The Fun of Public Speaking and Giving Invited Seminars

When faculty (or students) complete research, it is important to disseminate it.  Of course, one should always disseminate research results through publications such as journal articles, OpEds, and, if you have a substantive amount around a central theme, even through books. Speaking at conferences is another wonderful way in which to share one's research and also to get feedback on it.

Another great venue at which to share your research and to educate is through forums such as invited seminars that many departments within colleges and universities organize and hold at regular intervals.

If you have a great talk (or, better yet, since sometimes it is more fun not to be repeating oneself even if the faces in the audience are different, several talks) and are willing to travel, then, when the right invitations come, giving an invited seminar can be great fun.

You may get to go to places that you might not otherwise have gone to and meet new colleagues and students during your travels and also learn about other schools and their challenges.  I recall giving the Kleber-Gery lecture at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, where the faculty have survival gear, including snowshoes, in their car trunks. I was put up in a hotel where Jesse James stayed and I got the bridal suite, complete with a canopy bed!  I spoke at the University of Oklahoma as part of their Dream Course series, instituted by President Boren and was put up in my own villa with multiple rooms decorated with U. of Oklahoma paraphernalia.

I have also given quite a few invited seminars abroad in other beautiful locations such as Stockholm and Gothenburg, Sweden, Vienna, Austria,  and in Catania, Italy. Some of the questions I received from the audiences have turned into research problems that we are now pursuing. The food was also amazing in all those locations and the hospitality!

Other very enjoyable experiences I have had, in terms of speaking engagements, were through the INFORMS Speakers Program. I have traveled to Dallas to speak at SMU through this program, where the audience consisted of academics, students, and practitioners, many from the airline industry, and also to Boston to speak at the Boston INFORMS Chapter with my wonderful host, Dr. Les Servi of MITRE.  For the former presentation, I made it with just minutes to spare - the taxi driver was asking me for directions to SMU  and I had never been there, plus it was after 7PM and pitch dark!

Every audience that you speak to generates new ideas for you and that has something to do with the give and talk of a lively seminar.

Sometimes the invitation to speak may come from an organization or venue, which is unique and also very rewarding. Examples of the latter that I have had have included being a panelist at the World Science Festival on Traffic in NYC and also a panelist on Transport and Traffic at the New York  Times Energy for Tomorrow Conference, also in NYC, with a theme of Building Sustainable Cities. One member of the audience, from Toronto, at the former venue still communicates with me and told me that my panel and presentation changed his life! This year's Energy for Tomorrow conference is taking place in Paris next week under heightened security.

At times the audience may even be a bit "frightened" of your talk. When I organized a team residency at Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center on Lake Como in Italy back in 2004 and was there for 2 weeks, my group, which consisted of three females - we were the first Operations Research group invited for a residency in the center's 50+ year history, gave a talk to other Center Fellows, who included civil rights activists, poets, and even a Lincoln historian. Some were a bit scared that we would be showing some math. I think that we made our talk quite enjoyable but then, to me, networks can be a global language. A similar experience I had while speaking on Dynamic Networks at Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, while I was a Science Fellow there in 2005-2006.

In my previous blogpost, I wrote about how thrilled I was that so many students showed up to my game theory and cybercrime seminar late in the day just  two days before Thanksgiving, when the talk was not even required and no faculty member was taking attendance!  Now, that was an energizing experience and so rewarding.

I will be busy on the lecture circuit over the next few months.

This coming Wednesday, I will be speaking in a Cyber Security Faculty Seminar Series at UMass Amherst (no travel reuiqred). The week after, on December 9, 2015, I will be speaking at MIT in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar Series. I was invited to speak there last year but I was booked with travel and other professional commitments so am very glad that I can do it this academic semester.

On February 17, 2015 (I picked the date), I will be giving a Distinguished Lecture at Yale University in its YINS  (Yale Institute  for Network Science) seminar series, which I am very much looking forward to!

Then the day that our spring break begins, March 11, 2015, I will be speaking at the University of Buffalo (the invitation came before UMass Amherst's football team beat Buffalo's and knocked them out of a bowl game). The seminar series is the Praxis Seminar Series and it was very neat to see Michael Trick, a fellow blogger and INFORMS Fellow,  will be speaking there later this week and my colleague, Sundar Krishnamurthy, who is the chair of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at UMass Amherst will follow me in this seminar series (Maybe it is because the U. of Buffalo is located in Amherst (NY)).

I have also agreed to speak at Carnegie Mellon University of April 4, 2016.

Many thanks to all those who extended such wonderful invitations!

Defying Gravity and Success is the Best Revenge - Nurturing STEM Talent in Our Students, Females and Males

The article by Eileen Pollack in The New York Times, Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science? is a must read. Eileen was one of only two females to receive an undergrad degree in physics from Yale in 1978 and writes eloquently about her experiences and those of other females then and more recently in the pursuit of studies in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. She asks a fundamental question as to why still in the new millennium there are so few women in science and math. The conclusion reached in her very thoughtful and well-written article, filled with highlights from various studies as well as personal stories, is that it is the culture and the lack of support and mentorship.

She ends her aticle by describing a picnic back at Yale recently at which there were several female grad students (it was a picnic for the physics and astrophysics departments) in which there were a few female grad students including one African American.  Pollack concludes as follows:
 

The young black woman told me she did her undergraduate work at a historically black college, then entered a master’s program designed to help minority students develop the research skills and one-on-one mentoring relationships that would help them make the transition to a Ph.D. program. Her first year at Yale was rough, but her mentors helped her through. “As my mother always taught me,” she said, “success is the best revenge.” 

As so many studies have demonstrated, success in math and the hard sciences, far from being a matter of gender, is almost entirely dependent on culture — a culture that teaches girls math isn’t cool and no one will date them if they excel in physics; a culture in which professors rarely encourage their female students to continue on for advanced degrees; a culture in which success in graduate school is a matter of isolation, competition and ridiculously long hours in the lab; a culture in which female scientists are hired less frequently than men, earn less money and are allotted fewer resources.

The above speaks to resiliency and the role that, we, as educators, have in nurturing talent and confidence in our students, both females and males alike, in technical fields.  I teach in a business school but have 3 degrees in Applied Math, with a PhD in the specialty of operations research.  I love math, computer programming, and the applications that our tools and methodologies can help to formulate and solve from transportation to financial services to healthcare to logistics and supply chains. I have written about gender inequality in business schools as well.

A kind sentence can make a difference in a student's life and can give her (or him) the confidence to believe in her or himself and to pursue  advanced degrees and careers in areas where you may stand out (this may have some negatives, at first, but people will remember you).

My seventh grade math teacher, Mrs. Fuller, back in Yonkers, NY, said to me, "One day you will be a calculus professor." That statement has stayed with me to this day as have those that have said: "Anna, being a professor is the loneliest profession," and "Anna, the higher you rise, the greater of a target you will be." The latter two were by two of my male professors at Brown and there is wisdom in both statements, which I appreciate.

And culture is clearly so important so we need to increase the visibility of female scientists, engineers, and also business professionals and scholars. The Times article noted the rather stereotypical representation of female scientists and females in the TV series Big Bang Theory.

Let me give you a VERY cool and REAL example of a top female scientist, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the UMass Rising gala event last April that I wrote about -- the astronaut Dr. Cady Coleman. Cady received her undergrad degree from MIT and her PhD from UMass Amherst in polymer science and engineering.

The photo of Cady and me below was taken at the UMass Rising gala. Cady lives in western Massachusetts with her husband and son when not training and flying in outer space. She was one of the Masters of the Ceremony (along with Ken Feinberg).

There was an article yesterday in our local newspaper, the great Daily Hampshire Gazette (DHG), about Dr. Cady Coleman and how she consulted with Sandra Bullock on the movie Gravity, which will be released today and which also stars George Clooney. She was also featured in Mother Jones with the full article here as well as in Wired. 

In the DHG article, Cady states: I think it's an especially good film for girls. They need models of strong, courageous women who may not always know what to do, but can figure it out. I liked it, in that respect.

 So do be positive with your students -- a few words that recognize talent and an achievement can change a direction of a life!