Serendipity of Academic Travel

As an academic I travel a lot from conferences to giving invited seminars to living abroad in various countries when an exciting opportunity arises.

Travel helps to sustain that sense of wonder, which I believe is very important to overall creativity, including research, and to the enjoyment of life.

Of course, when one goes to conferences, gives talks, and holds visiting appointments at various universities, one gets to see people that one would expect to and this is in itself wonderful.

However, this blogpost is about the unexpected meetings, which make for pleasant conversations as well as memories, and help to make the world smaller and people closer.

For example, as readers of this blog know, for the past two weeks I have been in conferences in Europe.

One morning, while strolling for breakfast in Vienna, Austria, where I was attending and speaking at the EURO Humanitarian Operations (HOpe) conference, I came across the gentleman below.

Since I am a faculty member at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass I had to stop to talk to him. He is from Silicon Valley and his son had just graduated in May 2017 with his MBA from the Isenberg School. The Dad was proudly wearing his Isenberg garb that his son had given him. We chatted pleasantly about his son's experiences in our program and even about his favorite professors and activities while enrolled. The meeting made for a wonderful day being even brighter.

That weekend, when between a followup visit to the Vienna University of Economics and Business (which had been the venue for the EURO HOpe conference) and travels to the next conference in Kalamata, Greece (which I had co-organized), it was time to visit a new country. A short train ride from Vienna and we were in Bratislava, Slovakia, where my husband and I enjoyed the eastern European cuisine, crossed the New Bridge over the Danube by foot and then headed to climb up to the castle in the photo below.

At the castle, we were stopped by a gentleman who had noticed my husband's college cap.

He had also graduated from my husband's alma mater, Lafayette College, and was on a European holiday with his family. He works at the SEC. We exchanged business cards.

Now back at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where I am a Summer Fellow (and had been a Science Fellow in 2005-2006), I had the pleasure of seeing another Summer Fellow - Dr. Elaine Chew. She and I, we believe, are the only two Radcliffe Fellows ever  to have PhDs with a specialty in Operations Research. Moreover, she and I are academic relatives in that her doctoral dissertation advisor at MIT, Professor Georgia Perakis, had the same dissertation advisor at Brown University as I did - Professor Stella Dafermos, so, technically, I am Elaine's academic aunt.

Amazingly, last year, at this time, which is the Trinity Term, I was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College in beautiful Oxford, England. There were about a dozen Visiting Fellows at that time, representing different fields, including Dr.  Su Fang Ng, who was a Fellow with me at Radcliffe in 2005-2006! The photo below was taken in the garden at Oxford outside our offices.

And, the other evening, while taking a walk with my husband in the Harvard Square area, we were greeted by a big Hello! It was a neighbor of ours, whose family lives on the same street in Amherst, MA, as we do. He is now a postdoc at Harvard University. It was wonderful to catch up since we had not spoken with him since he began his doctoral studies at Dartmouth!

This week, we will be off to the IFORS conference in Quebec City, Canada, where thousands of operations researchers from around the globe will be presenting their latest work. We will see whom we meet because of the serendipity of academic travel.

Broadening Your Horizons - How a Female Operations Researcher Did It

After receiving my PhD in Applied Mathematics, with a specialty in Operations Research, from Brown University, and evaluating offers from both academia and industry, I accepted the offer of  a tenure track faculty position in Management Science, a STEM field, at the business school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, now the Isenberg School of Management. Since arriving on campus in 1983, I have managed to make “herstory” by becoming the first female Full Professor at the Isenberg School and the first female named chair professor in the UMass system.

Although UMass Amherst is my home and has provided me with the right environment in which I could pursue my research and teach courses on subjects on a variety of network themes including humanitarian logistics and healthcare, I have always felt that to thrive one needs new academic experiences and to challenge oneself by broadening one's horizons.  Such experiences enrich your scholarship as well as teaching.

In 1988, shortly after receiving promotion and tenure, I received a National Science Foundation Visiting Professorship for Women (NSF-VPW) award. I was off to MIT's Civil and Environmental  Engineering Department for a year as a Visiting Professor in the Center for Transportation. At that time,I was the only female faculty member in the department. While there, I taught a transportation network course  and also organized a speaker series focusing on Females in Operations Research at the Operations Research Center. It was a time when MIT Management Professor Lotte Bailyn organized get-togethers for female faculty. I remember them fondly and was able to meet and be inspired by such renowned female scientists as Mildred Dresselhaus. While at MIT I received a UMass Faculty Fellowship, which allowed me to spend another year at MIT, this time at the Sloan School.

In 1996, I was invited to be a Distinguished University Visiting Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. The goal of this professorship was to broaden the visibility of female Full Professors at the KTH since, at the time, there were only two.  With my husband, who also managed to get a Visiting Professorship there as well, and our 2 year old daughter, we embarked on a 7 month adventure during which I taught a class on optimization, met with many colleagues there and students, and managed to co-author the book, Financial Networks. Picking up my daughter, who was enrolled in daycare in Stockholm, then known as daghis, was always interesting because sometimes I would have to find her in a local park with her group where she was learning to climb trees and rocks. She was well-nourished there with a team of cooks preparing lunches consisting of salmon, potatoes, and carrots, with crunchy bread and fish egg spreads for snacks for the children between ages 2 and 7. We lived in the Wenner Gren Center with 150 other visiting academic families. It was a joy to see groups of children with no common language playing together. We ended up returning to Stockholm for multiple months in 1998 and again in 2001, when I co-authored Supernetworks: Decision-Making for the Information Age.

In 2002, I received a Distinguished Fulbright Visiting Professorship at the SOWI School of Business at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, so with my now 8 year old daughter and husband we were off to live in a villa in the Alps while I taught a series of courses on networks, while our daughter attended school (2nd grade), which was only in the morning, and learned her multiplication tables in German. If the students did well on math questions they got to stand on their desks and be applauded. The teacher also taught the children to rollerblade. Culturally, it is expected that Oma and Opa (grandparents) will take care of children once school is over, which we did not have the advantage of, so there was always juggling. Again, the mountains inspired, and no wonder my daughter ended up majoring in geology and is soon off for her PhD in this field. We have returned to beautiful Innsbruck because of the friendships made and once when we did, a colleague was wearing the Isenberg School t-shirt I had given him. Even the waiters remembered our orders in our favorite restaurants there.

In 2005-2006, I had the terrific honor of being one of twelve Science Fellows in a group of about  fifty Fellows at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. This fellowship in a community of writers, scholars from different disciplines, who listened to one another's guest lectures, and enjoyed lunches and great esprit de corps, cemented my thrust to continue placing myself in new environments. While at Radcliffe, I collaborated with female colleagues that Radcliffe helped to support  and completed my book: Supply Chain Network Economics. It was the year that Larry Summers resigned and the Dean of Radcliffe, Drew Gilpin Faust, became the first female president of Harvard.

Over the years 2011-2015, I held a Visiting Professorship at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, with a commitment of 44 days a year, which was very manageable. Living again in that marvelous country I have come to appreciate my male colleagues serious about their parental leaves, the celebrations associated with having a paper or book published, complete with coffee and cakes, and a quality of life with great transportation systems  and a focus on the environment that I wish I could bring back to the US with me.  My family has continued to travel with me as their commitments allow.

Last July, I returned from being a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College at Oxford University, where I spent the Trinity Term,  and was provided with an office overlooking a garden and fountain, and an apartment, with delicious lunches and formal dinners, so that I could just think, reflect, and write. Although scientists are the minority among both Visiting Fellows and Fellows of All Souls College, the conversations with a naval historian, medieval historian, archeologist, classicist,  Sanskrit expert, along with the mathematicians, physicists, and, of course, economists, I will never forget.  And I managed to complete the co-editing of the Dynamics of Disasters book and my Competing on Supply Chain Quality book was published with acknowledgment of Oxford, which I presented to the Codrington library. On June 22, 2016, Encaenia took place at Oxford University, during which 9 were awarded honorary degrees, including Mildred Dresselhaus of MIT. I had the special privilege of speaking with her and reminiscing about MIT at a reception and luncheon at All Souls College following the ceremony. Serendipitously, Louise Richardson, who was the Executive Dean at the Radcliffe Institute. when I was a Science Fellow there, is now the first female Vice Chancellor at Oxford University. On June 23, Britain voted to leave the European Union, with major ramifications for the economy as well as for research funding, and with shock waves permeating globally. And on June 24, 2016, we celebrated at All Souls College the 50^th anniversary of this magnificent program with a full day of events, despite Brexit.

While a visitor at different universities, I have attracted students to our graduate program at UMass. I have also used the knowledge of the various universities to help advise UMass students on their future. I believe that my research was only propelled by my time away and am looking forward to the next opportunity.

Academic Summer Highlights - What Are Yours?

Next Tuesday is the first day of classes of the new 2016-2017 academic year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and students have started to arrive back to campus and the town.

It was a terrific summer and I thought it would be fun to share some of the highlights.

In late April, after teaching my last classes at the Isenberg School of Management, I flew to England to begin my Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College at Oxford University. The experience of being at Oxford for two and a half months (during the trinity term) was magical and many times I felt as though I was living in a novel. Below is a photo of the Visiting Fellows, who hailed from Israel, Australia, England, and the US, along with our Dean, Dr. Simon Hornblower.

While at Oxford, my new book, Competing on Supply Chain Quality: A Network Economics Perspective, was published, and when I returned to Amherst, I celebrated with my co-author, Dr. Dong "Michelle" Li.

I also had the pleasure of making a very short (4 day) trip back to the US in late May to see my daughter, Alexandra, graduate summa cum laude and with honors from college. I am especially happy that she was a STEM major and had an incredible educational experience at Lafayette College, which is also her father's alma mater, serving as President of the crew team, to start.

Back at Oxford my husband and daughter joined me for a while and we visited one of my former doctoral students, Dr. Stavros Siokos, who is a very successful financier in London.

While in England, it  was also very special to give invited seminars at Imperial College in London and at Lancaster University. Our operations research colleagues tend to be the best hosts!

While in Europe, I also had the pleasure of traveling to Poznan, Poland to speak at the EURO conference, which was fabulous and I got to see former students and many colleagues from around the world.

One "lowlight" as opposed to highlight of this summer was waking up in Oxford the day after the UK voted to leave the European Union - known as Brexit. Everyone was walking around Oxford as in a daze and we were so upset that we penned an OpEd, Why we are stronger together,  that appeared in the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

Coming back from Europe I was delighted to see that the STEM Gems book, authored by Stephanie Espy, on 44 women role models in STEM (and I am one of the women featured), had been published and my copies had arrived. My daughter and nieces are the happy recipients of some of the copies and I also gave one to the Isenberg Dean Dr. Mark A. Fuller and to deserving doctoral students for inspiration!

In late August, it was time to drive my daughter to grad school, where she will be working on her PhD.

Then it was time to celebrate with my academic daughters. My doctoral student, Deniz Besik, successfully passed her core exam in Management Science at the Isenberg School on April 5,

and Sara Saberi became my 19th PhD student to successfully defend her PhD, which she did on August 12. She is now an Assistant Professor at the Foisie School of Business at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).

And, of course, no academic summer would be complete without getting some research papers written and, hopefully, accepted for publication! Two highlights were having the paper, Physical Proof of the Occurrence of the Braess Paradox in Electrical Circuits,  Ladimer S. Nagurney and Anna Nagurney,  published in  EPL (Europhysics Letters) 115 (2016) 28004, and having the paper,  A Generalized Nash Equilibrium Network Model for Post-Disaster Humanitarian Relief, Anna Nagurney, Emilio Alvarez Flores, and Ceren Soylu, accepted for publication in Transportation Research E. UMass Amherst posted a nice article on our latest Braess Paradox paper.

Working with other members of our great Supernetwork Team this summer has also been a big pleasure!

This summer the Olympics also took place in Rio and I would be remiss not to mention that one of the highlights was watching Michael Hixon, who is a student at Indiana University, and who also grew up in our neighborhood in Amherst (his parents live up the street from us),  receive a silver medal in diving,  I watched the competitions that he was in via videostream and I was mesmerized and as nervous as when my daughter competed in figure skating.

And, as educators, this is always an exciting time of the year during which we anticipate what will the new academic year bring?!  I have been working on my course lectures and am looking forward to meeting new students and new colleagues.

As for this summer, it will be hard to have a better one, but who knows what kind of adventures await next year!

Our OpEd on Why We Are Stronger Together - Brexit and the Upcoming US Presidential Election

I have been back from beautiful Oxford, England for exactly one month. The memories of the Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College at Oxford University will always be with me from the cameraderie of the Fellows, the wonderful staff and delicious meals, the gardens, my office, and historic Oxford (plus I got a lot of research on supply chains completed).

While in Oxford, we engaged in numerous discussions over meals and afternoon tea and being there during the Trinity term was truly a historic time. The referendum take place on June 23, 2016 and we awoke to the shocking news that Great Britain had voted to exit the European Union (known as Brexit), although Oxford overwhelmingly voted to Remain. Also, we were all anticipating the nominations of the US Presidential candidates. Indeed, many of the conversation would include US politics and Hillary Clinton  or the latest on Trump.

As a researcher and educator but also a blogger I believe that it is very important to share information, commentary,  and opinions with the public.

While still in Oxford and reeling from the vote and the impact that it would have on the British economy and even research funding (plus one of my former doctoral students from UMass Amherst and co-author is a financier in London so we had some great insights as to the possible ramifications of Brexit),  my husband and I sat down that weekend and we wrote the OpEd: Why We Are Stronger Together. We submitted it exclusively to the Daily Hampshire Gazette (DHG) and we received the response quickly on a Sunday with the Editor telling us that it would be published the very next day since he liked it so much.

The  page on which our OpEd appears can be viewed here.

The direct link to the article is here.

One can also read it here.

Our OpEd ends with the following: We are  all stronger together with the free flow of people, ideas, services, and goods.  This enhances the education of our students and the resilience of our communities.

My other commentaries, OpEds, and Letters to the Editors can be viewed on the following page on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website at the Isenberg School of Management.

Visiting Fellows 50th Anniversary Celebration at All Souls College at Oxford University

Yesterday was a truly a historic day in Britain. We woke up in Oxford, England to brilliant sunshine and then were shocked with the news that Britain  had voted to leave the European Union, so Brexit had become a reality.  Living now in a college town - that of Oxford - where intellectual freedom and the movement of ideas and people are essential to research and innovation - the news was shocking and stunning.The repercussions are reverberating around the world.

Yesterday was also the day that we celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the Visiting Fellowships Program at All Souls College at Oxford University. I am now a Visiting Fellow (VF) at All Souls College for the Trinity term. I had received an invitation to attend this full day of celebrations while I was in Amherst months ago and was thrilled to take part yesterday and my husband did as well.

The program is below.

We began with registration and a welcome by the Warden, Sir John Vickers, who is an economist.

Mr. Edward Mortimer, who is a Fellow at All Souls College, provided us with background and the history of the Visiting Fellowship Program, which began in 1966 with the college deciding on November 6, 1965 to admit Visiting Fellows. All Souls College is a unique college at Oxford University in that it does not admit undergraduates.

Edward Mortimer, whom I have mentioned in my blog before, worked at the United Nations and wrote speeches for the former Secretary general, Kofi Annan.

I was delighted to hear Sir John Vickers say that we were celebrating "one of the best things that has happened to All Souls College." He said that the VF Program provides internationalization of the college and to-date there have been 800 Visiting Fellows from 40 different countries. The first female Visiting Fellow Dr. Janet Morgan, now known as Lady Balfour of Burleigh, was a VF in 1982, while she was also studying the BBC, upon the invitation of the PM,  spoke yesterday morning and I was delighted to see her.

 I also very much enjoyed hearing Sir Roger Braithwaite, who is an expert on negotiating with Russians, and is featured in the photo below. He was UK's ambassador to Russia and also its representative at the embassy in the US where he focused on commercial policy and was very successful.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the first Visiting Fellows were invited.

About 130 Visiting Fellows attended the celebration yesterday.

 
After the morning session we were treated to a delicious lunch in our elegant Codrington Library.

The menu is below.

Then it was time for tea and coffee before additional panels ands sessions followed by tea and a concert!

I enjoyed meeting former VFs from Berkeley and Illinois and was thrilled to see Professor Carol Heim of the Economics department at UMass Amherst, who had been a VF at Oxford a few years ago.

 Many thanks to Sir John Vickers and to the Dean of Visiting Fellows, Professor Simon Hornblower, for such a pleasant and very memorable celebration of the the great Visiting Fellowship Program at All Souls College Many thanks also to the staff for the exquisite hospitality, food, and organization.

It has been a marvelous experience being a Visiting Fellow at Oxford and the support, intellectual freedom, fellowship with our Fellows, have all been extraordinary. All Souls College is a unique institution and very special.

Majestic Honorary Degree Celebrations Encaenia at Oxford University with Photos

It is an extraordinary experience to be a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College at Oxford University in England this Trinity term.

Yesterday, Fellows and many dignitaries were invited to take part and celebrate 9 honorary degree recipients. And what a tremendous list of awardees this is!

Below is a photo of the recipients, compliments of Oxford University.

I was absolutely thrilled to see the Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences Paul Krugman and also the National Medal of Science recipient Professor Mildred "Millie"  Dresselhaus of MIT plus the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar as well as Sir Jonathan Ive is Chief Design Officer of Apple Inc and designer of the iMac, PowerBook, iBook, iPod, iPhone, iPad, AppleWatch and MacBookat Oxford on the list! The opera singer Jessye Norman was not able to attend this year.

The day began with peaches, strawberries, and champagne, and a procession in Radcliffe Square to the Sheldonian where the ceremony took place.

After the Encaenia ceremony at the Sheldonian the Quad at All Souls College was the site for drinks before a lavish lunch that took place at the Codrington Library with tea and coffee out in the Quad afterwards. Magically, the skies cleared up so the outdoor events took place on the bright green lawn.

I was absolutely thrilled to be able to speak to Professor Millie Dresselhaus and to even meet one of her granddaughters. I had met Professor Millie when I was a Visiting Scholar and Associate Professor at MIT and we would take part in female get-togethers with Professor Lotte Bailyn of the Business School. She told me yesterday how important it is to have technical female professors at business schools and I agree. We also spoke about several of our well-known colleagues in Operations Research at MIT.

The lunch was fabulous and the seating arrangement very carefully thought out.

The dessert was also wonderful.

My husband was seated in front of the former principal of Hertford College at Oxford University, Dr. John Landers . Hertford used to have an exchange program with his university, the University of Hartford, so we took the following photo.

Seated across from me was the head of public affairs at Oxford University and next to me an amazing female entrepreneur. the conversations just flowed. I continue to be very impressed by Oxford's website and we talked about the importance of getting news on research out by faculty.

After lunch we chatted on the lawn. You can see Pedro Almodovar strolling on the lawn below in red.  I had to have a photo taken with Visiting Fellow Richard Vokes, an anthropologist from Australia. I also took the photo of him, my hsusband, and the brilliant nabal historian Nicholas Rodger.

And, if you take a look at the photo above, which I took because I very much like my Math Fellows Professors Francis Brown and Constantin Teleman, I also serendipitously snapped Pedro Almodovar on the right in the red gown!

Then it was time to walk to Merton College of Oxford University (the university  has 38 grand colleges) to attend the Vice Chancellor's garden party. The Vice Chancellor is Dr. Louise Richardson, who was the Executive Dean at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, when I was a Science Fellow there in 2005-2006. It was great to see her and to shake her hand and to congratulate her on becoming the first female VC in Oxford's 800 year history!

The lawns are beautiful at Merton and the spread of food plus orchestra were grand.

And, later that evening, the remaining Visiting Fellows got together at a pub for dinner and to finish off a truly special day! The full list of Visiting Fellows during this past year is here.

Thank you to All Souls College plus Oxford University for memories that I will always treasure and for friendships made across disciplines! My only disappointment was not being able to personally congratulate Paul Krugman despite trying to find him after the lunch!