The Syrian Crisis and a Humanitarian Hero - Dr. Mahmoud Hariri

Today we had the great honor of hosting Dr. Mahmoud Hariri, who is a Scholars at Risk Fellow at Harvard University, as a guest speaker in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class.
 
 His guest lecture on the Syrian Crisis had been scheduled for March 7, but, since he had gotten into a course at the Macy Institute at Harvard, he asked for a postponement, and I graciously agreed. It was worth waiting for him!

There were logistics involved even in terms of getting him to speak to my class, which meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 8:30AM at the Isenberg School of Management. Since he is now at Harvard University for a few months, before returning to his home country of Syria, I arranged for a 6:15AM pickup in eastern Massachusetts and he arrived at the Isenberg School at 8:15AM!  Last night he had been busy speaking on a panel at Harvard and meeting with Syrian doctors until midnight.

Dr. Hariri has to be one of the bravest people I have ever met and, in teaching this course and working on disaster relief and operations research, I have communicated and interacted with many courageous and outstanding scholars and practitioners in this field.

He began his presentation by providing us with an overview of the Syrian Crisis and illustrated his presentation with numerous personal experiences. As a trauma surgeon, he has had to work in (and is now even helping to construct) makeshift hospitals, has driven an ambulance (these are usually covered in mud to camouflage), and has seen healthcare facilities targeted with bombs, especially using a double bomb attack tactic.

He shared with us conditions in prison that are so horrific I will spare you the details, but even children are imprisoned for "crimes" allegedly committed by a parent, which could even involve giving medical care to a patient.

Elderly parents are not spared.

He stated that high school students have three options, once they graduate:
1. become a refugee
2. carry arms and become a militant
3. continue one's education, if feasible.


Through incredible creativity and the novel use of technology he is working on educating medical students in Syria, most of whom will not be trained doing dissections, but will work directly on patients, many suffering from war wounds due to bombs and other weapons.


One hospital that he has worked at was targeted 25 times. The health system in Syria has almost collapsed with more than 50% of those working in hospitals now volunteers.


For security, they have moved hospitals underground and emergency rooms are sometimes located separately from hospitals to reduce the chance of detection and strikes. Dr. Hariri, has, at times, had to operate on patients, who are blindfolded, so that they don't recognize him in the community as a doctor, since medical professionals are targeted.

His creativity, drive to do good and help, have resulted in such innovations as having 5 ICUs being monitored from the US, medical education via smart phone, and with students studying on smart phones. He emphasized the importance of learning English among students in Syria and that even a warehouse of books was destroyed by the regime. Many of the books had been provided by the Dutch.  2 and a half million children in Syria are not in formal schools and mothers are trying to home school children.

Some of the bombs that are being dropped are in the form of toys.


There are now 5,000 Syrian doctors in the US but fewer than 2,000 in Syria.

To show you how dire the situation is, when speaking to militants, he was told that they did not want a hospital located in their area, since it was too dangerous!  What a challenge for operations research and applications of location theory!

Dr. Hariri believes that education is essential and will be pivotal in changing the crisis in Syria, a country in which dozens of weapons have been used in experiments.


His presentation, on Prezi, can be viewed here.


The love for his country, his brilliance, ingenuity, dedication, energy, and passion for doing what is right shone throughout his presentation today.

Below is a photo taken after his lecture. I presented him with a plaque for being a Professor for a Day and also a gift from the Isenberg School.

Afterwards, several students lingered to ask him more questions.

Many thanks to a humanitarian hero - Dr. Mahmoud Hariri, for a lecture that noone in the audience will ever forget.

For a nice article on Dr. Hariri in the Harvard Gazette, click here.

Human Migration Networks, the Refugee Crisis, and Operations Research

The refugee crisis in the Middle East, especially from Syria,  and Europe has been a top news story for many weeks now. The coverage has been extensive and the below graphic is compliments of USA Today.

The migrant crisis has been escalating especially the past several weeks with refugees, thousands from Syria, arriving in Greece, usually now by boat from Turkey, and then following land routes, sometimes with the assistance of various governments, to their ultimate destinations. Some have specific country preferences because they may have friends or relatives in certain locations or they have heard good things about a particular country. Germany, for example, has been identified as a final point for many because of its prosperity and also the welcome that Angela Merkel has been extending.

There have also been news articles that have included interviews with refugees who do not want to go to specific countries.

This crisis with the suffering children and families risking their lives and giving up their countries in order to escape war and strife resonates with everyone and it has become also a humanitarian crisis because of the extraordinary numbers of refugees. The crisis has been called by some Europeans as the biggest one since World War II.

In reading about the crisis and also taking to many European friends and researchers as well as practitioners about it I could not help but go back to some of my earlier work on human migration networks.

Many of my doctoral students come from different countries and, ultimately, they settle somewhere as either academics or industry professionals. My second doctoral student, Jie Pan, whose dissertation I co-supervised with Professor Alexander Eydeland, was from China and he was brilliant. In fact, his English was so good that he ended up teaching math courses at Amherst College. His dissertation was titled: "Variational inequalities in the modeling and computation of spatial economic equilibria: Structural reformulations and the method of multipliers," Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1992. We published papers in Operations Research, Operations Research Letters, and the European Journal of Operational Research.

Together we also did a lot of work on human migration networks. My first paper on the topic was published in Economic Letters. Since I was always fascinated by transportation and networks, studying migration was a natural application for me (and I was born in Canada so I am also a migrant, in a sense). In that paper, however, there were no costs associated with migration, which is actually a huge issue especially now in terms of the refugee crisis.  I followed up with several papers in which migration costs were introduced as well as class transformations.

With Jie Pan, we wrote a paper that modeled migration as a chaining phenomenon and also integrated Markov chains and variational inequalities.  In essence, humans can continue to migrate, which we expect to see in the migration crisis in the future. If those who locate in a certain location are not happy, then they will eventually move if the costs associated with migration are not too high relative to the utility gain. Humans compare the utilities of where they are at with the utility of another destination and include also the "transportation" or translocation cost in making their decisions.  Our paper, "Using Markov chains to model human migration in a network equilibrium framework," was published in Mathematical and Computer Modelling and, propitiously, today, I found out that the journal has made the paper available online for free, which is great.

We established in this paper that a stable population distribution is shown to exist under certain assumptions.

Other operations  researchers, who have a passion and inquisitiveness as to how people move in the long-term and where they settle,  have also used our variational inequality framework to build other human migration network models.

Sadly,  Jie Pan died at age 36. He had been diagnosed with lupus and traveled for treatment to China where he passed away. He had achieved promotion and tenure at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia.  I also co-authored a paper with him (posthumously) while I was a Fellow at Radcliffe on evolution variational inequalities, projected dynamical systems, and human migration. The world lost a brilliant operations researcher, husband, and father.

Amazingly, the work that we did on human migration networks is now being used also in ecology especially in the case of the migration of fish!

Dynamics of Disasters - A Conference Not to be Missed

The number of disasters is growing as well as the number of people affected by them from the Ebola epidemic in western Africa to the floods in Kashmir to humanitarian crises in war-torn Syria, Iraq, and eastern Ukraine. 

The challenges faced by citizens, humanitarian organizations, governments, and even businesses in dealing with disasters are immense and the research questions have never been more timely.

Together, with Professors Panos M. Pardalos and Ilias Kotsireas, we are organizing a conference that will take place in Greece this summer that should not be missed.

The conference is on the theme Dynamics of Disasters and the topics that we are seeking papers and presentations on are below:

• Disaster communications and social networks
• Healthcare issues and disaster relief
• Disaster team coordination, integration, and synergies
• Humanitarian logistics and relief supply chains
• Advances in methodological tools for emergency preparedness, response, and risk mitigation
• Performance metrics for disaster response
• Critical infrastructure protection and resiliency
• Financial funding for disaster relief
• Learning from disasters and response
• Cooperative game theory
• Dynamical systems
• Decision-making under risk and uncertainty
• Spread of diseases and contagion
• Modelling and mathematics of disasters.

The Program Committee is nearly complete and we are thrilled to have such a knowledgable and international group:

1. Irene Abi-Zeid (Universite Laval, Quebec, Canada)
2. Bradley Adame (Arizona State University, USA)
3. Fuad Aleskerov (Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia)
4. Ashwin Arulselvan (Technische Universitaet Berlin, Germany)
5. Burcu Balcik (Ozyegin University, Industrial Engineering Department, Istanbul, Turkey)
6. Dirk Brockmann (Institute for Theoretical Biology, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany)
7. Sergiy Butenko (Texas A&M, USA)
8. Patrizia Daniele (University of Catania, Italy)
9. Stanislaw Grzeda (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, USA)
10. Jose Holguin-Veras (RPI, USA)
11. Jacquleen Joseph (Jamsetji Tata Centre for Disaster Management, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India)
12. Joo-Young Jung (International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan)
13. Athanasia Karakitsiou (Industrial Logistics, ETS Institute, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden)
14. Rob Kevlihan (Kimmage Development Studies Centre, Dublin, Ireland)
15. Evangelos Kranakis (Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada)
16. Bishawjit Mallick (Karlsruhe, Germany)
17. Claude Miller (The University of Oklahoma, USA)
18. Athanasios Migdalas (Industrial Logistics, ETS Institute, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden)
19. Oleg Prokopyev (Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA)
20. Olivier Rubin (Department of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University, Denmark)
21. Karen Smilowitz (Northwestern University, USA)
22. Fuminori Toyasaki (Logistics and Disaster and Emergency Management, York University, Toronto, Canada)
23. Chrysafis Vogiatzis (University of Florida, USA)
24. Tina Wakolbinger (Institute for Transport and Logistics Management, Vienna, Austria)
25. Francesco Zirilli (Universita di Roma La Sapienza, Italy).

Information on the conference, including the venue and the deadline for paper submissions is at:
 http://www.caopt.com/DOD2015/index.html

I hope that you can join us - we need the best minds to tackle the problems that we are facing.