Congratulations to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter!

The INFORMS Conference in Atlanta, which took place October 26-29, 2025, was fantastic! There were about 7,000 conferees, who enjoyed the scientific presentations plus keynotes and plenaries, many social networking events, tutorials, business meetings, and also award ceremonies. It was wonderful to have participants who are students, academics, and practitioners from around the globe!

On Monday evening of the conference, the INFORMS Chapter Awards event took place. As the Faculty Advisor to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter since 2004 (when the Chapter was founded), I was delighted to see the Chapter recognized with the Cum Laude Award for its activities.

The evening began with welcoming remarks from Elena Gerstmann, the Executive Director of INFORMS, and Mark E. Lewis, the President-Elect of INFORMS.

Then we had the pleasure of hearing from Vinod Cheriyan, the Chapter Representative to the Subdivisions Council of  INFORMS, and listening to the dynamic keynote by Sina Ansari.

The students were thrilled to receive the award plaque and we took a group photo.

This Student Chapter is an outstanding collaboration between PhD students in Operations Management at the Isenberg School of Management and Industrial Engineering PhD students at UMass Amherst. All who are interested in Operations Research and Analytics are welcome to join. Last year's Chapter President was Ismael Pour and this year's Chapter President is Samira Samadi.

For more information about the Chapters, its Officers, and activities, please visit the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter website: https://websites.umass.edu/umassinf/

It was wonderful to have even a former member, now a Professor, Dr. Heng Chen of Kansas State University, join us.

Congratulations to the students! We plan on holding a celebration on campus soon.

Very Much Looking Forward to the INFORMS 2022 Annual Meeting in Indianapolis - It Will Be Extraordinary!

The INFORMS Annual Meeting will take place October 16-19, 2022 in Indianapolis, Indiana. This is the first face to face meeting of this conference since the declaration of the pandemic and it promises to be an extraordinary conference with thousands of conferees from around the globe!

In conjunction with this conference there are also events taking place immediately prior. I am deeply honored to have been invited to speak at the Minority Issues Forum (MIF) Workshop for Undergraduate Underrepresented Minorities (URMs) on October 15, 2022. The program has been put together by Professors Trilce Encarnación and Ruben Proaño and it is fabulous. I am very much looking forward to meeting with the undergraduates and to the exciting discussions.

The slide deck for my 90 minute presentation is complete.

The program for the MIF Workshop is below.

The full program for the conference can be accessed here and it is rich with tutorials, keynote talks, social events, award ceremonies, and many networking opportunities!

I am very much looking forward to the editorial board meeting on Sunday hosted by Professor Celso Ribeiro, the outstanding Editor of the journal International Transactions in Operational Research. On Sunday evening, I will be taking Virtual Center for Supernetwork Associates, who are taking part in the conference, out to dinner (and there are quite a few who will be presenting)!

On Monday, I will be speaking at an invited session on Supply Networks on a paper that was recently published in Operations Research Perspectives with the title below.

Then it will be time for the INFORMS Fellows luncheon to celebrate the newly elected 2022 INFORMS Fellows and to enjoy a wonderful meal and conversations with many colleagues. 

On Monday evening, there will be the Transportation Science and Logistics Society Business Meeting at which multiple awards will be announced, including the Stella Dafermos Mid-Career Award. This is the first time this award is being given and I am delighted to have chaired this committee for an award named after my PhD dissertation advisor at Brown University! Many thanks to the committee members! Information about this award and about Professor Stella Dafermos and her incredible legacy can be found here. I acknowledge the great support of the TSL Society President, Professor Jan Ehmke, and the TSL Society Board, in establishing this award.

The awardee will present in a special session on Tuesday morning at which the latest Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award recipient (Dr. Warren Powell) will also present. This session is just before the not-to-be-missed WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) luncheon! This is always a favorite event for many of us. Awardees of the WORMS award will be recognized there.

Monday, after the TSL Society Business Meeting, it will be time for the Student Awards Ceremony, at which INFORMS will recognize the INFORMS Student Chapters for their activities. I am looking forward to seeing officers from our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter as well as many alums!

I am very excited about the session organized by Professor Deniz Besik on Supply Chain Networks of Critical Items at which Professor Pritha Dutta will present our paper with Dr. Besik on agricultural supply chains, recently published in the European Journal of Operational Research. This session is on Tuesday afternoon.

Also, in the same session, Professor Mojtaba Salarpour will present our paper published in the International Journal of Production Economics!

On Wednesday morning, I will be taking part in a special advocacy panel session organized by INFORMS, which will be fascinating! Joining me on the panel is the former INFORMS President Professor Ramayya Krishnan and the incoming INFORMS President Professor Laura Albert plus my UMass Boston colleague Professor Michael Johnson and Northeastern U. Professor Kayse Maass! The moderator is Dr. Kara Morgan. This is a not-to-be-missed session!

I am sure that we will build great memories from this INFORMS conference and that there will be many warm hugs and reconnections as well as the beginnings of new friendships!

Wishing everyone safe travels and see you soon! And, bright and early on Thursday morning, I will be back to teaching my Transportation and Logistics class at the Isenberg School of Management!

The Isenberg School of Management Rocks Boston

Yesterday, the fifth annual Isenberg Business Leadership Awards Dinner took place at the Colonnade Hotel in Boston.

Since I am now a Summer Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and now living in Cambridge, this made for an easy commute to this special event. My husband and I took the Red line and then the Green line which dropped us off right in front of the hotel.

There were over 300 alums, faculty, administrators, special guests, and even students at this gala evening.

We were there to honor two special Isenberg School alums and honorees: Earl Stafford, an executive, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, and Nick Markey, a CPA with Deloitte.

 The menu was exquisite as was the actual food.

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What made this Business Leadership Awards dinner truly special for me was seeing two of my former MBA students, now very successful executives, Kevin Koswick and Vinnie Daboul, whose daughters are now Isenberg School alumna, as well!

It was also terrific to hear the speakers, including our outstanding, super energetic Dean, Dr. Mark A. Fuller, whose exceptional leadership has propelled the Isenberg School of Management in the various rankings. We are also in the midst of a very exciting addition to the infrastructure of the school with a $62 million addition of a Business Innovation Hub.

The Boston Globe had the featured ad below in yesterday's edition, which the Dean noted. It recognized that 66% of the graduating seniors of the Isenberg School gave to the school - quite the accomplishment and all their names were listed!

Also present at the gala dinner was our fabulous UMass Amherst Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy and Professor Dick Simpson who taught accounting at the Isenberg School passed the age of 80!

There were several Operations and Information Management alums at our table as well as Finance alums and the jobs our students get are so impressive - with top companies such as EY, Deloitte, JP Morgan, IBM, to name just a few, and even SpaceX (one of Elon Musk's companies).

It was terrific to see many of my Isenberg School colleagues, including a great turnout from the McCormack Department of Sports Management, with Associate Dean Lisa Masteralexis, Professor Steven McKelvey, Professor Nefertiti Walker (our new Director of Diversity and Inclusion), all bringing their exceptional professionalism and smiles to this event.

Plus, what would an evening be without our Marketing colleagues, Professor Bruce Weinberg, Head of the Marketing Department, and Professor Easwar Iyer, joined by several alums.

And, as we exited from a lovely evening and terrific networking event, we were offered the Annual Dean's Report.

In it, I was thrilled to see Hailey Cockrum, who was one of our amazing Operations and Information Management majors, and who graduated in May 2017. Hailey took both my Transportation and Logistics class and my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class. She is the one now working at SpaceX in LA.

 The Isenberg School Rocked Boston!

Looking Forward to @INFORMS2016 in Nashville with Talks on Disaster Relief to Cybersecurity

Last week, I was at New York University for a fantastic Game Theory and Security conference that I blogged about and this week has been historic with the US Presidential election result on Tuesday. I am glad that we live in Amherst, Massachusetts.

As a faculty member, one keeps on marching on, and, this past Wednesday, the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, which will be receiving its 11th award from INFORMS in as many years at  the INFORMS conference that takes place in Nashville, Tennessee, November 13-16, 2016, hosted a Tune-Up for this conference and two  other upcoming ones. The 6 students who presented on their research with their advisors did a wonderful job and, frankly, it was a great distraction from the election outcome. 3 of the 6 talks were on climate change issues, one was on healthcare, one on global distribution, and my student spoke on competitive supply chains with quality of fresh produce with applications to farmers' markets. She will be presenting this joint work of ours at the INFORMS Computing Society conference in Texas in January. We had several faculty and additional students show up to support the speakers. The event lasted two and a half hours with questions and comments to improve the students' talks, if need be.

Below are a few photos from the above event.

At the INFORMS conference in Nashville, I am a co-author of five paper presentations and four are now ready. Please visit the Supernetwork Center website at the Isenberg School of Management for the presentations that we have uploaded. I organized a session for this conference on Novel Applications of Network Optimization and look forward to the talks on supply chains, disaster relief, financial hedging, and medical resource allocation in epidemics. The annual INFORMS conference also always serves as a fabulous venue for a reunion of many of the Supernetwork Center Associates, so there will be nice get-togethers and also photo opportunities. Some of our presentation topics, from disaster relief to cybersecurity, that we will be presenting are shown below. I am also very excited that a collaborator from Colombia will be coming to the conference to speak on our joint work on auction mechanisms for Internet adoption.

In addition to sessions, there are many special events at this conference and I am looking forward to the INFORMS Fellows Awards lunch, the WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) lunch, the Transportation & Logistics Society meeting, the INFORMS Computing Society meeting, some editorial board meetings,  and award ceremonies.  It will be a very busy but enjoyable conference.

Wishing everyone safe travels to Nashville and a fabulous INFORMS conference!

Congrats to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter on its 9th National Award!

Late yesterday I returned to Amherst from the INFORMS Annual Conference, which took place in San Francisco. Several of our PhD students took the red-eye shuttle and returned this morning!

The conference was wonderful and a highlight was watching our students from the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, which is based at the Isenberg School, being recognized for their hard work with the cum laude award from INFORMS for their chapter activities. This year, the chapter received its 9th award in a row, which I suspect must be a record. The chapter's members are graduate students from the Isenberg School of Management and the College of Engineering, principally, from the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.

Below are featured photos taken at the award ceremony, which took place this past Monday evening, November 10,  at our conference in San Francisco. What an amazing turnout - even some students who had received their PhDs a year or two ago came to support the new cohort and to celebrate with them. Plus. one of our MBA students, Ben Joyney, also came.

As the Faculty Advisor to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter for over a decade now, I congratulate this great group! The friendships continue even after they graduate and leave UMass!

Waiting for the award ceremony to begin

 The UMass Amherst INFORMS student members are called to the podium and receive their award plaque from David Hunt and are congratulated by Gino Lim

This year's Chapter President, Michael Prokle, holding the award - last year's President was Shivani Shukla, who prepared the annual report, which was vital for the judging outcome

 The students with two former officers, Drs. Min Yu and Farbod Farhadi on the far right,  enjoy posing with their award plaque

And, after the award ceremony, we were treated to a reception, with the beautiful desserts displayed below

Congratulations to the Officers and the members - it is a pleasure to work with all of you!

Congrats to All the Student Chapter Award Recipients of INFORMS!

I would like to congratulate all the recipients of this year's INFORMS student chapter awards! The award ceremony will take place on Tuesday morning, November 9, 2010, in Austin, Texas at the 2010 INFORMS annual conference.

Special thanks go to the officers of the student chapters as well as the Faculty Advisors who work very hard in organizing activities and disseminating information about operations research and the management sciences. As the Faculty Advisor to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, I know the dedication that is required to have a successful student chapter. 32 INFORMS student chapters submitted their annual reports for 2009 and the awards below are to recognize the leading chapters for their activities.

The message below is from Dr. Stefan Karisch and was distributed today to the Faculty Advisors and the chapter presidents.

Dear Student Chapter Officers,

Congratulations! The Chapters/Fora Committee is pleased to notify you that your chapter is a winner of the INFORMS Student Chapter Annual Award at the level shown below. The purpose of these awards is to recognize the achievements of student chapters. The award will be presented at the Chapters/Fora Breakfast at the upcoming INFORMS Annual Meeting in Austin. If you are at the meeting, we hope you will join us and be recognized at this event. If not, we will mail the award to you.

Best regards,

Stefan Karisch

INFORMS VP Chapters/Fora

Summa Cum Laude

Arizona State University

Magna Cum Laude

University of Massachusetts

University of South Florida

Cum Laude

Texas A&M University

North Carolina State University

University of Illinois - Chicago

Florida International University

University of California - Berkeley

Oklahoma State University

University of Alabama

Stefan E. Karisch
Director, Operations Research and Optimization

Quality and Business Operation Services

_____________________________________
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A Boeing Company

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