Working with Colleagues in Ukraine Is Inspiring

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, I have been deeply involved in supporting higher education there. I had already been quite active, due to my affiliation with the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) as both a member of its Board of Directors (BOD) and its International Academic Board over several years, but, in March, 2022, my connections intensified since I was elected one of the four Co-Chairs of the BOD of KSE https://kse.ua/community/stories/board-of-directors/.  Shortly thereafter, my university - UMass Amherst - established a global partnership with KSE. The partnership included both a student exchange student program (very successful) as well as a Virtual Scholar in Residence Program to reduce brain drain from Ukraine. We have now had two sets of cohorts of Virtual Scholars and I have enjoyed working with several of the scholars.

My colleagues in Ukraine inspire me and I believe that the research that we have done together is strengthened through our collaborations.

I am honored and delighted that Professor Myroslava Kushnir from the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv and I have had our latest paper accepted for presentation at the Information Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction Conference at Kyoto University https://itdrr.org/conference/itdrr2025/. Our paper, "Social Network Analysis of Civilian Support Networks for the Ukrainian Military," emphasizes that Russia’s war on Ukraine is not only a geopolitical conflict but also a humanitarian, ecological, social and economic disaster. Our study applies Social Network Analysis (SNA) to explore the interaction structure between civil society organizations (CSOs) and military units in Ukraine during the ongoing full-scale war. Dr. Kushnir has been a Virtual Scholar in both cohorts. Our first joint paper, "Civilian-Military Integration in Ukrainian Defense Supply Chain," co-authored with Renata Konrad of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, was published in the Proceedings of the International ISCRAM Conference: https://ojs.iscram.org/index.php/Proceedings/article/view/49

And just a few days ago, at the great EURO Conference in Leeds, UK, I presented a paper co-authored with my Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Ismael Pour, and Professor Borys Kormych of the Odesa Law Academy. The paper, "Integrated Crop and Cargo War Risk Insurance: Application to Ukraine," was recently published in the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/itor.70038 Professor Kormych had also been a Virtual Scholar in the two cohorts. 

And, with Virtual Scholar Pavlo Martyshev and Professor Oleg Nivievskyi of KSE, we have published 4 papers, along with my Isenberg School of Management PhD student Dana Hassani. I am very proud of this work. The papers that have appeared in journals are: 

"A Multiperiod Multicommodity Capacitated International Agricultural Trade Network Equilibrium Model with Applications to Ukraine in Wartime," Dana Hassani, Anna Nagurney, Oleg Nivievskyi, and Pavlo Martyshev, Transportation Science 59(1): (2025), pp 143-164,

"Multicommodity International Agricultural Trade Network Equilibrium: Competition for Limited Production and Transportation Capacity Under Disaster Scenarios with Implications for Food Security,"Anna Nagurney, Dana Hassani, Oleg Nivievskyi, and Pavlo Martyshev, European Journal of Operational Research 314(1): (2024), pp 1127-1142,

"Exchange Rates and Multicommodity International Trade: Insights from Spatial Price Equilibrium Modeling with Policy Instruments via Variational Inequalities," Anna Nagurney, Dana Hassani, Oleg Nivievskyi, and Pavlo Martyshev, Journal of Global Optimization 87: (2023), pp 1-30.

Plus, we have the following paper: "Quantification of International Trade Network Performance Under Disruptions to Supply, Transportation, and Demand Capacity, and Exchange Rates in Disasters,"Anna Nagurney, Dana Hassani, Oleg Nivievskyi, and Pavlo Martyshev, published in Dynamics of Disasters - From Natural Phenomena to Human Activity, I.S. Kotsireas, A. Nagurney, P.M. Pardalos, S. Pickl, C. Vogiatzis, Editors, Springer Nature Switzerland AG (2024), pp 151-179.

Dana Hassani has received 4 research awards (2 from the OIM Department and 2 from the Isenberg School) for his publications. These are significant recognitions.

I have written additional article with Professor Nivievskyi and am extremely proud of the paper, "Ukraine - Addressing the Domestic Crisis and the Effects of the War on Global Food Systems," which was published by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: https://www.pas.va/en/publications/scripta-varia/sv154pas/nivievskyi.html

I have also worked with Professor Elena Besedina of KSE. She was a Virtual Scholar in the first cohort. The paper that we co-authored is: "A Multicommodity Spatial Price Equilibrium Model with Exchange Rates and Non-Tariff Measures for Agri-Food International Trade," Anna Nagurney and Elena Besedina, Operations Research Forum 4: (2023), 84.

My colleagues and collaborators in Ukraine have dealt with drones and missiles and losses of family members and friends and much too much time in shelters. They continue to teach and to conduct research under very challenging conditions. What they do to support their students and knowledge discovery in wartime is heroic. I thank them from the bottom of my heart and look forward to peace and prosperity for Ukraine and its freedom-loving citizenry.

It Was Great to Be Back at MIT to Speak on Agricultural Supply Chain Networks and Trade Policies

This past Tuesday I had the pleasure of speaking at MIT at the Center for Transportation and Logistics in its seminar series. I'd like to thank Austin Iglesias Saragih for the invitation to speak. The title of my presentation was: Agricultural Supply Chain Networks: Trade, Policies, and Resilience.

In my seminar, I first highlighted research that we had done on food supply chains over the past decade with collaborators: Min Yu, Deniz Besik, and Pritha Dutta (all of whom were my former PhD students, and now are thriving as Professors), and, more recently, with my present PhD student Dana Hassani and collaborators at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) Professor Oleg Nivievskyi and Dr. Pavlo Martyshev. 

In my presentation, I did a deep dive into the paper, "Exchange Rates and Multicommodity International Trade: Insights from Spatial Price Equilibrium Modeling with Policy Instruments via Variational Inequalities," Anna Nagurney, Dana Hassani, Oleg Nivievskyi, and Pavlo Martyshev, Journal of Global Optimization 87: (2023), pp 1-30.

The paper was the lead article in the volume and was also displayed at the INFORMS Phoenix conference. In the below photo I am standing next to the journal Editor, Professor Sergiy Butenko, and my PhD student Dana Hassani. The Springer editors Razia Amzad and Christian Rauscher are next to Dana.

I also discussed some results from my Labor and Supply Chain Networks book.

I am very grateful to the audience for the excellent questions and discussions and to Austin for handling the logistics of my visit. 

It was also extra special to have one of my former students, Emilio Alvarez Flores, who is now pursuing an MBA at Sloan at MIT, come to my presentation. In addition, I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Dr. Elenna Dugundji, who is a Research Scientist at the Center for Transportation ad Logistics at MIT.

My talk was also streamed on Zoom (which I had not been informed of). It was great to see MIT faculty Zooming in and others from different locations, including Georgia Tech.

It was terrific to be back at MIT. Coincidentally, the Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) is located at 1 Amherst Street in Cambridge so I felt right at home. I had spent 2 years at MIT and recall when the OR Center was also located there.

In my presentation, I discussed the importance of alternative routes and appropriate policies for agricultural trade with a focus on the impacts of Russia's war on Ukraine and, that night, as we all know, the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed after being hit by the cargo ship Dali. I had multiple requests for media interviews but had to decline because of my presentation and meetings at MIT. Lo and behold, whom did I see on the TV news, a few hours afterwards - none other than the Director of CTL, Professor Yossi Sheffi! He had hugged me when he saw me at MIT, something his PhD students told me they have never seen him do before. Professor Sheffi was also my host when I had an NSF Visiting Professorship for Women at MIT and I spent my first year at CTL, which was then located in Building 1.

The slide deck of my seminar presentation is posted on the Supernetwork Center website.

I had previously given a seminar at MIT in December 2015 and was hosted by Professor Carolina Osorio, who is no longer at MIT. She and Professor Jim Orlin joined us for dinner after my talk and Professor Orlin even Zoomed into my presentation this past Tuesday. My blogpost with photos from that visit can be accessed here.

That evening, I stopped by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (RIAS) at Harvard University, where I has been a Science Fellow in 2005-2006. The Fellows that year included Professor Claudia Goldin, who in 2023 received the Nobel Prize in Economics. I had been back to RIAS as a Summer Fellow twice since then.

And to celebrate being back in Cambridge, we enjoyed a delicious Amareno gelato topped by a chocolate macaron.

Very Excited About the IFORS Conference in Santiago (Where It Is Winter) and the Dynamics of Disasters Conference in Athens (Where It Is Summer)

Academics are quite good at conferencing and also in optimizing when it comes to packing, etc. Nevertheless, packing for essentially back to back conferences on different continents and seasons can be a challenge especially if the plan is to only have a single carryon as luggage.

In 2006, I spoke at successive conferences in Cyprus (Limassol), Iceland (Reykjavik), and then in Italy (Erice). Family members joined me in Iceland and brought some warm clothing since the temperature, while we were there and it was officially summer, never rose about 48 degrees F. Some reflections on packing for the stream of conferences.

Soon I will be flying to Athens, Greece for the Dynamics of Disasters conference that I co-organized, and then, via Madrid, to the IFORS Conference in Santiago, Chile.

I am thrilled to be delivering a keynote talk, entitled, "Agricultural Supply Chain Networks: From Trade to Resilience and How OR Can Help," at the IFORS Conference.

My keynote will highlight some of our research over the past decade on agricultural supply chain networks including recent work with collaborators in Ukraine. Information on this conference can be found here. I am very honored to be on the list of plenary and keynote speakers.

Also, at the IFORS conference, I'll be taking part in the "Meet the ITOR Editors" panel, which was organized by the outstanding Editor of the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) journal Celso C. Ribeiro! Joining us on the panel is the previous President of IFORS Grazia Speranza and Mario Guajardo. ITOR recently celebrated its 30th anniversary with a special issue. I was delighted to have my tutorial paper on ``Fragile Networks," co-authored with Qiang "Patrick" Qiang included in this special issue. The tutorial paper was based on a tutorial that I gave at the ALIO INFORMS conference in Buenos Aires.

I am very much looking forward to seeing conferees from many continents at this IFORS conference, including my former Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Dmytro Matsypura, who will travel from Australia. He is Chair of the Business Analytics Department at the University of Sydney. The President of IFORS is now Janny Leung and she is traveling from Macao!

And, prior to the IFORS conference, I will be experiencing the warmth of a Mediterranean summer at the Dynamics of Disasters Conference. We have an outstanding lineup of plenary speakers and I thank them all for accepting our invitations. This is the 6th Dynamics of Disasters Conference! It was such a pleasure to work with Ilias S. Kotsireas, Panos M. Pardalos, and Chrys Vogiatzis on this conference.

My presentation at this conference will be on joint work with my PhD student Dana Hassani and colleagues in Ukraine at the Kyiv School of Economics: Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev.

There is clearly and agricultural theme to my presentations at both these international conferences. In fact, at the Dynamics of Disasters one, we also a special Acknowledgment and Dedication.

Back to packing for the conferences with my new suitcase purchased after I wore out my favorite one!

Safe travels to all those heading to conferences!