Graduation Time -- Let Them Fly on Their Own Wings

This time of year is when many college graduations and associated events and festivities take place.

Yesterday, UMass Amherst awarded graduate degrees at the Mullins Center and we had a nice group from the Isenberg School officially receiving their PhD degrees.

Today, on a simply gorgeous spring day, undergraduate degrees will be awarded at a joint campus event, which will be followed by individual school events, including one at the Isenberg School of Management. I am looking forward to seeing my Operations Management students graduate! They have all worked very hard and have had the advantage of a challenging curriculum with great professors. Our students are a delight to teach.

The undergraduate commencement speaker will be Sheila Bair, the Chairwoman of the FDIC, who is officially on leave from my department (Finance and Operations Management at the Isenberg School of Management), where she had a faculty appointment for a few years. UMass Amherst issued a nice press release on her being back to speak at commencement.

She, along with Mary Schapiro and Elizabeth Warren, are featured on the latest cover of Time Magazine, with an accompanying article, The New Sheriffs of Wall Street. In the article, former Senator Bob Dole, who was her mentor, is quoted as saying that Sheila "was available 24/7." In addition, he is quoted as saying: As my wife will tell you, more is expected of women. Dole, in 1990, encouraged Sheila to run for an open House seat in Kansas. She ran as a pro-choice Republican and lost narrowly. Senator Dole told me the reason I lost was because I was a woman and I was unmarried, Bair recalled last year, on accepting the Profiles in Courage Award at Harvard University. That made me all the more determined to take on new challenges. Sheila is now married and has two children, including an adopted daughter. She still very much enjoys coming back to Amherst (which, I must say is primarily Democratic).

I agree with Dole's statement that, more is expected of women; nevertheless, we can still be major instruments of change, whether through government, scientific research and discoveries, business, engineering, medicine and healthcare, creative arts, media, and/or education, or, however, we and our family members and students, decide to fly on our own wings.

So, congratulations to all of this year's college graduates!

Amherst as the Center of the Universe and Powerful Women

On Friday, March 27, 2009, the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter had the pleasure of hosting Professor June Dong. Her talk on supply chain disruptions generated numerous questions and brought issues such as traceability in food supply chains to the fore. In addition, she emphasized that the framework today that needs to be captured is that of supply chain versus supply chain competition. She also identified how the work that we had done regarding the Nagurney-Qiang measure could be applied to identify the most important nodes and links in supply chains and the impact of their "removal." What a pleasure it was to host one of our former PhDs -- Dr. June Dong received her PhD from UMass Amherst in 1994 and is a Full Professor at the School of Business at SUNY Oswego. She has held the prestigious Chow Fellowship and various appointments in China.

One brilliant female speaker would have sufficed but we were being "spoiled." Late that afternoon, Sheila Bair, the Chairperson of the FDIC, spoke at the Isenberg School. As I had mentioned in an earlier post, she is a colleague of mine and on leave from the Isenberg School. The Flavin auditorium was filled and even retired faculty and numerous students attended. Along with Dr. June Dong, and another colleague, Jennifer Taub, we found seats towards the front of the auditorium and enjoyed Sheila's presentation immensely. It was on-point, articulate, and punctuated by jokes from her recent experiences. The Q&A was dynamic, illuminating, and very interesting. In my discussions with Taub and Dong we came up with that toxins in food supply chains that Dong had remarked upon in her talk (from the infant formula poisoning in China to the salmonella in the peanut plant in the US) are similar to the toxic financial assets that Bair had talked about. Nothing like network theory to help to identify similarities and differences between applications!

Yesterday (Saturday), as we were catching our breaths from a week that included a PhD dissertation defense, distinguished speakers, and deadlines for proposals to book chapters and paper revisions, we decided to have dinner in downtown Amherst. Sitting in Amherst Chinese Foods, which is owned by Dr. Chang, who also runs his own farm in Whately, my daughter looks out of the window and exclaims: "there is Sheila Bair with her daughter and some friends and I think that she is coming to this restaurant." Indeed, that was the case. Sheila Bair owns a home on Main Street in Amherst and it was a delight to see her and her daughter the day after her presentation at the Isenberg School.

As we left the restaurant we chatted and strolling back to our car I heard a "Hello Professor Nagurney -- how are you?!" Lo and behold, it was one of my undergraduates who had taken my Transportation & Logistics class last semester. He was standing in front of his place of work (yes, we do have a wine/liquor store in downtown Amherst). I informed my family that this student was a Commonwealth College student at UMass Amherst and last semester traveled to St. Andrews, Scotland, to visit his girlfriend. Later in the evening, I pick up my New York Times and there is an article on and photo of Dr. Louise Richardson, the President (first female) of the University of St. Andrews! The article noted that she was one of seven children and that she had received her PhD from Harvard and had been a faculty member there. However, it missed that she had been Executive Dean of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University where I had been a Fellow in 2005 -- 2006. I know Louise from my time at Harvard and she is an expert on terrorism and just a delightful person with an accent that sings!

Good News and the Isenberg School of Management

What a day it was! Yesterday, one of my doctoral students, Patrick Qiang, at the Isenberg School of Management (ISOM), successfully defended his doctoral dissertation entitled, "Network Efficiency/Performance Measurement with Vulnerability and Robustness Analysis with Application to Critical Infrastructure." Patrick gave a terrific one hour presentation on his dissertation and his committee consisted of Professors June Dong, Ana Muriel, and Sanjay Nawalkha. His concentration is in Management Science. It was great to see so many of our doctoral students in the audience supporting him. Patrick is an Associate of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks as is Professor June Dong. Last night we celebrated with a lovely dinner at La Piazza in Amherst, Massachusetts.

The above speaks to one reason why I love the Isenberg School of Management -- our outstanding students, from the doctoral and Master's students to the undergraduates. Speaking of undergraduates, one of my advisees, who has a double major in operations management and economics stopped by my office the other day to chat. The work ethic exhibited by this student, which is characteristic of many of our students, is amazing. Not only is he a double major, but he also is a Resident Assistant in a dorm, plus he even works at Staples in his "free" time. What touched me most during our conversation was when he talked about his dreams and that he loves the Isenberg School, UMass Amherst, and the town of Amherst so much. I told this wonderful student that many of the faculty stay at the Isenberg School because we also really love what it stands for and the amazing people -- from students to faculty to staff and alumni that make up the school. The Isenberg School has always been willing to take risks and to think "out of the box."

For example, a few years ago, the then Dean, Dr. Tom O'Brien, appointed Sheila Bair as the Dean's Professor of Regulatory Policy and Sheila had an office two doors down from me for about 2 years. As everyone knows now, Sheila Bair is Chair of the FDIC, and has been identified as the second most powerful female in the world, after Angela Merkel. Sheila Bair will be speaking today at the Isenberg School after Professor June Dong gives her presentation. Dr. Dong received her PhD from UMass Amherst in 1994. As you may have heard, Sheila will be one of three recipients of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award at ceremonies in Boston in May. Congratulations to the ISOM family!