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.

Scenes from Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and Cambridge

Yesterday I had the pleasure of being back in Cambridge, MA so I had to visit Brattle Street, Radcliffe,  and Harvard Square.

I spent the 2005-2006 year as a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and that year I wrote my Supply Chain Network Economics book

I have wonderful memories of that year --  of the people that I met, the friends that I made, and of the research  and writing that I did.

I lived on 83 Brattle Street in the building below on the 6th floor.

My office was in Putnam House a few buildings down from my apartment, where, in the Fall that year, one of my neighbors was the French mathematician, Pierrette.Cassou-Nogues from Bourdeaux. 
In the Spring, my collaborator Professor Patrizia Daniele, who is an operations researcher, joined me for several months and Radcliffe provided her with an office in Putnam House, which was terrific! Patrizia is from the University of Catania in Italy and she is also a Supernetwork Center Associate.

Below is a photo taken in front of Putnam House.

Radcliffe Yard looked beautiful and I enjoyed checking out the award-winning sculpture.

The sculpture is an installation called Saturate the Moment.

We wandered over to Bartley's, a Cambridge institution but it was closed.

 

 Cardullo's in Harvard Square had the beautiful gingerbread house in its window below.

Burdick's was open so we enjoyed some delicious hot chocolate! 

We had traveled to eastern MA, since my daughter wanted to meet a friend who had returned from a semester abroad at the University of St Andews in Scotland.  The head (known as the Principal and Vice-Chancellor) of St Andrews is Dr. Louise Richardson, who was the Executive Dean of Radcliffe when I was there. You can see her at our Radcliffe Fellows "graduation" ceremony  in the top photo in my blogpost here.

You may recall that Prince William and his wife, Kate Middleton, the Duke and Dutchess of Cambridge (in England), were recently in NYC for a fundraiser for St Andrews, since they met at this university, and Dr. Richardson can be seen with them here. The 600th anniversary gala for the University of St Andrews took place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

And, when I returned back to Amherst last night, I had a message from none other than Dr. Pierrette Cassou-Nogues, wishing me a Happy New Year!

Celebrating 15 Years of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University

I received a stunning invitation in the mail yesterday, which brought back so many pleasant memories. The invitation was from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the invitation was for a celebration of  15 years since its founding and also 135 years of Radcliffe.

In 2005-2006, I spent a sabbatical at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and was one of 12 Science Fellows that year. I had an office in Putnam House on Brattle Street, one of my favorite streets in Cambridge, MA, because of its location next to Harvard Square and also its history. I loved working that year on my Supply Chain Network Economics book, talking with fellow residents of Putnam - an engineer, sister physicists, linguists, and a computer scientists, and a French mathematician (Pierrette and I still stay in touch). Radcliffe generously also supported two of my female collaborators that year for several months when they visited me.

I also so much enjoyed the lunches filled with conversation across disciplines because that year (and this is another aspect of the Radcliffe Institute experience that is so special) we had novelists, artists, historians, film-makers, a psychiatrist, and other trailblazers, among us. I also very much enjoyed the talks that the Fellows gave and the various formal and informal get-togethers around Harvard and Cambridge.

Radcliffe is very special and its Institute for Advanced Studies is a true gem of scholarship and collegiality.  ORMS Today featured my essay on that very special year - thank you, INFORMS, for the great support of your members! Dr Elane Chew, then of USC, followed in my footsteps, a few years after my Radcliffe year, and I believe that we are the only operations researchers to have been Science Fellows, thus far, and I hope that there will be many more!

Some of you may know that the present President of Harvard, who is also its first female President, Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, was the Founding Dean of the Radcliffe Institute and she was its Dean when I was there. Dr. Barbara Grosz, a renowned computer scientist, was the Science Dean then.

To mark 15 years of the Radcliffe Institute and 135 years of Radcliffe,  there will be a celebration on May 30, 2014.  Also, Drew Gilpin Faust will be receiving the 2014 Radcliffe Medal.

I RSVPed my regrets - I will be in Sweden during Radcliffe Day 2014 - but through this post I wanted to reflect and reminisce and also to thank Radcliffe and the Institute for its support of interdisciplinary scholars and its vision!

Wishing everyone at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study much continued intellectual discourse and discoveries and, again, thanks for such a great year and for the friendships made!

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.