Some Tips on Networking - Terrific EURO WISDOM Panel in Copenhagen

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking on a Networking panel at the start of the EURO 2024 Conference in Copenhagen. The panel was organized by Paula Carroll and Annunziata Esposito Amideo. Joining me on the panel was life coach Margaret Collins. The panel attracted an excellent audience, very enthusiastic and energetic.

The WISDOM Forum aims "to provide a platform to support, empower and encourage the participation of all genders in Operational Research within EURO." It is very active in organizing events, engaging in social media and has various terrific initiatives; more info on its website. Other related such forums include the WORMS forum of the professional society of INFORMS.

What we emphasized on the panel included the following:

1. The importance of networking.

2. Strategies for developing networks of visibility.

3. Communication skills to deliver your message.

4. How to deal with nerves or anxiety.

As an academic, who also has worked in high tech consulting in the defense sector, I noted the importance of being engaged with practice and the serendipity of meeting people and expanding your network, whether at conferences (a fabulous venue for networking) or even during travel, such as on planes. I spoke about reaching out to researchers that I admired, early on, in order to gather their wisdom and professional advice. I shared that George Dantzig, one of the founders of the field of OR, came to the first conference presentation that I ever gave, which was at the Mathematical Programming Symposium at MIT, and the kind words that he shared. I also acknowledged my PhD dissertation advisor, the late Stella Dafermos, in my presentation. I was her first PhD student. I showed the audience my academic genealogy, which includes Maxwell, Newton, and Galileo!

On our panel, the importance of social media was emphasized, which can create opportunities and invitations, and in keeping your profile up to date. In addition. Margaret, through her nicely interactive presentation, told the audience to have prepared a short introduction of yourself (perhaps several). One should also think about whom you might network with. Different people have distinct comfort zones, and it is important to acknowledge that some may be introverts or extroverts, or somewhere in between.

I focused on networking as your career progresses.

My presentation can be downloaded here. Early in one's career, one networks laterally and up, and it is important as one's career progresses to mentor and support others. Taking risks is also important since new experiences can help one to grow both personally and professionally. I also spoke about networking with journalists and decision-makers in order to have one's research make a greater impact. I emphasized the relevance of writing Letters to the Editor and OpEds to broaden one's reach.

Ultimately, networking is about people, and professional societies are playing a big role in bringing us together, through conferences, newsletters, opportunities for leadership, and various means of support and enhanced visibility.

Many thanks to the organizers of the EURO 2024 conference for the lovely city location venue of Copenhagen. More info on the conference here.

Also, early in my presentation, I congratulated both Paula and Annunziata on the publication of their discussion paper (the inaugural one): "Gender equality: opportunities and challenges for the OR community,"  in the Journal of the Operational Research Society. Their paper is now trending, along with the set of invited commentaries, which I contributed one to. These publications are open access and are very informative and relevant.   Relationships matter and networks do as well.

Optimism and Operations Research

Today I received info on a very interesting article sent via The Harvard Gazette e-list that spoke about optimism. I was a 2005-2006 Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, so I receive such mailings and enjoy such articles very much.

But, of course, you may be wondering how relevant is optimism in the pandemic? I suggest that you read the above article and I will share some highlights from my great professional discipline of Operations Research (OR) that makes me quite optimistic!

First, I must say that Operations Research, with its scientific, very powerful methodologies, and wide range of applications, coupled with the expertise of those in our profession, has never been more relevant than in the COVID-19 pandemic. The positive impact has been global, with many of our academic researchers and practitioners speaking to the media, writing OpEds, and, of course, journal articles, and also fostering education about numerous relevant issues from healthcare to vaccine supply chains. INFORMS, a professional society of over 11,000 members, for example, has compiled a wealth of resources along these lines, very accessible to the public as well as to policy and decision-makers.

Others have been advising governments and I have a special shout out to my great Operations Research colleagues in the UK on this!

Of course, the pandemic has caused incredible pain and suffering throughout the globe, but support and advocacy by professional societies such as INFORMS is helping in getting important news out. My "last" face to face conference before the declaration by the WHO of the pandemic on March 11, 2020, was the inaugural INFORMS Security Conference in Monterey, California in mid February 2020. Often I return to the wonderful memories and many of those are because of the  pleasant exchanges of colleagues at that conference, which I had blogged about. And, speaking of conferences, I was very touched by the essay, "Thanks for the Memories," by Peter Horner, who has served for 30 years as the Editor of ORMS Today! There is a photo therein of Peter with Harrison Schramm, who, coincidentally, was an organizer of the conference in Monterey (and appears with me in a photo in my blogpost, along with Professor Stefan Pickl of Germany). Luckily, Peter will continue as Editor of the Analytics online magazine of INFORMS.

Now, more on optimism. I would like to single out and applaud the efforts of AIRO Young, which is  a group of young researchers, part of the Italian Operational Research Society. Their energy, enthusiasm, and initiatives are all cause for optimism!

For example, in the relatively new journal, SN Operations Research Forum, published by Springer, there is the article, Women Just Wanna Have OR: Young Researchers Interview Expert Researchers, co-authored by Amorosi, Cavagnini, Del Sasso, Fischetti, Morandi, and Raffaele (all members of AIRO Young),  which is quite inspiring. Although so much remains to be done, much has been accomplished and I was so honored to be interviewed for this article, along with amazing colleagues: Professors Carvalho, Romero Morales, Ljubic, Labbe, and Speranza, speaking from many different countries about their experiences and offering many pearls of wisdom.

Also, Alice Raffaele,  in her very eloquent, literary article: Becoming Visible: Why We Should be Better Communicators Now has excellent suggestions for our professional community, further generating optimism. 

Thanks to SN Operations Research Forum for making the above (and other) articles available for everyone to read online!

I would also like to thank the amazing students who are behind the publication ORMS Tomorrow, supported by INFORMS. Two of my former PhD students, now Professors, Dr. Pritha Duttaof Pace University in NYC and Dr. Shivani Shukla of the University of San Francisco, worked on this publication when they were students at the Isenberg School.

A Thank You to Barry List, Communications Director of INFORMS, Who is Retiring

I heard the news this morning, after my Humanitarian Logistics class and office hours. 

The message came via email (after Barry List had kindly retweeted a message that I had sent out on Dr. Michael Johnson's talk tomorrow at the Isenberg School in the UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series),

The message said:

Hi, Anna,

After 18 years serving our association and its membership, I will retire from INFORMS this Friday.

I very much appreciate all the help and encouragement you gave me. I look forward to reading more about all the wonderful research that you and your students are conducting.

Very best wishes,

Barry List
A. Director, Communications
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)


I was simply stunned and, fully agree with  Dr. Paul Rubin who later tweeted: "he is too young to retire."

INFORMS has been my primary professional organization. What makes it truly special is the people - from its members to the INFORMS staff. Barry List was not only someone that many of us enjoyed seeing at INFORMS conferences but also one with whom we regularly communicated with  about professional activities and events. He would always listen and provide support and, as the Communications Director, kept the wonderful news about the research of our colleagues and the growth of our professional society front and center.

His network of contacts and his knowledge of our society members and its activities were vast and he always was a great champion of operations research and the management sciences as well as analytics.  His press releases on INFORMS members' publications and achievements were always a pleasure to read.

I very much also enjoyed being interviewed by him for a podcast Supernetworks.and have listened to the many podcast interviews that he conducted. 

And when there was heartbreaking news such as the passing of Professor George Dantzig, it was Barry List, as the Communications Director of INFORMS,  who shared it with the world. 

Barry, you will be greatly missed. Thanks for the almost two decades with INFORMS and for all the terrific work that you did.

I hope that your wonderful adventures continue!

Future Transportation in a Connected World

Today was a great day for transportation!

In my morning class in Logistics & Transportation, we had a surprise guest from India - a consultant in Transportation & Logistics who was in the US for the first time, and had spoken recently in Los Angeles at the International Conference of Women Engineers and Scientists. Many of my undergraduate students are interested in the consulting profession and, after an introduction, they asked her numerous questions not only about consulting but also about transportation in India and the challenges. Her talk in LA was on non-motorized last mile deliveries and associated challenges, including congestion. She told us about plans for new subway systems in India as well as the inroads that the Japanese are making in the transport sector from trains to logistics. She also talked about being the only female in her group initially and about the competition among top consulting firms for business. She noted the importance of competing on price and credentials, which I would call "quality." and experience.

Then it was time to go to lunch with a group of the Transportation faculty from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UMass Amherst since the group was hosting a faculty member from RPI, Professor Jeff Ban, whose advisor was Dr. Bin Ran at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and whose advisor, in turn, was Professor David E. Boyce. Academics tend to track their academic family trees or genealogy. Ran and Boyce co-authored the book, Modeling Dynamic Transportation Networks.

Information on Professor Ban's talk that took place this afternoon is below:

 Future Transportation in A Connected World

Xuegang (Jeff) Ban

Associate Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)

Abstract: Emerging technologies (such as mobile sensing, connected vehicles, and new social media) make transportation components more connected. This includes connections/ communications among vehicles, and between vehicles and the infrastructure, as well as more close connections among transportation users. Such connections are transforming and will continue to further transform the transportation system. This talk will focus on certain aspects of these transformations, including (i) how mobile sensing data can be collected and used for urban traffic modeling applications; and (ii) what system analysis models may be developed to account for the connections among users.

I enjoyed his talk a lot and he emphasized issues of privacy and big data in transportation. Also, how not to just gather data but to glean knowledge from the data through algorithms, while preserving travellers' privacy.

I very much enjoyed the discussion on urban freight and the benefits of night-time deliveries in urban settings, including NYC, with some of the benefits including improved travel times and the lowering of emissions. However, a major challenge remains that the consumers, including retailers, want the deliveries to take place in the daytime and they hold the power - so discussions centered also on incentives.

Since several of my doctoral students also came to the talk I was very pleased that he mentioned the need for different behavioral models, which, coincidentally, we have been researching. And, of course, I was thrilled when he noted game theory and variational inequalities!

I took the photos below at Professor Ban's presentation and afterwards.

Recognizing the Achievements of Assistant Professors

The new academic year is upon us and it is so exciting to see the students moving into their dorms!

With the new year we also welcome new faculty to the various colleges and universities and they bring new perspectives, new research ideas, and lots of terrific energy!

Colleges and universities are built on the faculty and the most junior faculty are those who have received their PhDs within the past 5 or 6 years and they are called Assistant Professors.

In this blog, I periodically write what might be construed as an "advice column" and for many of these posts I get special thank yous. I have written on leadership on many occasions (even acknowledged by various Deans) and also on being an advocate for women. The latter was picked up by the WORMS President, Dr. Laura McLay, who recently gave an invited presentation, Five Observations on Women in Engineering,  and referenced my post. She told me afterwards that the males especially appreciated the advocacy suggestions that I had suggested.

The Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst has hired several new faculty and  I have been very much enjoying meeting several of them over the past several weeks and getting to know then. They are terrific!

Yes, I may be a bit "nostalgic" and am thinking  back to the time when I was an Assistant Professor, fresh with my PhD from Brown University.  I was very lucky, although, in those days, there was no formalized parental leave (so I had a child after becoming a Full Professor, but, through hard work, that promotion came only 8 years after my PhD and promotion to Associate Professor with tenure only 4 years after my PhD). There were also no teaching load reductions per se and I taught extra classes as an Assistant Professor w/o any added compensation, but to be a "good citizen" and because I was asked by my chairman at that time.

However, I had support from senior colleagues, even in other departments, who would congratulate me regularly and, with their sense of humor, make it fun to come to work. We had regular newsletters that were disseminated to faculty so we were informed as to the goings-on. I very often would be one of the first to arrive in the building, having breakfasted in the Newman Center,  whose opening I awaited at 7AM.

Assistant Professors, who have not yet achieved promotion to Associate Professor, and tenure, work very hard and, in academia, typically, achievement in the three pillars of research, teaching, and service is what matters for promotions.

But Assistant Professors do need support and kind words and collegiality can go a long way!

In addition, Assistant Professors (and don't we all) also want to feel part of a community in which their hard work is valued and when they achieve, their achievements should be recognized.

For example, administrators could and should send a congratulatory email note not just to the individual, but copy to the department and even to the school! It may take awhile to update websites and achievements ranging from getting grants, receiving best paper awards and other professional awards, and even press and media coverage, should be noted!

Why is this so hard to do for some in the Internet Age?!

Assistant Professors are ambassadors for academic programs and if they feel valued and recognized they will say positive things within the building and to the professional communities that they are part of. Happy Assistant Professors  are more likely to stay and to not seek employment elsewhere.

Given university investments in new faculty in terms of salaries and startup packages, is not recognizing the achievements of Assistant (and other) Professors a small price to pay?

Besides, when faculty do outstanding work, the reputation of the institution grows and everyone benefits.

Truly, don't you think that over time, those who feel recognized will do more for your programs and institutions?

As an Assistant Professor recently told me, a university cannot thrive if we are all islands.

So celebrate the achievements of Assistant Professors!

Some suggestions:

1. Disseminate good news regularly, including in personal messages that are copied to all faculty and even staff. This will bring smiles on the faces of many.

2. Do write a  personal congratulatory note -- I have a collection in my offices, which are posted -- they continue to inspire me and to lift me up.

3. Send a small token of appreciation -- I have written about a former Dean of mine, Dr. Tom O'Brien, who was amazing in this way and he was so good at development (not surprising)! Bouquets of flowers would arrive at my door -- sometimes at home and sometimes at my office, accompanied by chocolate chip cookies for my daughter.

4. Announce faculty achievements at public venues and don't forget to:

5.  Communicate the goods news to others outside the institution, including alums,  as appropriate, and through the right channels regularly.

6. Celebrate when Assistant Professors get promotion and tenure by broadcasting to the whole school!

And as the UMass Amherst Chancellor recently stated:

Let's build a community that will be the pride of the nation.

If my readers have other suggestions as to how to support and recognize Assistant Professors, please let me know -- Thanks!

Conundrum -- Satellite Communication Resiliency, Haiti, and the Last Mile

The issues of communications, and associated coordination, along with logistics and the bottlenecks, have permeated the post-earthquake humanitarian relief efforts in Haiti. Ironically, and, in a strange way, propitiously, it turns out that Haiti's Internet connectivity is robust precisely because its telecommunications infrastructure is so underdeveloped. Specifically, as reported in the IEEE Spectrum Tech Talk, most Haitian ISPs connect to the Internet via satellite and are not dependent on the country's lone undersea fiber optic cable link, which was knocked out the during the quake. The challenge for engineers now is the proverbial last mile--getting local connections to satellites restored so NGOs can get online. What is needed, from a communication hardware perspective, is that additional capacity, in the form of bandwidth, be added for satellite communications.

As I had written in this blog early on during this crisis, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a branch of the United Nations, located in Geneva, Switzerland, is providing additional satellite communication capacity (as it has done in numerous disasters prior). Dr. Cosmas Zavazava, the Head of Emergency Communications at the ITU, spoke at the humanitarian logistics conference that I organized, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation. You can find his presentation here, along with many others, or access it directly below.


Our book, Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, discusses how to identify the most important nodes and links in networks from telecommunications networks to transportation, logistical (including humanitarian ones), and even financial networks.

The United States and western Europe depend heavily on their copper and fiber optic interconnections (which are physical) for phone, Internet, and cable TV. There may be a very ironic lesson here and a critically important one in terms of the resiliency and robustness of telecoomunication infrastructure.