Civilian-Military Integration of Ukrainian Defense Supply Chain - A Paper by Three Females

The ISCRAM conference, which took place recently in Munster, Germany, is now over. The conference focused on information systems for crisis response and management and attracted speakers from many countries.

I was thrilled that Professor Myroslava Kushnir of the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv, Ukraine was able to present our paper, "Civilian-Military Integration of Ukrainian Defense Supply Chain" at the recent ISCRAM conference that took place in Munster, Germany.  The paper was also co-authored by Professor Renata Konrad of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). For all three of us, Ukrainian is our first language.

The paper was published in the refereed conference Proceedings and is open access. It can be downloaded here.

I started working with Myroslava, through the outstanding UMass Amherst - Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) partnership, in which the 1st round of Virtual Scholars had 15 scholars in Ukraine matched up with faculty hosts at UMass Amherst. 9 of the 15 were matched with faculty at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst. I had the pleasure of working with Myroslava and also with Elena Besedina of KSE and Pavlo Martyshev of KSE as well as Oleg Nivievskyi of KSE. I published papers with all of them.

Nathan Greenfield wrote this wonderful article in World University News about the meaning of this partnership and you can see therein quotes from Kushnir, Besedina, and Martyshev.

Myroslava told me that she was the only Ukrainian that presented at the ISCRAM Conference.

Our research continues and we expect to have an announcement of the 2nd round of Virtual Scholars before too long.

Working with faculty and researchers in Ukraine has been incredibly humbling and inspirational.

Very Much Looking Forward to the 2023 INFORMS Conference in Phoenix!

The 2023 INFORMS Annual Meeting is on the horizon, and is taking place October 15-18 in Phoenix, Arizona. The program is filled with numerous sessions, keynote and plenary talks, business meetings, and many award and social networking events.

I look forward to seeing colleagues from around the globe and also quite a few of my former PhD students. Dmytro Matsypura, for example, will be traveling all the way from Sydney, Australia to take part in this conference! Shivani Shukla will be coming from San Francisco, Deniz Besik from Richmond, and Sara Saberi from Worcester. Zugang "Leo" Liu will be traveling from eastern Pennsylvania.

It is also very exciting that my present Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Dana Hassani, will be speaking at this INFORMS conference, which is his first. He will be presenting our paper, "Exchange Rates and Multicommodity International Trade: Insights from Spatial Price Equilibrium Modeling with Policy Instruments via Variational Inequalities," which is co-authored with Kyiv School of Economics colleagues in Ukraine - Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev. The paper was recently published in the Journal of Global Optimization. 

I will present the paper, "Defense Critical Supply Chain Networks and Risk Management with the Inclusion of Labor: Dynamics and Quantification of Performance and the Ranking of Nodes and Links," which is now in press in the  Handbook for Management of Threats: Security and Defense, Resilience and Optimal Strategies, Konstantinos Balomenos, Major Antonios Fytopoulos, and Panos Pardalos, Editors, Springer Nature, 2023.

Our talks are prepared and I am honored and delighted to be also speaking on two panels.

The above resilience panel is organized by Himadri Sen Gupta and the ITOR Editors panel by the EIC of ITOR (International Transactions in Operational Research) - Celso C. Ribeiro!

I will also be taking part in multiple Editorial Board meetings and in the meeting of the Magazine Editorial Advisory Board (MEAB) of INFORMS that I am now chairing, with the outstanding support of Kara Tucker of INFORMS and committee members.

I look forward to the INFORMS Fellows lunch and to congratulating the newly elected members.

It will also be wonderful to see the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter receive the Magna Cum Laude Award from INFORMS at this conference. Congratulations to all the student chapters who will be recognized for their activities at the conference!

Information on the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix can be found here. Seeing all the exhibits at the Convention Center will be great fun, I am sure, as well as meeting conferees at the various events and even in passing.

And, on Sunday, October 15, for a while, I will take part in an NSF Workshop on Mobility at Arizona State University with both David Boyce and Hani S. Mahmassani speaking. I have forwarded a tribute to David Boyce to the workshop organizers.

I have to also take this opportunity to congratulate Hani Mahmassani since he will be recognized at the Transportation Science & Logistics (TSL) Society business meeting in Phoenix with the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science! Robert Herman was his PhD advisor at UT Austin and this award is so well-deserved. Hani is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering. 

It will be a very exciting time in Phoenix and we will manage, I hope, with the 100 degree temperature!