Welcoming my New PhD Student to the Isenberg School of Management

It has been a dynamic first two weeks of the new academic year at UMass Amherst! I have been busy teaching my Transportation & Logistics class at the Isenberg School of Management and also with PhD comprehensive exams (3 for our Operations Management (OM) PhD students, 2 of whom are my students) plus many additional meetings.

A highlight of a new academic year is always meeting new students.  I was delighted to meet my new OM PhD student, Sarvagya Jha, who is from India. He joined me and my three other PhD students: Dana Hassani, Samira Samadi, and Ismael Pour, in my office. I then took the photo below next to my framed mathematics academic genealogy tree, which, through my PhD advisor at Brown University Stella Dafermos, goes back to James Maxwell, Isaac Newton, and Galileo Galilei, which is quite inspiring, I must say. The academic genealogy was presented to me by my former PhD student Dong "Michelle" Li, who is now a tenured Associate Professor at Babson College in Wellesley,  MA.

You can read more about my academic genealogy on my blog here: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-academic-family-tree-going-back-to.html

Good luck to all students on the new academic year!

The Academic Family Tree Going Back to Maxwell, Newton, and Galileo

I always felt like I was standing on shoulders of giants in terms of outstanding researchers and scientists and, yesterday, my most recent Isenberg doctoral student to receive the PhD, Dong "Michelle" Li, surprised me with a truly special gift. Michelle is my 18th PhD student to receive the PhD.

She had my academic math genealogy tree printed through the Mathematics Genealogy project.

Typically, one is aware (obviously) of one's own PhD students and, of course, of one's dissertation advisor and probably knows of her or his advisor but how far back can you go? Below, I am with Michelle and her parents, both of whom are academics, and who traveled to Amherst for their first visit to the US to help Michelle in her move to assume an Assistant Professorship. Michelle and I are holding a poster of my academic family tree (ancestors and progeny).

Below is a photo of my academic family tree, which includes some renowned scientists such as James Maxwell, Isaac Newton, and Galileo, going back years, and operations researchers, more recently - Stella Dafermos and her advisor, Frederick (Tom) Sparrow.

Speaking of Maxwell, my academic great-great...-grandfather was looking over us when we were recently in Scotland to attend the EUROPT and EURO2015 conferences.

And, since the above photo of the academic family tree is hard to read, below I have included snapshots of the huge poster that Michelle presented to me. What surprises me is the list of academic ancestors that I have who received their PhDs from the University of Edinburgh or the University of Cambridge! Next spring I will be a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University so will have to stop by Cambridge to pay my respects.

 

 

 

It is quite amazing that operations researchers can trace their lineage to physicists but, then again, the father of operations research, Philip Morse, was a physicist!

And since I could not fit all of my PhD students into a readable photo the full list is here.

Just over 4 years ago, OR superstar and fellow blogger, Mike Trick, had a great post: Hello cousin!  In it he noted that we were actually cousins, academically related through Frederick (Tom) Sparrow, who was my advisor's (Stella Dafermos') advisor at The John Hopkins University. His post inspired my blogpost at that time.

My Academic Mother

It was my second year at MIT.

My first year at MIT, back in 1988-1989, I had spent in the Transportation Systems Division in Engineering, supported by an NSF Visiting Professorship for Women (VPW). During that year, I taught a course and also organized a speaker series to bring Women in Operations Research to MIT, and their talks took place at the MIT Operations Research Center. My dissertation advisor at Brown University had been Stella Dafermos, who held appointments in Applied Mathematics and in Engineering. Stella also had had a VPW earlier at MIT and I had decided to apply and received the NSF grant/award.

My first year at MIT was terrific. I had received my promotion and tenure two years prior (four years after getting my PhD from Brown University in Applied Mathematics, with a specialty in Operations Research) and I was always open for new challenges and experiences.

UMass Amherst, I suspect, was pleased with what I was doing in terms of research and I was lucky to receive a UMass Faculty Fellowship after my VPW, which allowed me to take another year to think, conduct research, and to write, so I elected to stay at MIT. I loved living on Mass Ave (past Harvard right next to a trolley bus station), riding the T, interacting with the students and colleagues at MIT, and taking advantage also of seminars at Harvard. That year, I hosted several visitors from around the world, whom I would treat to the buffet lunch on the top floor of what was then the Sloan School of Management building.

I especially enjoyed running into the Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson, whether in the cafeteria, the snack shop, or the elevator, resplendent always in his bow tie, who seemed to like to eat as much as I did. His query: "Anna, have you proved any good theorems lately?" stays with me. It was a marvelous year and even on Saturdays (I won't mention names) there was always a Full Professor who put on the pot of coffee at Sloan. Surrounded by brilliant, collegial minds in operations research and in economics, life was good!

As Dickens, however, wrote in his Tales of Two Cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

That September, of my second year at MIT, my mother passed away and that April, shortly before she would have turned 50, my dissertation advisor, Stella Dafermos, also died. I received the phone call in my Sloan office just before I was to give a seminar at the OR Center, which I did. Stella's funeral in Providence and her burial in April, 1990 in the cemetery on Blackstone Boulevard, as the snow was melting and the daffodils were popping up, I will never forget.

Within 7 months, I had lost my two mothers.

Stella had been the second female PhD in Operations Research. I was asked to write several obituaries, including one that was published in Operations Research, and, as her first PhD student, this was a special, albeit painful, honor and privilege. In preparing my writeups I conversed with many leaders in OR (including Nemhauser) and we concluded that she had been the second female OR PhD (although some of us had thought that she had been the first). She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, moved on with her husband to Cornell, and then settled at Brown University.

I never had Stella as an undergraduate at Brown, but heard from my fellow Applied Math majors (many of whom were female), including my room-mate, about what a great teacher she was.

After receiving two degrees from Brown and working in the defense sector in Newport, RI, running marathons, and having my companies pay for my Master's degree at Brown, I decided to enroll full-time at Brown and Stella became my advisor. Her grants supported me and in 3 years I completed my PhD. Stella needed a student who was good at computing and since I had really enjoyed computing while at Brown and in industry plus I was always fascinated by transportation and networks, it was a great match. I also sought out the only female faculty member in Engineering and in Applied Math.

We would talk for hours in her office and even in her home, when she would welcome her children from school. Regularly, on Thursdays, she would go up to MIT for the OR seminars.

Together we published multiple papers that appeared in Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Transportation Research B, and several economics and regional science journals.

We would read our papers out loud since not only did the work have to be good but it had to sound good --OR as poetry/literature (non-fiction, of course)! Manuscripts were written and rewritten multiple times until it was time to get them typed-up and then submitted.

Being a teaching assistant for Stella was always enjoyable, and with the likes of Irv Lustig, in classes, it made my job easy (and with Les Servi also at Brown then always pleasant).

Even as a doctoral student, I had opportunities to travel with Stella to conferences (sometimes with my husband as the navigator). At OR conferences, during the academic year, while I was an Assistant Professor, we would often share rooms at conferences (not only to save grant funds but because it was fun).

With Stella, we explored Tokyo, Athens (she was the guide there), and had some of our most memorable adventures in Amsterdam (en route to my first European conference, which was in Delft). We thought we would be settled in our hotel room, and then there would be a knock on the door -- it would be Stella asking us to join her on another adventure (in Amsterdam, we were even offered "family discounts" and on a dinner canal boat ride asked whether we wanted to be seated with our "mother-in-law" or not).

All four of Stella's PhD students (3 of whom were females) are now Full Professors (she died while her 4th student had not yet completed her PhD) and three of my former PhD students have also reached the Full Professor rank.

Stella, you gave us standards that we continue to aspire to.

Your legacy is eternal and your academic children, grandchildren, and cousins thank you.

This blogpost was written for the INFORMS blog Challenge on OR and Families.

For additional perspectives on academic genealogies and words of wisdom, connect with the writings of my fellow colleagues, Mike Trick and Laura McLay.

On Being a Proud Academic Mom

When your children surprise you by doing something unexpected and wonderful, they certainly make a mother proud.

I have been smiling all morning since I heard that a group of my former students at the Isenberg School, all of whom received their PhDs in Management Science from UMass Amherst, co-authored a paper, which has now been accepted for publication.

I was the chair of their doctoral dissertation committees.

Yes, we in academia, consider genealogy, especially of the academic kind, to be important; see a recent blogpost and links on this.

Not only is the topic of the paper so timely -- that of closed loop supply chains (CLSCs) -- but the team is made up of four, Assistant and Full Professors, who hail from the states of Pennsylvania, New York, Texas, and Washington.

The paper, The Closed-loop Supply Chain Network with Competition, Distribution Channel Investment, and Uncertainties, Qiang Qiang, Ke Ke, Trisha Anderson, and June Dong, has been accepted in the journal, OMEGA.

In this paper, the authors developed a CLSC network model, consisting of raw material suppliers, manufacturers, and retail outlets. The demand of the retailers was satisfied either by newly manufactured products or by remanufactured products which were deemed comparable to the new ones in function and quality. The consumers were indifferent in their demand for either products.

The authors assumed that the manufacturers collected the recycled product directly from the demand market, similar to the operations of Hewlett-Packard and Xerox Corporation regarding printer cartridges.

The model has a sufficient level of complexity to capture the major environmental and behavioral as well as pricing issues, while, at the same time, being both theoretically sound and computable (very important for practice and analytics).

In the paper, the authors note that:

The volume of waste is growing at an alarming rate and environmental recovery is an option that is underutilized since firms are unsure how to mitigate the ambiguity surrounding economic performance. By providing clarification of reverse supply chain issues, and firms re-examine their recovery efforts, the environmental benefits can be pronounced, for example, reducing landfill space, reducing air pollution, and leveraging the earth’s natural resources, to name a few. Equipped with our model, one can “fine- tune” the parameters to study the behaviors of different decision makers in the CLSC, which also can generate some implications for the policy maker.

Nothing can make a Mom prouder than when her "children" soar!

The Academic Genealogy Surprises Continue -- Back to Newton and Even Galileo Thanks to Mike Trick

Those of us in Operations Research are well aware of the heritage of our discipline, which includes such luminaries as the physicist Phillip Morse, and, as a distinct discipline, originates in the 1940s.

Many of us are curious about other students that have had the same doctoral dissertation advisor since networks in academia and beyond are important.

While I knew that the doctoral dissertation advisor of my dissertation advisor, Stella Dafermos, was F. Thomas "Tom" Sparrow, my academic genealogy trail ended there.

It was not until I received email messages from fellow OR blogger and CMU Professor Mike Trick that I found out that his advisor's, advisor's advisor was also Tom Sparrow, so we are academic cousins! Mike received his PhD from Georgia Tech while I received mine from Brown University.

In another recent blogpost, Mike, being the serious scholar and researcher that he is, traced our heritage back to Sir Isaac Newton, who needs no introductions to any living scientist, but, wait, there is more ...

While not technically his advisor in the current sense, the most important advisor to Newton was Isaac Barrow, the discoverer of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus.

Barrow, in turn, studied under Vincenzio Viviani, who studied under Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei, who is considered the father of modern physics.

Looking back in OR/MS Today, I found Great Moments in HistORy by Saul Gass and the second item mentions none other than Newton!

We clearly need to enthusiastically celebrate our scientific roots with our disciplinary brothers and sisters, including physicists.