Magnificent OIM Awards Celebration 2026

On April 20, 2026, my Operations and Information Management (OIM) Department at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst helds its Awards Celebration event.

A big CONGRATULATIONS to ALL the amazing students that were recognized and to the recipient of the OIM Distinguished Alumni Award Paul Cichocki! The awards celebration, which included a delicious banquet meal at The Inn at Boltwood in Amherst, was lovely - with expert organization, thanks to the Department Chair Professor Senay Solak, the Associate Department Chair Professor Michele Burch, and our great Office Manager Samantha Whittle. 

Congratulations to: the RSM U.S. Foundation Consulting Scholarship Recipients: Iris Cabral and Kamila Velez; The NCG Operations and Information Scholarship Recipient: Wendy Zou, and to The Nagurney Scholarship Recipient: Campbell Hatcher. Bravo to the Isenberg Senior Leadership Award Recipient: Gowri Vellanki and to Spencer Zbitnoff on his Isenberg Academic Excellence Award. The OIM Exceptional Impact Scholarship Recipients are: Reese Barnett, Suzanne Patti, Alfonso Alvarez Ribeiro, and Josie Wu! Congratulations to all the OIM Elevate Scholarship Awardees: Darrius Lupo, Ryan Bonia, and Carolin Zorrilla We also recognized two PhD students with the OIM Elevate Scholarship: Yue Xue, who is pursuing her doctorate in Information Systems, and Solmaz Abbaspour, who is pursuing hers in Operations Management. 

Many thanks to the OIM Faculty Scholarship Committee Members: Professors Susan Boyer, Ying Liu, and Shirley Shmerling. Many of the faculty, students, and their supporters lingered after the ceremony as we basked in the warmth of this truly special academic community. Best to all our students as they pursue their dreams!

This was the third time that my department held such an Awards Celebration and it is one of our favorite events of the academic year. It was also very special to have Campbell Hatcher receive The Nagurney Scholarship, which my husband and I established. Campbell wrote us a lovely letter a while back. She is majoring not only in OIM but also in Sport Management and, after her graduation next week, will be joining Kerry in Wisconsin. Her work ethic and engagement in so many activities, including mentoring ones, while working about 25 hours a week are inspiring.

Lovely Operations & Information Management Awards Celebration 2024

On May 2, 2024, in the Inn at Boltwood in downtown Amherst, my department held an Awards Celebration to recognize student achievements.

It was a lovely evening with delicious food, great company, and ceremony recognizing each student awardee. The full list from the program is below.

The two students that I had nominated, Khang Banh, who is from Vietnam, and is an undergraduate graduating this month, and Dana Hassani, who is my PhD student, concentrating in Operations Management,  received the OIM Exceptional Impact Scholarship. Khang Banh, in addition, is one of only ten recipients of the Outstanding Student Employee Award this year from UMass Amherst! Dana is the President of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter and has already published two journal articles, co-authored with me and colleagues in Ukraine at the Kyiv School of Economics, Professor Oleg Nivievskyi and Dr. Pavlo Martyshev.

It was delightful to meet family members, who came, as well as friends of the students.

The Chair of the OIM Department, Professor Senay Solak, and Dr. Michele Burch, the Co-Chair of the OIM Department, did a superb job reading bios of the students and assisting with giving out the awards.

Many thanks to my OIM colleague, Dr. Oscar Lopez, for taking the below group photos. Along with Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney, I had to leave a bit early for another event. It is a very busy time of the academic year with many celebrations taking place.

Special thanks to Dr. Shirley Shmerling and Susan Boyer and Dr. Ying Liu for the great work on selecting the awardees and on organizing the event with a special shoutout to our outstanding Office Manager Samantha Whittle for designing and producing the elegant program, the name cards, and making sure that the event was so memorable!

And, most importantly, congratulations to all the student awardees! Your work ethic and creativity and dedication and academic success inspire us. The awardees hail from multiple countries and one even from the town of Amherst.

Marking the Retirement of a Great Isenberg School Finance Colleague - Professor Ben Branch

Last evening we had the honor of taking part in the retirement party of my Isenberg School of Management Finance colleague, Professor Ben Branch. The reception and dinner took place at the Marriott Center at the UMass Amherst Campus Center.

Professor Ben Branch, who received his PhD from the U. of Michigan in 1970,  has been on the Isenberg School faculty since 1975 and he is still teaching a class this semester. He is renowned for his work on investments and bankruptcy. In 2007, I had nominated him for the UMass Amherst Faculty Distinguished Lectureship, which he received. He and I were one of the very few Isenberg School faculty recognized in this wonderful way.

The evening was a fitting tribute to a true "gentleman-scholar," one who arrived at his office at 6:30AM, sometimes with his dog, and whose kindness helped to support multiple faculty and not only in his Finance Department. Professor Branch I had met when I was interviewed at UMass and he was one of about 20 faculty that attended my interview at the Lord Jeffery Inn in Amherst. 
When my daughter was born, he and his wife were among the first to come visit us in our hone to celebrate. He is always very dapper, and, in his wardrobe, he has about 40 bowties, so yesterday, as a tribute, my husband also wore one in his honor.

When I joined the faculty at the Isenberg School, our department was the Department of General Business and Finance, so my Finance colleagues were always there for me. The department has gone through various renamings and now we are two departments; Finance Department and the Operations and Information Management Department. Several present and former chairs of these departments also came to pay tribute including: Professors Iqbal Ali, Sanjay Nawalkha, and Nelson Lacey, who was a terrific Master of Ceremonies.

In the above photos are: Professor Ali, my husband and I, Finance colleagues: Professors Fousseni Chabi-Yo, Mila Sherman (the first female Full Professor in Finance, who acknowledged Ben's support, and Nikos Artavanis, who traveled from Virginia Tech for the retirement party, where he is now a Visiting Professor. We saw him last week in Blacksburg!

Joining the bowties in the above photo is Professor Hossein Kazemi, the Director of CISDM.

Several retired faculty (including Professors Charlie Schewe and Tony Butterfield) showed up to honor Ben as well as faculty and staff from other departments, including Professors Easwar Iyer and  Jennifer Merton, which was wonderful. Our Interim Dean, Tom Moliterno spoke, as did Professor Hossein Kazemi, who gave a hysterical rendition of how he was interviewed by Ben and got the job (and we had a walk down memory lane with both Dr. Alex Barges and Dr. Craig Moore mentioned). Several of his former doctoral students also came, including one who traveled all the way from California to honor his dissertation advisor. Professor Branch shared with us how proud he is of his former doctoral students. I enjoyed Professor Larry Zacharias' tribute very much. He noted not only Professor Branch's intellect and his interests in politics, but also how he studied astronomy and very early in the morning (about 3AM) he would go to observe and visit the beavers close to his home.

Professor Nelson Lacey presented the honoree with a gift.

Professor Branch wanted to have the last words and they were very touching, emphasizing the long way that our business school has come since his arrival over four decades ago. In the 1970s there was even a typing pool and computing was done with the use of punch cards.

Ben loves my borshcht, so in honor of him I have a huge pot on now and he and his family are welcome any time.

Thank you, Professor Ben Branch, for being such a special colleague of so many of us over so many years! You will always be a part of the Isenberg School of Management.

A Leader for the 21st Century from the Isenberg School of Management

Yesterday was a truly marvelous day with the Isenberg School of Management (ISOM) commencement at the Mullins Center. This is  a special ceremony in which each of the ISOM graduating senior undergraduates receiving their degree, gets their name called, receives a medal, and gets recognized by our fabulous Dean, Dr. Mark A. Fuller, and our exceptional Undergraduate Associate Dean Dr. Linda Shea. Faculty from the graduate's department (and we have 7)  then shake hands and often also share hugs. It is a day to remember.

Wonderful speeches by our Deans as well as an uplifting video on our school's namesake, Mr. Gene Isenberg, added to the special ceremony.

I very much enjoyed being a faculty marshal with my Sports Management colleague, and our Director of Diversity, Dr. Nefertiti Walker. We were all led by Mr. Lou Wigdor, who carried the Isenberg School banner.

I could not resist taking the photo of my Operations and Information Management (OIM) colleagues below after we had shaken our OIM graduates' hands.

Also recognized at the ceremony were our student leaders and award recipients, including the Jack Welch Scholar from the Marketing Department, Elizabeth Miranda Imbrogna, and Karen Li, an OIM major and premed, whom I had nominated for the 21st Century Leaders Award. Karen was one of ten recipients of the 21st Century Leaders Award from the entire UMass Amherst undergrad graduating class of over 5,000!

The day before Karen was recognized at the UMass Amherst graduation and sat on the podium with our Chancellor and other dignitaries, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, who gave a tremendous speech.

And, on Friday evening, my husband and I took part in a very special commencement celebration at the UMass Amherst Campus Center honoring the 21st Century Leader Award recipients and the Jack Welch Scholars as well as the jazz legend, Sheila Jordan, the honorary degree recipient.

Above is Karen Li receiving her award from the UMass Amherst Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy and Provost Katherine E. Newman as well as the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Campus Life, Dr. Enku Gelaye. Michaella Morzuch, President of the UMass Amherst Alumni Association, was the excellent moderator and emcee who announced the award recipients.

Congratulations to all!

I have written about Karen Li and her accomplishments before, including her 100 page honors thesis, which she defended at the Undergraduate Research Conference on April 28.

It was so special to celebrate this occasion even with the Amherst Fire Chief Mr. Tim Nelson, who Karen had interviewed for her thesis. He also graciously hosted a tour of the North Amherst Fire Station last year for the students in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class that Karen was in. Joining us in the photo below are Dean Mark A. Fuller and Associate Dean of the College of Engineering, my marvelous collaborator on two National Science Foundation grants, Dr. Tilman Wolf.

Three generations of Karen's family celebrated with us.

The food and lovely evening all those in attendance will never forget.

I also had a chance to meet the commencement student speaker, Conor Janes O'Kelly from Ipswich, whose moving tribute to his father, who would always leave him a note in his lunchbox on the first day of school, was heartfelt. Below is a photo of Conor and his Dad at the commencement celebration dinner.

We wish all of the class of 2017 much happiness and professional success! With 21st Century Leaders such as these, lucky are those who are faculty at the Isenberg School of Management and UMass Amherst!

Great Undergraduate Research Conference at UMass Amherst Plus Humanitarian Logistics Thesis Defense

Today I had the pleasure of attending the Undergraduate Research Conference at UMass Amherst held at the Campus Center Auditorium.

This was a system-wide conference and just look at the schools that were represented below.

 I was excited to even get a name tag.

The reason I was there (and this is certainly a very busy time of the year since it is nearing the end of the academic year plus later today we have our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter party to which I a bringing Ukrainian food), was that one of my undergraduate students in Operations and Information Management, Emilio Alvarez Flores, was defending his honors thesis at this special event.  Professor Ceren Soylu of the Department of Economics and I are co-chairing Emilio's  thesis committee. he title of Emilio's thesis: "Optimizing Non-Governmental Organizations’ Operations and Fundraising: A Game-Theoretical Supply Chain Approach."

Emilio had his presentation as an electronic poster.

Emilio is also a student in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class this semester and his thesis passed with flying colors and it a great contribution to humanitarian logistics.  His interests lie in operations research, economics, and game theory, and his thesis was an excellent example of all three areas.

He begins his dissertation with the following quote by Martin Luther King Jr.:
“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is,
’What are you doing for others?’”

The thesis not only develops both Nash Equilibrium and Generalized Nash Equilibrium models for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)  who seek to deliver relief supplies post-disaster to points of demand, while also competing for financial funds, and presents several numerical examples, but, also, contains a realistic case study focusing on Hurricane Katrina. The case study uses the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, as well as other NGOS as the involved disaster relief organizations. In fact, Emilio, Professor Soylu, and I submitted a paper based on the thesis to a research journal because both the model and formulation as well as examples are quite novel. The framework guarantees that there will not be oversupply (resulting in materiel convergence) or undersupply (resulting in suffering and loss of life) of relief items at various demand points, through the imposition of upper and lower bounds on the demands by a higher body or regulatory organization.

As Emilio states in his dissertation:  This research has a host of implications for both coordinating authorities, that is governments and organizing bodies like the United Nations, and managers in the public sector. As far as coordinated authorities are concerned, this research provides a strong argument for their importance in having successful humanitarian relief efforts. In fact, our research suggests that if authorities can impose the constraints on upper and lower demand levels, they can provide an effective mechanism for improving responses to disasters. In particular, it is imperative that we stress the importance having reliable statistics on the population that can be used to create the estimates on the upper and lower bounds on the demand. If NGOs do not believe that this estimates are reliable, it is highly unlikely that a coordinating authority will be capable of imposing the associated constraints in practice. In addition, governments and other authorities should include collaboration with and between NGOs as part of their preparation before a disaster. It is easy to imagine that attempts to perform large-scale coordination efforts during the response phase are likely to go awry or to be ineffective. Coordinating authorities that are successful in doing so should be capable of improving the outcomes of their relief efforts under the assumption that NGOs have the goodwill to be part of this mechanism.

Emilio is graduating from UMass Amherst on May 6 and will be starting his position at Cisco shortly thereafter. The passion and dedication that he has exhibited throughout his research project have been extraordinary. It was truly an honor to co-chair his dissertation and a great experience to also work with Professor Soylu of the Economics Department at UMass Amherst.

It was nice to see some of Emilio's friends come out to support him today.

I enjoyed speaking with several researchers from various colleges and was very impressed by the enthusiasm of the undergraduate researchers for their projects, whether researching Icelandic sagas,  whether journalists should not identify their sources, or the pros and cons of single gender precollege schools, or the effects of  preschool education on high school graduation rates around the world.

Attendance was great at this special event.

Also, I might add, that last week, on April 15, when I was at the University of Waterloo in Canada giving a plenary talk at Analytics Day, Emilio Alvarez Flores was one of ten recipients of an Honors Dean's Award from the Commonwealth Honors College at UMass Amherst. Writing a letter of nomination for him was a joy.

Congratulations to all undergraduate researchers who presented today at the Undergraduate Research Conference at UMass Amherst. I hope that you never lose that intellectual curiosity!

Just Some of the Very Cool Accomplishments of Isenberg Faculty This Summer

One of the best aspects of the Isenberg School of Management in addition to, of course, our great students, is the faculty, who are my colleagues.

This summer there have been so many accomplishments at a time when the public think that we are just "on vacation" that I thought they would merit a blogspot. Besides being intellectual leaders, my colleagues are terrific educators and also genuinely nice and very interesting people.

My readers know that in late June and July I was in Greece co-organizing the Dynamics of Disasters conference with Professor Pardalos of the University of Florida and Professor Kotsireas of Wilfrid University in Canada.

We were in Kalamata, Greece on June 29, 2015 (the first day of our conference) when the banks closed due to the Greek financial crisis and the lines at the ATM machines (which had financial funds left) were growing.

My Isenberg colleague, Professor Nikos Artavanis of the Finance Department, meanwhile,  had been researching the crisis and what to do about it. His study, co-authored with two colleagues from the Booth School at the University of Chicago,  "Tax Evasion Across Industries: Soft Credit Evidence from Greece," revealed  that tax evasion was most prevalent among Greece's highly educated professionals, that is, doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, and even journalists. Hence, what was needed, was a good tax collector in Greece! Nikos's paper received international attention and a writeup from CBS News can be found here. 

Professor Artavanis, by the way, is Greek, and he often brings me back some Greek coffee from his travels there, which I very much appreciate.

And, another Finance professor at Isenberg, Dr. Mila Getmansky Sherman, with whom last September, along with my Operations and Information Management colleague, Professor Senay Solak, and Engineering colleague, Professor Wayne Burleson, we organized a great (I am biased but it was terrific) cybersecurity workshop at the Sloan School of MIT, also had great media coverage of her latest research. It was conducted with Professor Andrew Lo of MIT (who was a keynote speaker at our workshop). The paper, "Hedge Funds: A Dynamic Industry in Transition," was also co-authored with Peter Lee. According to the study, "due to inherent biases in the way hedge-fund databases compile results, the industry's returns have been about half as strong as they appear," as reported by Bloomberg News. The interview and report can be accessed here. 

My Marketing Department colleagues, Professors Charles Schewe and George Milne (who is also Isenberg's PhD Program Director), completed, along with two of our doctoral students and a colleague from Australia,  a fascinating study on baby boomers and aging. Their findings, according to the University of Technology Sydney, in Australia:

• They found that what counts isn’t how many birthdays you’ve had but social, mental and biological factors.
• With the help of the subjective age index, you may be able to correct any of those factors so you can ‘manage’ your age.

My Sports Management colleague, Professor Todd Crosset, earlier this summer, delivered an invited talk in Geneva on racism in sports. He was invited by the United Nations to speak on his work. 

My Accounting Department colleague, Professor David Piercey, shook up the auditing world this summer with his paper, which, through behavioral experiments, showed that forcing companies to periodically change their auditing firms can prove counterproductive. His paper was published this summer in The Accounting Review.  This research received extensive coverage in the accounting press.

And, Professor Bradley Bennett, also of Accounting, recently, received a big honor, the Wildman Medal Award, for his co-authored paper, with Professor Hatfield of the University of Alabama, "The Effect of the Social Mismatch Between Staff Auditors and Client Management on the Collection of Audit Evidence."

There are many other achievements but the above, I believe, provide a wonderful snapshot of the kind of research and activities that faculty at a business school, and, especially the Isenberg School of Management, engage in.

Having such successful and very active faculty keeps one constantly striving and achieving but, then again, we certainly love what we do!

Congratulations to the Isenberg School Class of 2015!

This morning, the Isenberg School graduation for our undergraduates, class of 2015 took place, with graduating seniors from our 7 departments being honored.

The event took place at the Mullins Center at UMass Amherst and it was a joyful occasion, which flowed smoothly, and those of us in Operations care about such things. Associate Dean Linda Shea was a great emcee and had an inspiring speech. The student speaker was Lauren Casaceli, who has been a great ambassador for the Isenberg School, and has had a leadership role in organizing the very successful annual Women of Isenberg Business Conference. Dean Mark A. Fuller had closing remarks, took another selfie, and showed a video tribute to Gene Isenberg and his family.

The faculty always enjoy shaking hands with the graduates from their departments and it was great to see so many Operations and Information Management graduates. I was hoping to see more parents afterwards but with about 1,000 graduates across all departments, that was rather challenging.

The photos below I took before, during, and after the ceremony today. The faculty were resplendent in their academic regalia.

Congratulations to the Class of 2015!

The family members and friends of the graduates as well as other faculty after the ceremony in photos below.