Looking Forward to Speaking at Texas A&M in its INFORMS Student Chapter and Dow Chemical Speaker Series

I am very much looking forward to being at Texas A&M to speak this coming Friday!

Last week, one of my colleagues at the Isenberg School, Dr. John D. Wells, who is the Associate Dean for Professional Programs, and has both a Master's and PhD from Texas A&M, told me to practice saying "Howdy!" when he heard that I would be speaking there.

I was invited by the award-winning Texas A&M INFORMS Student Chapter, and since I am a big proponent of such chapters, and have also served as the Faculty Advisor to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter for almost a decade, this was an invitation that I could not refuse.

My talk in the series is also sponsored by Dow Chemical and by the great INFORMS Speakers Program (I may be a bit biased since I served on the committee for this program and also chaired it), which I am a big fan of. At the Isenberg School, we have also invited speakers under the INFORMS Speakers Program (Dr. John Birge of the University of Chicago and Dr. Sheldon Jacobson of the University of Illinois, to name two). INFORMS pays, upon approval,  the travel expenses of the speaker, and the host institution pays for the on-site costs. Given the distance between Amherst and College Station and a two-legged flight, I will be overnighting there. Since I have never been to Texas A&M and have quite a few wonderful colleagues there, I am very much looking forward to visiting! I also am very excited about seeing the students there.

I have starting working on my presentation, which is entitled: "Networks Against Time: From Food to Pharma."

 

 It will be interesting to see the terrain there -- the last time that I was in Texas was at the INFORMS conference in Austin.  Prior to that Texas trip, I spoke in Dallas at SMU, courtesy of the Dallas / Forth Worth INFORMS chapter, and that experience was quite the adventure!

Photos from the Fabulous Supply Chain Workshop in Switzerland

Yes, it was a whirlwind trip -- I flew from Boston to Zurich on September 10 and returned yesterday, September 15, with new research ideas, great new contacts, and visual scenes and experiences that were simply fabulous.

Below, I present, in photos, some of the highlights. The purpose of my trip was to deliver the talk Networks Against Time: From Food to Pharma at the Workshop on Supply Chain Vulnerability and Resilience. The Workshop was organized by the ETH Risk Center and the Zurich Insurance Group.

The view from my room at the Zurich Development Center (ZDC) (Lake Zurich and the Alps with the green landscape in the foreground):

Some of the art displayed at the ZDC, which was a former sanitarium and where Bircher invented bircher muesli -- delicious -- soccer fans will appreciate the photos, I am sure:

 Some photos from the conference:

 Scenes outside the workshop venue:

Thanks to the organizers of this Supply Chain Workshop for such an extraordinary workshop in a perfect venue!

3 Great Books by 3 Great Females

Usually, when I am writing a book, I am so focused that I don't read other books during that period.

This year, our Networks Against Time book was published and I heard the other day from a Springer editor, who is also a UMass Amherst grad, that it will be on display at the INFORMS conference in Minneapolis, which is exciting!

 

Once our book was out and, since I was on sabbatical this year, it was time for some reflection,  and that involved reading several books that I was quite interested in because of their authors.

I write nonfiction -- books on network themes from transportation to supply chains to supernetworks and I am also drawn to nonfiction books, from those of a technical and professional nature to  memoirs and, lately, to memoirs by women. One can get valuable advice from the latter volumes and compare your professional and life situation to those of others.

The 3 books that I recently read  (my summer reading, in part) are displayed in the photo above, which also features some lovely craft pieces received as gifts from a former doctoral student of mine, which are from the village in his home country.

Yes, I had to read Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, given all the media attention and commentaries on it,  and was very interested to see whether or not it would "speak" to me as an academic, who also has had several years in industry in high tech consulting for the defense sector. Many pages of Lean In I marked with colorful Post-it notes. Sheryl, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook,  spoke very honestly, in my opinion, of the challenges that she faced even with such mentors as Dr. Larry Summer, the former President of Harvard, whom I met as a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. 

I would love to hear back from female academics who have read this book to see what their opinions of it are!

Fay Ajzenberg-Selove's book, A Matter of Choices: Memoirs of a Female Physicist, I became aware of through an obit written by Gloria Lubkin, which appeared in Physics Today. I had met Lubkin at Brown University through a physics professor there, the great Bob Beyer, who introduced me and my husband, a physics doctoral student at that time, to her. In the obit, she recommended this book, and I was intrigued and loved it! Fay was a trailblazer, who never gave up. One of my favorite paragraphs from her book:

If you work on interesting science, it is essential to schmooze with other scientists in your research field, and find out what they are doing at the time they are doing it. Your own work will not be current if you wait until your colleagues' results are published, since this occurs at least several months after the work is completed. Attending meetings is essential. The meetings take place at venues throughout the world. They are organized in such a way that no group has a recurring burden, nor a disproportionate influence, in running them. It is part of the fun of physics, and of science generally, that its practitioners become world travelers, well acquainted with international airports and with watering holes.

Although Fay could never have children, she had a long, loving marriage and her scientific community was her extended family and did she socialize!

Anna Quindlen, the Pulitzer Prize winning author (for commentary) and former columnist,  has authored many books, including novels. As a mother of 3 out of college children, she, typically, wrote and still does from 9AM until 3PM and her book, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, I very much enjoyed.

Anna Quindlen spoke at a ceremony in NYC at which I received a Young Achiever's Award  from the National Council of Women of the United States, Inc., a few years after my receipt of a PhD from Brown University. In her book, she speaks on the importance of friendships, lending a hand to others, and how far women have come, among several other themes that any female can relate to. I especially enjoyed the afterword in which Quindlen engages in a conversation with her friend, Meryl Streep.

Looking forward to the Vulnerability and Resilience of Supply Chains Workshop in Zurich

The other day I saw a colleague of mine and asked him what was he looking forward to, given that the new academic year was about to begin. 

The response surprised me -- he said "January."  He was serious and was not joking.

I know that, sometimes, perhaps, one may not feel valued by one's immediate organization and that can include one's school or university but one has to look at the bright side of things and make the most of any situation.

As an operations researcher and management scientist, I try to optimize the resources that I am given and to take advantage of any opportunities and, of course, make opportunities for students and colleagues (as much as is feasible).  One needs to be resilient!

I have written a lot on network vulnerability and robustness from supply chains to transportation networks and the Internet with fabulous former students, who are now great colleagues at other universities from Dr. Patrick Qiang to Dr. June Dong, as well as with my collaborators from Dr. Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy and Dr. David Parkes of Harvard University, among many others.

Besides getting ready for the new academic year, which begins at UMass Amherst next week, I am also working on a presentation for a workshop that I am very excited about. The workshop is on Vulnerability and Resilience of Supply Chains and it will take place at the ETH Risk Center in Zurich, Switzerland, September 12-13, 2013. Below, I have posted the agenda, which looks fabulous, and should be an outstanding workshop in terms of presentations and discussion -- so looking forward to it!

 More information on the workshop is available from the workshop website.

Many thanks to all those who have put the agenda and associated activities together!
 

Organizing Committee

• Dirk Helbing (ETH Zurich) 
• Wolfgang Kröger (ETH Zurich)
• Benno Keller (Zurich Insurance Company)

Organizing Team

• Petra Monsch
• Hilary Woodard
• Matthias Leiss

Super News from the Supernetworks Center at the Isenberg School

This has been a very eventful semester!

As we begin to wrap up a great academic year (and although I am on sabbatical) I thought it appropriate to share news even before our next Supernetwork Sentinel newsletter comes out.

Now, some of the latest highlights from the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management and its Center Associates.

Professor Jose M. Cruz, who received 5 degrees from UMass Amherst, including his PhD in 2004 from the Isenberg School with a concentration in Management Science, is the recipient of the 2013 UConn School of Business Graduate Teaching Award. In addition, he will be the Director of the UConn M.S. in Business Analytics and Project Management for the next two years and continues as an Ackerman Scholar until 2014.

Professor Cruz in 2010 received the Undergraduate Teaching Award from UConn's School of Business. We hosted him in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Speaker Series last December and his talk on how to get a tenure-track job and then get tenure was brilliant. When he shared the above great news with me he noted how much his education at UMass Amherst has helped him in his success (and as his PhD dissertation advisor, I could not be prouder).

Amir H. Masoumi will be receiving his PhD this coming Friday in Graduate Ceremonies at UMass Amherst, an event I am very much looking forward to, since now the advisor will be hooding the PhD recipient. This event will take place at the grand Mullins Center in the morning. Amir had requests for over a dozen on campus interviews when he was on the job market this past year and will be assuming a tenure-track faculty position at the School of Business at Manhattan College. He, together with Professor Min Yu, who graduated with her PhD last year (I was also her advisor), Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford, and me, had our book, Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products, published in 2013. This was a great supernetwork team effort!

Also, the special issue of Computational Management Science on Financial Networks, which I guest edited, is now in production. It will be a double issue consisting of 8 papers and I am so grateful to the authors (and the anonymous reviewers) for assistance in this big effort. My editorial, which discusses the papers in this special issue, can be accessed and read here.

Professor Dmytro Matsypura of the School of Business at the University of Sydney has been granted a sabbatical and will be visiting the University of Pittsburgh for two months. He, along with several other Center Associates, including Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business, will be presenting research at the Euro-INFORMS Conference in Rome, Italy this summer. Professor Wakolbinger spoke in our series this past February, after the AAAS Dynamics of Disasters Symposium in Boston with other OR/MS and Engineering luminaries such as Professors Laura McLay, Panos M. Pardalos, David McLaughlin, and Jose Holguin-Veras.

And speaking of conferences, I wrote about the wonderful Computational Management Science Conference in Montreal that I recently returned from, which overlapped by a day with the POMS Conference in Denver. My doctoral student, Dong "Michelle" Li did a great job presenting our latest work on medical nuclear supply chains and pharmaceutical supply chains with outsourcing there.

Michelle Li with Center Associate Professor Patrick Qiang of Penn State Malvern at POMS in Denver and with two other doctoral students in Management Science from the Isenberg School in first photo below.

Michelle with Professor Dayo Shittu, UMass Amherst PhD in Industrial Engineering, who is now a Professor at Tulane University at POMS in photo above.

Our work on our big multi-institution, collaborative  NSF project: Network Innovation Through Choice continues and our paper, The Cyber-Physical Marketplace: A Framework for Large-Scale Horizontal Integration in Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems,Tilman Wolf, Michael Zink, and Anna Nagurney, will kick-off The Third International Workshop on Cyber-Physical Networking Systems, in Philadelphia, in July.

And, speaking of graduations -- what a happy time of the year this is for the graduates, their proud family members, and professors. I will be back at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden soon, as part of my sabbatical this year, and will be giving (for the second year in a row) the graduate commencement address there. The next day, I will fly to Athens, Greece to give a plenary on our NSF project at the Network Models in Economics and Finance conference.

No two days for an academic are ever alike and this is one aspect of the academic life that makes it an honor and truly special.

We Must Go On

Yesterday, as I was packing up and getting ready for my trip this morning to Philadelphia, where I will be speaking later today at the Graduate School of Professional Programs at Penn State, I happened to turn on the news. I was interested in an update on the Boston Marathon results.

A colleague from INFORMS, whom I had met at a wonderful conference in Yalta, Ukraine, was running as well as an Amherst resident, who is a fellow Brown University alum.

Both are women.

I had run marathons (the Ocean State Marathon in Newport, RI) but never the Boston one and the last time that I was in Boston was in mid-February, to lead the Dynamics of Disasters symposium that I had organized for the AAAS meeting, which took place very close to the end of the Boston Marathon route.

The news at 3PM yesterday was "Breaking News" and now the world knows.

We have gotten messages of concern from as far away as Turkey and phone calls from Washington DC.

Boston is a historical and educational and architectural treasure. It is also a center for sports and innovation. It is a beautiful city.

Boston, to me, is the most European city in the US and who cannot love it?

As more information trickles in, and the Boston Common is now a staging area for the National Guard, and even hospitals are turning away blood donors since they are dealing with injuries that one would see in times of war and are strapped for resources, our hearts and prayers go out to the survivors, the victims, and their families and friends.

I heard from my INFORMS colleague -- she finished the marathon and heard about the attacks as she was on the Green Line trying to make her way back to her hotel. Even cell phone communications were stopped for a while, as well as parts of the public transport network, and even flights at Logan. She, as all of us, was reeling from the horror and the shock. And she had just run over 26 miles in a fabulous time.

My neighbor from Amherst -- I checked online -- made it to the half-way point of the marathon  -- and  no more news.

Resilience is what carries marathoners through their journeys and dreams and we need to be resilient.

This evening, when I speak on Networks Against Time: From Food to Pharma, I will be dedicating my talk to freedom and to those who have lost their lives and suffered horrible injuries because of the unexplainable explosive attacks in Boston yesterday.

A Terrific Visiting Professor Program at an International Business School

As a faculty member at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst with research and teaching interests in transportation and logistics, operations research / management science, networks and various methodologies, it is important to always be challenging yourself.

One great way in which to extend one's horizons is to travel and to live and work abroad. One then brings back new ideas for research and education. In the global economy one has to stretch oneself and experience different cultures and business climates.

I have now had a full year's affiliation with the truly excellent Visiting Professor Programme (VPP) at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

My first trip/visit to the school was in March 2012, and I also had extended stays in June and this past October.

The School has produced a stunning brochure which highlights the Visiting Professors, who come from several countries in Europe, Israel, India, and the US. 

I am most grateful for the wonderful opportunities that I have had because of this program, whether in giving lectures, helping out with a PhD course in Operations Management, advising doctoral students, taking part in conferences, such as the Future Urban Transport Conference, and having numerous discussions with colleagues, students, staff, and corporate representatives on industry and academic projects.

Yesterday, we celebrated the publication of two new books -- the book, "Essentials of Information Systems" by my colleague and host in Gothenburg, Professor Jonas Floden, and my new book, "Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products," which I co-authored with Professor Min Yu, Amir H. Masoumi, and Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney. I began writing this book while in Gothenburg and it is based on years of multidisciplinary research on supply chains.

Dr. Taylan Mavruk, a colleague in Finance, took the photo below -- notice the cakes -- they were quickly eaten.

 

Our group at the School of Business, Economics and Law celebrated the publication of our books with 2 cakes -- a blueberry cream cake and a passion fruit cake with a chocolate ganache crust -- exquisite!

The VPP at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg acknowledges the  following companies for their vision and for their generous financial support in helping to create this unique program:
• AB Volvo
• Stena AB
• Sten A Olssons Stiftelse för Forskning och Kultur
• AB SKF
• Elanders AB
• Carl Bennet AB.

As a Visiting Professor I also laud these companies for their foresight and support!

It would be admirable and very rewarding if more business schools in the United States (and elsewhere) could initiate similar Visiting Professor Programs to the one at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg! I also note that the organization and support provided the visiting faculty is outstanding and so very collegial. Thank you!

Great Books by My Isenberg School of Management Colleagues

Business School Profs are dynamic.

Some  do fundamental theoretical work, others make more applied contributions, but all who conduct research  write and speak about their observations and discoveries.

The reputation of any school, including a school of business or management, rests on the caliber of its faculty and that of the students that it graduates.

Some business school profs also write books. These might be of a technical nature, depending on one's discipline, or meant for a popular/mass audience.

Below are photos of (some of the) books by Isenberg School of Management authors that are displayed in our school. 5 of my books are featured.

For a fairly recent list of books authored by Isenberg faculty, see the webpage on the school's website.

At the request of our wonderful Associate Dean, Jane K. Miller, I brought over my latest book, "Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products," that I co-authored with Dr. Min Yu, Amir H. Masoumi, and Dr. Ladimer S. Nagurney, featured in the photo below and just published

Min received her PhD with a concentration in Management Science at the Isenberg School last May and is now a Professor at the Pamplin College of Business at the University of Portland, and Amir recently successfully defended his doctoral dissertation. I was their dissertation advisor. As for Dr. Ladimer S. Nagurney, his college has already started to celebrate the publication of our book. This was a great collaboration, which the Isenberg School helped to bring together.
 

Networks Against Time -- Our New Book is Published!

Yesterday was not only Valentine's Day, but it was also the day that the first shipment of our new book, "Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products," published by Springer, arrived.

The book had already been posted online, in chapter format by the publisher, but the feeling, filled with expectation, of opening the box and then unwrapping the packaging to see the finished product, over which we had  labored hard and long, was very special.

Writing a book is like giving birth (I guess that only females can use this analogy). You hope that, when the time comes, the "child" is healthy and will be with you for a long time. It also takes teamwork -- my co-authors: Min Yu, Amir H. Masoumi, and Ladimer S. Nagurney, made this multidisciplinary approach to supply chains ranging from food to pharma to fast fashion to medical nuclear supply chains and even blood supply chains possible.

The journey of this book, in terms of production, was filled with suspense, since it was emailed in electronic format to the publisher in NYC and then Superstorm Sandy struck, and the Springer offices were without power. I did not even dare to ask about the flooding (the address is on Spring Street). After a few days, I received an acknowledgment that the offices would reopen.

Then, after copyediting, which required some transcontinental communications, and  the correction of the galleys, it was time for production, both virtual (website-based) and physical.

Those of you in the Northeast know that we are still digging out from Blizzard Nemo, so, clearly, there were delays in deliveries because of the road and travel conditions.

This is my 10th book and whether it is your very first or n-th, the feeling of accomplishment is satisfying.

The Supernetworks book that I wrote with June Dong and was published by Edward Elgar in 2002, was sent to our publisher in the United Kingdom just before 9/11. In those days, we did camera-ready copies on special paper, and the parcel that I had mailed was at the JFK airport until flights were allowed to resume.

The Networks Against Time  book I dedicate, posthumously, to my amazing uncle, Mr. Stanley E. Jarosz, who at age 92, was still working for a bridge engineering firm in Manhattan, living on 57th Street, and regularly going to concerts and operas at Lincoln Center. He was a refugee from Ukraine and fled during WWII to Vienna and made his way to the US. He died on February 13, 2013. Several of the bridges that he designed in the US received major awards. He had also been a licensed pilot -- the love of transportation and logistics must be in our family's genes.

In the last conversation that I had had with him -- he was not even ailing and, just over the past several days, required hospice care -- he asked me when I was going to write another book. I told him that my 10th would be out soon. He died  in Colorado, with his son looking over him. He had moved from Manhattan seven months ago after retiring and missed work tremendously.

That night, I could not sleep for several hours -- unknowingly -- and coinciding with his passing. We had spoken with his son (my cousin)  only hours before and I thought that my uncle would still be with us for a week or so.

Uncle Stanley (or Stacho as we called him in Ukrainian), this book is for you!

Today, I will be speaking in the Computational Social Science Seminar Series at UMass Amherst and I had a deja vu. When my dissertation advisor, Professor Stella Dafermos, who was the first female professor at Brown University in the School of Engineering and the Division of Applied Math (and for the historians of science out there -- also the second female to receive a PhD in Operations Research in the world) passed away, I was a Visiting Scholar at the Sloan School at MIT. I received the news of her passing in a phone call from her husband and that very afternoon I gave a talk in the Operations Research Center seminar series at MIT.

Not easy, but such mentors as Stella and my uncle Stanley, who demonstrated remarkable resilience, and true intellect, taught us well.

And I did receive the lovely bouquet of flowers pictured below yesterday as well.