Congrats to the Underdogs, Butler University, on Making the NCAA Final Two!

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Last night, Butler University's men's basketball team was beaten by Duke University's team at a score of 61-59. Congratulations to both these fantastic teams! You made this year's N.C.A.A. men's basketball tournament extra special.

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Congratulations to the Butler University men's basketball team for winning their Final Four matchup game yesterday against Michigan State with a score of 52-50! This is the first time in decades that a 5th seeded team has reached the final game, which will be played against Duke University tomorrow night. Duke beat West Virginia last night.

The mascot of the Butler University team is a bulldog and, last night, if you watched the game, you couldn't miss him, dressed up in his dark blue and white Butler coat. He seemed to be enjoying the game and subsequent victory in Indianapolis as much as all the Butler University fans with the game taking place in their home city.

I like it when an "underdog" achieves what was made possible through dreams, a lot of hard work, and a terrific young coach, Brad Stevens, who made his players believe that they would reach this final game.

The President of Butler University is Dr. Bobby Fong, who is the first-born child of Chinese immigrants. He did not learn how to speak English until he was in kindergarten (this was my situation as well, since my family immigrated from Canada, and only Ukrainian was spoken in our home except when my parents did not want the children to understand what they were saying, they would revert to speaking in German). Bobby Fong went on to major in English at Harvard and then received his PhD from UCLA, also in English. Dr. Fong has been the President of Butler University since 2001. The New York Times had a wonderful feature article on Dr. Bobby Fong, which also related how he learned math from baseball statistics and learned about the US by reading about baseball.

Kudos to Butler University, a liberal arts university, with fewer than 5,000 students! I wish their men's basketball team, its students, and its President all the very best! They demonstrate what is special about sports, good sportsmanship, and the terrific possibilities!

From the NCAA Tournament to Pediatric Vaccines

Today we were treated to a brilliant talk by a star operations researcher, Dr. Sheldon Jacobson, of the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Professor Jacobson's talk was in our Spring 2010 Speaker Series in Operations Research / Management Sciences.

His presentation, An Analysis of Pediatric Vaccine Pricing and Stockpiling Issues, was simply outstanding! He recently returned from a trip that took him to Australia and Japan to investigate different vaccine issues in those countries. He discussed how integer programming can be used in the pricing of vaccines with real-world data and how he used stochastic programming to formulate and answer questions regarding the stockpiling of vaccines. He informed the audience of the challenges that vaccine manufacturers are faced with. He told the students to be willing to do "work for free" because sometimes great opportunities arise from doing research that helps others (as he had experienced with a pharmaceutical company and CDC project).

Today, as well, Dr. Jacobson was one of nine experts whose commentary appeared in The New York Times "Room for Debate" on the theme, How to Improve the N.C.A.A. Tournament! It was very cool to see Dr. Jacobson on the same short list as the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame member, Rebecca Lobo Rishin, and the former Temple University men's basketball coach, John Chaney, among other sports experts! Actually, they are lucky to be on the same short list as Professor Jacobson!

Now you might be thinking how can someone be an expert on healthcare topics such as vaccine production, stockpiling, and pricing, coupled with the analysis of sports tournament outcomes?! Dr. Jacobson is also an expert on aviation security and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2003. His degrees are in mathematics and operations research (with a PhD in the latter from Cornell University). Having critical analytical skills, a strong math background, and the ability to develop creative and insightful mathematical models, with important policy implications, can lead you to study and address numerous important problems.

Dr. Jacobson is a Renaissance man and we are so grateful that he took the time out of his extremely busy professional schedule to come and speak at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst.

We also thank Barry List of INFORMS and its Speaker Program for co-sponsoring Dr. Jacobson's wonderful talk today!