Congratulations to Dana Hassani on Receipt of the 2025 Outstanding Doctoral Student Researcher Award at the Isenberg School!

On May 9, the Isenberg School of Management held its All School Meeting to wrap up the academic year. At the meeting, various awards were given out to faculty, staff, and doctoral students.

My Isenberg PhD student in Operations Management Dana Hassani, who was announced as the recipient of the 2025 Outstanding Doctoral Student Researcher Award, was, at that time, was en route to the POM Society Conference in Atlanta, so could not attend. I had blogged about this conference in previous posts.

So, this past Thursday, after the Isenberg PhD robing ceremony, the Director of our PhD Program, Dr. George Milne, presented Dana with the award plaque in our Business Innovation Hub.

Dana arrived at UMass Amherst in January 2022, after a delay in obtaining his visa. He has published 3 journal articles, and one book chapter, which is quite remarkable. And he has also been teaching this past academic year a required course, "Business Data Analysis," for our business undergraduates each semester. Dana is the lead author of the paper, "A Multiperiod, Multicommodity, Capacitated International Agricultural Trade Network Equilibrium Model with Applications to Ukraine in Wartime," co-authored with me, and Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) colleagues: Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev, which appears in in the INFORMS journal Transportation Science,  vol. 59, no. 1, January-February 2025, pp. 143–164. He is also the co-author (second author) with the same co-authors as above of the paper, "Multicommodity International Agricultural Trade Network Equilibrium: Competition for Limited Production and Transportation Capacity Under Disaster Scenarios with Implications for Food Security," published in the European Journal of Operational Research, vol. 314, no. 1, 2024,  pp. 1127-1142. He is also a co-author, with the same authors as above of the paper, "Exchange Rates and Multicommodity International Trade: Insights from Spatial Price Equilibrium Modeling with Policy Instruments via Variational Inequalities," published in the Journal of Global Optimization, vol.  87, 2023, pp. 1-30.

Dana's book chapter, co-authored with the same team as his journal articles, "Quantification of International Trade Network Performance Under Disruptions to Supply, Transportation, and Demand Capacity, and Exchange Rates in Disasters," was 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.

It is important to emphasize that there are 9 tracks in the Isenberg PhD Program so receiving this award is quite the achievement. And, Dana also got this award last year. He successfully defended his dissertation proposal a few months ago. I look forward to his successful PhD defense in the coming academic year. He has done excellent research focusing on agricultural supply chains and international trade under disruptions, including in Ukraine during wartime. It has been an honor to work with him and with colleagues at the Kyiv School of Economics. 

Isenberg School Supernetwork Center Associates Presenting at ISSR Research Beyond the Academy Conference at UMass

This is a fabulous week with tonight the Isenberg School Scholarship Celebration taking place at the Marriott Center at UMass Amherst; tomorrow the UMass Amherst Honors dinner at the Campus Center as well as the Isenberg School Senior Barbecue plus All School meeting immediately prior, and Friday is a special conference organized by the Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR) at UMass. And, yes, we are still conducting classes!

Friday's conference is on Social Science Research Beyond the Academy with PhD alum panelists and a graduate student research exposition.

My former doctoral student in Management Science at the Isenberg School, Dr. Padma Ramaujam, who is with SAS in Cary, North Carolina, and with whom I co-authored the Emvironment Networks book, will be a panelist.  Padma's dissertation received an INFORMS Transportation Science Section (now the Transportation Science & Logistics Society) best dissertation award, a highly prestigious honor.

Also, my doctoral student, Shivani Shukla, will be presenting a poster at this conference on our latest research on cybersecurity investments.

Dr. Laurel Smith-Doerr, the Director of ISSR, provided me with the nice flyer, reposted below, which mentions Padma and Shivani, both of whom are Supernetwork Center Associates.

It should be a great event and week filled with so many celebratory activities recognizing the achievements of students and faculty!

Terrific Insights on Teaching from Our UMass Amherst INFORMS PhD Students

Today we had a very special event at the Isenberg School of Management, that was organized by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter.

It was a panel on teaching.

The panelists were 4 of our doctoral students in Management Science at the Isenberg School of Management who have taught anywhere from one semester to over four semesters (the latter by choice), and I did not include courses that some of our doctoral students may have taught in their home countries

Attendance at this event was great with even doctoral students coming not only from the Isenberg School but from several departments in the College of Engineering from across campus.

The panelists were: Heng Chen, Tulay Varol, Ameera Ibrahim, and Farbod Farhadi, who is defending his doctoral dissertation next week and who received the Isenberg's 2013 Outstanding Teaching Award. He has accepted a very nice tenure-track faculty position offer in a beautiful location.

Below are some photos from the event today.

My doctoral student, Shivani Shukla, who is serving as the President of this Student Chapter this year, organized the panel and did the introductions.

The advice offered and experiences exchanged were fascinating as was the discussion that followed.

The pizza that was provided was yummy and it got consumed quickly after the panelists spoke and the Q&A!

 

What impressed me most was the devotion and dedication to teaching exhibited by all the panelists and they have been teaching a required Operations & Information Management class that is now taken by all students at the Isenberg School.

They shared experiences from nervousness and how to conquer or at least  reduce such feelings by coming to class early and greeting students as they come in, to having a bottle of water to take a refreshment break, realizing that you are the leader and that you know the material well.

They also related some wonderful personal stories about students that, at first, they thought that they were not reaching but these students actually (as they found out later) very much appreciated their instruction but may have been dealing with late work nights, early class times, and a multiplicity of other issues.

The panelists told the audience how they engage our undergraduates through class exercises, always bring real world examples to illustrate the theory and concepts, relate to the undergraduates as to their interests and try to "customize" the material is best as possible.

Farbod, our award-winning instructor,  on the blackboard (more of a brown board), told the audience that for every lecture (and this he noted is also very useful advice for giving seminars and conference presentations), know your objectives, identify the strategies for covering the objectives of the presentation, and practice, practice, practice!

They discussed the importance of handouts of the lectures (something I have always done) so that the audience is listening to the instructor and not just busy trying to write everything down.

Lucky will be the next generation of students who will have our doctoral students as professors after they receive their PhDs and lucky are our undergraduates who have also learned so much from such dedicated teachers.

Below are  some group photos of both the officers present and many members of the audience, who then joined the officers

 

As the Faculty Advisor of this UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, I could not have been prouder than I was today of this amazing group of doctoral students.

Doctoral Students Tuning Up for INFORMS Minneapolis

A very successful activity of our award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, which we initiated last year, was the Tune-Up for the Annual INFORMS Conference. You may recall that the conference was in Phoenix last year.

This year, we will be holding another such event, and it will take place this Friday, from 1-3PM at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst.

The doctoral students will be giving the presentations that they will be delivering next week at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Minneapolis.

Information is on the flier below, which the students have prepared. Three presenters are doctoral students in Management Science at the Isenberg School and one is from the College of Engineering.

 This tune-up event gives students (and faculty) the opportunity to learn more about one another's research and provides a nice, welcoming venue in which the students can practice their public speaking and presentation skills. Feedback will be provided and questions are welcome.

This year, one of my doctoral students, Dong "Michelle" Li, will be presenting the paper, Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Networks with Outsourcing Under Price and Quality Competition, by
Anna Nagurney, Dong Li, and Ladimer S. Nagurney, which is in press in the International Transactions in Operational Research. Her presentation can be downloaded here.

The other students will be talking about their work on models and algorithms for applications from transportation (airline and shipping) to healthcare.

Hope to see some of you at the Tune-up on Friday at the Isenberg School!

More information on the chapter's activities can be found on its website.