2009. This Symposium marks the 60th anniversary of the 0-th such symposium, which also took place in Chicago. The conference is held every three years.

I have organized an invited session on Game Theory and Variational Inequalities, which includes papers on dynamic modeling of the Internet, supply chain network disruptions and vulnerability analysis with performance assessment, mergers and acquisitions among oligopolistic firms and the merger paradox, and the modeling and solution of electric power supply chains with applications to New England. The presenters in this session are: Professor Patrick Qiang, Professor Zugang "Leo" Liu, and yours truly. I have posted the presentations on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website.

This will be a very special conference for me. I recall my first Math Programming Symposium when I was a fairly fresh PhD and the conference was at MIT in Cambridge, MA. My dissertation advisor, Dr. Stella Dafermos of Brown University, had recommended that I attend this conference and I recall fondly my excitement about presenting a single-authored paper on computational comparisons of spatial price equilibrium problems (which later was published in the Journal of Regional Science). I have always loved working at the interfaces of operations research / management science and economics. Lo and behold, a few minutes into my presentation, who comes running into the room, but none other than Professor George Dantzig of Stanford University, who is considered the founder of "operations research." He apologized for being late, I caught my breath, and proceeded with my talk. Afterwards, Professor Dantzig came up to me and told me that he had been working on such problems and he thought that my approach was great. Needless to say, his support and special thoughtfulness and kindness I have carried forward with me from that moment on!

Above I include photos of Professor Dantzig with me taken a few years back and also a photo of Professor Stella Dafermos, two giants of operations research (although height-wise they were certainly not "tall"). You can read more about Professor Dantzig, who lived to the age of 90, here.

I am delighted that two of my recent PhD students, Dr. Qiang and Dr. Liu, will be with me at this Math Programming Symposium and will be presenting papers. How wonderful to have history repeating itself!

Going Back to My Alma Mater -- Brown University

This past weekend I spent at Brown University, my alma mater, which is in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown University is one of the oldest universities in the United States and had the first undergraduate engineering program in the country. I have four degrees from Brown and my husband has two. Brown's President is Dr. Ruth Simmons, who is the first African American female to lead an Ivy League University. Her story is truly amazing -- the daughter of Mississippi sharecroppers, she is one of eleven children. She has been the President of Brown since 2001 and, under her leadership, Brown has reached new heights in scholarship and education.

For once, I was the "trailing spouse." My husband was invited to be on a career panel, organized by the Department of Physics at Brown. The Saturday program brought back alumni of the Physics Department, from undergraduates through doctoral alumni. The program was the initiative of President Simmons, who also made an appearance, and declared that the physics career event was one of the most successful ones to-date. Alumni from industry, including IBM, and from academia, including Williams College and Johns Hopkins University, spoke on their experiences to an audience of students, faculty, and administrators. Physics Brown alums that returned to campus and participated in this special event also included venture capitalists, employees of national research labs and of financial firms on Wall Street. My husband discussed his experiences, as a tenured professor at the University of Hartford in the College of Engineering.

Of course, a visit to Brown enabled me to see my former dorms, from Andrews Hall on the Pembroke Campus, to Diman House next to the Sharpe Refectory, to the Russian House. Brown has expanded its medical school and Life Science building and its athletic facilities but has managed to preserve its historical buildings and unique layout and design. Walking on the East Side of Providence, where Brown is located on College Hill, brought back so many wonderful memories. Coincidentally, yesterday, April 5, 2009, was the anniversary of my doctoral dissertation advisor's death. My advisor, Dr. Stella Dafermos, was the first female to hold an appointment in the Divisions of Applied Mathematics and Engineering at Brown. I was her first doctoral student. She passed away in 1989 and her work continues to be cited to this day and to make an impact in fields from transportation science to computer science. We stopped by the Swan Point Cemetery on Blackstone Boulevard, where Stella is buried, to pay our respects.

Walking through the Brown Green, I visited the statue of the Brown mascot, the Brown bear, with the inscription that contains the terrific phrase: "To Symbolize those Qualities of Strength, Courage, Endurance, which go Far to Make Men Invincible."

Brown and Providence have changed since I graduated but the beauty of the architecture and landscaping, plus the friendliness of the people remain! As for the food -- it is hard to top an Italian meal on Atwell's Avenue in the Federal Hill district of Providence!