Amazing INFORMS Judith Liebman Award Winners and Student Volunteers

Today is the deadline for submitting your nomination for the INFORMS Judith Liebman Award. 

According to the INFORMS website: The Judith Liebman Award has been established to recognize outstanding student volunteers who have been "moving spirits" in their universities, their student chapters, and the Institute. The award will be an 11x8 mounted certificate signed by the Vice President for Chapters/Student Chapters/Fora, and a letter of congratulations, in a form suitable for sending to each recipient's department chair.

The full list of recipients, to-date, beginning with 2004 until 2016 can be found here.

And what a truly impressive list of amazing student volunteers they were (and some still are students). Many have gone on to much prominence at their places of employment and also at INFORMS.

Today was also the day that the official notification went out to the recipients of the 2017 INFORMS Service Award, and, since I had the pleasure of serving on that committee, with Dr. Lauren Davis as Chair, I am reflecting on the importance of volunteerism. Clearly, Hurricane Harvey has also put us in a frame of mind of  "volunteering" in whatever way feasible. Last year I was among the group very honored to receive the first set of INFORMS Service Awards. The recipients of both the above awards will be honored at our Annual INFORMS conference, which is supposed to be in Houston in October, but we will see if the location is moved. 

I have met Dr. Judith Liebman, after whom the award is named. She was a contemporary of my PhD advisor, Dr, Stella Dafermos, and both were PhD students in Operations Research at Johns Hopkins University together. A wonderful blogpost on Dr. Liebman, and some of her impact, can be found in a post by her granddaughter Lauren.

Speaking of the dynamos who have received the Judith Liebman Award and that I have had the pleasure of interacting with, I mention Thiago Serra of CMU, a 2016 recipient, with whom I had  dined not long ago at the UMass Club in Boston. Joining us was also Dr. Michael Prokle, a 2015 recipient of the award, who recently received his PhD from UMass Amherst. Michael is a Data Scientist at Philips Research North America working on health care related projects.

Plus, Dr. Amir H. Masoumi, who received the Judith Liebman Award in 2013 (and was one of my PhD students), and who is now an Assistant Professor at the School of Business at Manhattan College, also joined us. Amir has been heavily involved in the School of Business' annual Analytics Competition, which, in 2016, had, as its keynote speaker, Dr. Anne Robinson of Verizon,
who not only is a previous President of INFORMS (I believe the youngest one ever) but she was also a recipient of the Judith Liebman Award the very first year that it was given, back in 2004!

Below is a photo of Dr. Robinson being thanked by Dr. Masoumi after her keynote speech.

I would be remiss not to acknowledge Dr. Kayse Maass, also a recipient of the Judith Liebman Award, the same year as Michael Prokle, and now a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis. Kayse is doing extraordinary work in healthcare modeling as well as battling human trafficking. I had the pleasure of seeing Kayse at a workshop sponsored by NSF on Disrupting Illicit Supply Networks last May at the University of Texas Austin. Below is a photo taken at the workshop in which also Dr. Georgia-Ann Klutke, the NSF Program Officer, and Dr. Renata Konrad of WPI, who has written with Kayse, appear.

In 2006, there were two recipients of the Judith Liebman Award, Dr. Burcu Keskin, an extremely active INFORMS member, and my former doctoral student (I had nominated her) Dr. Tina Wakolbinger, who is now a Full Professor (having achieved this status only 4 years after her PhD from UMass Amherst) at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in beautiful Austria. The photo below of Tina and me was taken in Vienna this past June at a conference on Humanitarian Operations organized by Tina. Tina was instrumental in helping me to start the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, and she, along with Burcu, wrote up guidelines, on how to do this for INFORMS.

In 2009, Dr. Qiang "Patrick" Qiang received the Judith Liebman Award. I had nominated Patrick, who was my PhD student, and whose dissertation received a national transportation award. He is my co-author of the book: Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World. Patrick is now a tenured Professor at the Graduate School of Professional Studies at Pennsylvania State University Great Valley. 

And to show the kind of support Patrick and Amir provide to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, which they were all part of and their extraordinary efforts garnered them the Judith Liebman Award, below is a photo from the Nashville INFORMS conference in November 2016 taken at the student chapter award and Judith Liebman Award ceremonies. They come back to support the students and for this I am eternally grateful.

Above I have only highlighted those Judith Liebman Award recipients that I know personally. All recipients deserve a big round of applause for their hard work, selflessness, and energy!

I might mention that just being nominated is an honor. And, since some have asked, yes, you must be an INFORMS member for two years to be considered eligible for this award, which is only given for work as a student volunteer. In addition, you can receive the award shortly after receiving your PhD.

Looking forward to hearing this year's recipients.

What if Noone Showed Up to Your Talk!

Academics harbor different fears, a topic, which of itself, would merit a series of blogposts.

As we are often called up to speak in public, whether in front of our classes, at conferences, or at seminars, public speaking is, typically, not one of our fears, although, honestly, I know of several faculty who, literally, are so frightened of speaking in public that they vomit before classes and giving talks. (I would recommend teaching online to these folks.)

When an academic gives a seminar or speaks at a conference and has spent a lot of time not only doing the research that she is to speak on, not to mention all the time it takes to prepare a well-thought out and engaging presentation, she would welcome a good audience. By a "good" audience, I mean an attentive one, and one of a decent size.

John L. Jackson Jr., writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, has a most vivid rendition of a talk that he gave 10 years ago to which noone showed up except for the speaker (John, that is) and the person that invited him. And there were fliers posted up that he could even see. The article made my heart bleed for him. In the article, he argues whether we have simply too many seminars (and, perhaps, folks are too busy) to attract a good-sized audience.

He does note, however, that student-organized events, including talks and seminars, tend to draw a large audience. Indeed, this is the strategy that we have been using for the past seven years or so, when we organize seminars as part of the activities of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. As this chapter's Faculty Advisor, I have over the years only missed about two out of seventy plus seminars (I even traveled back from Harvard during my sabbatical in 2005-2006 while I was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study to support the students and the speakers).

In an earlier post, I wrote about how to organize a great speaker series and related issues (and, clearly, part of it is to attract a terrific audience, since, otherwise it is insulting to the speaker).

Folks regularly tell me how wonderful our speakers are and that their talks on Fridays are the highlights of both students' and faculty members' weeks!

We've even had TV news crews show up to interview some speakers, but we strategize well and disseminate the talks really well. The students do an outstanding job in hosting and following up with thank yous.

We have now started a "Meet the Executive" series, which is attracting students (grad and undergrads), faculty, and others from throughout campus.

I remember, on a related matter, a New Year's Eve party that my husband and I were invited to back in our Brown University days. It was organized by two physicists and my husband ended up being the only invited guest to show up.

Congrats to All the Student Chapter Award Recipients of INFORMS!

I would like to congratulate all the recipients of this year's INFORMS student chapter awards! The award ceremony will take place on Tuesday morning, November 9, 2010, in Austin, Texas at the 2010 INFORMS annual conference.

Special thanks go to the officers of the student chapters as well as the Faculty Advisors who work very hard in organizing activities and disseminating information about operations research and the management sciences. As the Faculty Advisor to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, I know the dedication that is required to have a successful student chapter. 32 INFORMS student chapters submitted their annual reports for 2009 and the awards below are to recognize the leading chapters for their activities.

The message below is from Dr. Stefan Karisch and was distributed today to the Faculty Advisors and the chapter presidents.

Dear Student Chapter Officers,

Congratulations! The Chapters/Fora Committee is pleased to notify you that your chapter is a winner of the INFORMS Student Chapter Annual Award at the level shown below. The purpose of these awards is to recognize the achievements of student chapters. The award will be presented at the Chapters/Fora Breakfast at the upcoming INFORMS Annual Meeting in Austin. If you are at the meeting, we hope you will join us and be recognized at this event. If not, we will mail the award to you.

Best regards,

Stefan Karisch

INFORMS VP Chapters/Fora

Summa Cum Laude

Arizona State University

Magna Cum Laude

University of Massachusetts

University of South Florida

Cum Laude

Texas A&M University

North Carolina State University

University of Illinois - Chicago

Florida International University

University of California - Berkeley

Oklahoma State University

University of Alabama

Stefan E. Karisch
Director, Operations Research and Optimization

Quality and Business Operation Services

_____________________________________
Jeppesen
A Boeing Company

ph: 303.328.6389 | Mobile : 303.305.8388 | fax: 303.328.4117 | stefan.karisch@jeppesen.com
55 Inverness Drive East | Englewood, CO 80112 | www.jeppesen.com

What a Week It Was!

This week has certainly flown by quickly!

Besides teaching my two courses and holding office hours, I was:

1. interviewed for a radio program on the news of my latest publication, that was highlighted both on physorg.com and on the homeland security newswire and was also the subject of a UMass Amherst news release;

2. interviewed by several journalists on my research on the negation of the Braess paradox and the wisdom of crowds, the subject of my latest article, and asked to comment on some preprints of other researchers;

3. contacted by UMass Amherst development to see whether I could help host an executive who is also an alum;

4. contacted by a representative who was wondering whether I was willing to have a photo of George Dantzig (the founder of operations research who passed away at ago 90) and me, that was taken at a conference, be used in a new edition of a book, and whether I was willing to provide a high resolution image of the photo (coincidentally, I had just shared that photo with the students in my graduate class the day before);

5. a participant in a teleconference for the SBP 2011 conference that I am serving as the tutorial chair for;

6. busy working on a multiple investigator NSF proposal, and

7. trying to finish up two research papers on sustainable supply chain management and on electronic recycling with collaborators;

8. busy contacting all the INFORMS student chapter Faculty Advisors and Chapter Presidents that I am responsible for to see how their chapters were doing and the activities that they were planning for this semester, and

9. trying to catch up with the reviewing of a pile of papers;

10. taking out a senior colleague to lunch who is a distinguished teacher, since I wanted to document his pedagogical wisdom (will write about what I learned later on this blog), and

11. starting my reviews of proposals for a scientific foundation of another country (luckily, this country pays for this kind of hard work).

All of the above I somehow managed to do as our community was having a very hard time dealing with the sudden death of a terrific colleague.

And the above does not even mention any duties/activities as a wife and mother!