3 Great Books by 3 Great Females

Usually, when I am writing a book, I am so focused that I don't read other books during that period.

This year, our Networks Against Time book was published and I heard the other day from a Springer editor, who is also a UMass Amherst grad, that it will be on display at the INFORMS conference in Minneapolis, which is exciting!

 

Once our book was out and, since I was on sabbatical this year, it was time for some reflection,  and that involved reading several books that I was quite interested in because of their authors.

I write nonfiction -- books on network themes from transportation to supply chains to supernetworks and I am also drawn to nonfiction books, from those of a technical and professional nature to  memoirs and, lately, to memoirs by women. One can get valuable advice from the latter volumes and compare your professional and life situation to those of others.

The 3 books that I recently read  (my summer reading, in part) are displayed in the photo above, which also features some lovely craft pieces received as gifts from a former doctoral student of mine, which are from the village in his home country.

Yes, I had to read Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, given all the media attention and commentaries on it,  and was very interested to see whether or not it would "speak" to me as an academic, who also has had several years in industry in high tech consulting for the defense sector. Many pages of Lean In I marked with colorful Post-it notes. Sheryl, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook,  spoke very honestly, in my opinion, of the challenges that she faced even with such mentors as Dr. Larry Summer, the former President of Harvard, whom I met as a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. 

I would love to hear back from female academics who have read this book to see what their opinions of it are!

Fay Ajzenberg-Selove's book, A Matter of Choices: Memoirs of a Female Physicist, I became aware of through an obit written by Gloria Lubkin, which appeared in Physics Today. I had met Lubkin at Brown University through a physics professor there, the great Bob Beyer, who introduced me and my husband, a physics doctoral student at that time, to her. In the obit, she recommended this book, and I was intrigued and loved it! Fay was a trailblazer, who never gave up. One of my favorite paragraphs from her book:

If you work on interesting science, it is essential to schmooze with other scientists in your research field, and find out what they are doing at the time they are doing it. Your own work will not be current if you wait until your colleagues' results are published, since this occurs at least several months after the work is completed. Attending meetings is essential. The meetings take place at venues throughout the world. They are organized in such a way that no group has a recurring burden, nor a disproportionate influence, in running them. It is part of the fun of physics, and of science generally, that its practitioners become world travelers, well acquainted with international airports and with watering holes.

Although Fay could never have children, she had a long, loving marriage and her scientific community was her extended family and did she socialize!

Anna Quindlen, the Pulitzer Prize winning author (for commentary) and former columnist,  has authored many books, including novels. As a mother of 3 out of college children, she, typically, wrote and still does from 9AM until 3PM and her book, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, I very much enjoyed.

Anna Quindlen spoke at a ceremony in NYC at which I received a Young Achiever's Award  from the National Council of Women of the United States, Inc., a few years after my receipt of a PhD from Brown University. In her book, she speaks on the importance of friendships, lending a hand to others, and how far women have come, among several other themes that any female can relate to. I especially enjoyed the afterword in which Quindlen engages in a conversation with her friend, Meryl Streep.

Congrats to Another Female Management Scientist and Operations Researcher on Promotion and Tenure

I received an email this morning with a copy of the official letter attached.

One of my former doctoral students, Dr. Ke "Grace" Ke, who had done very interesting work on financial networks, which are of particular relevance these days because of the financial crisis and systemic risk issues, shared the great news with me.

She has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at the Department of Finance and Supply Chain Management at the School of Business at Central Washington University.

Ke came from China and received her PhD from the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst with a concentration in Management Science and with a minor in Finance. I was her doctoral dissertation committee chair.

Her dissertation was entitled:, "Statics and Dynamics of Complex Network Systems: Supply Chain Analysis and Financial Networks with Intermediation."

Some of our joint research has appeared in the European Journal of Operational Research, in Quantitative Finance, and in Environment & Planning B.

Dr. Ke managed to even solve the "two body problem" and to relocate from her first academic appointment, post the PhD, which was at the University of Arkansas Monticello, to Washington state, since her husband had positions first at Microsoft and then at Amazon.com. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UMass Amherst.

Just two months ago, another former doctoral student of mine, Dr. Jose M. Cruz, received his promotion with tenure at the School of Business at the University of Connecticut and was also named an Ackerman Scholar.

2012 is turning out to be a great year for me as an Academic Mom.

It is wonderful to see faculty with expertise in operations research and management science being so successful at business schools!

I am so happy for my former doctoral students, who are now colleagues!

My Academic Mother

It was my second year at MIT.

My first year at MIT, back in 1988-1989, I had spent in the Transportation Systems Division in Engineering, supported by an NSF Visiting Professorship for Women (VPW). During that year, I taught a course and also organized a speaker series to bring Women in Operations Research to MIT, and their talks took place at the MIT Operations Research Center. My dissertation advisor at Brown University had been Stella Dafermos, who held appointments in Applied Mathematics and in Engineering. Stella also had had a VPW earlier at MIT and I had decided to apply and received the NSF grant/award.

My first year at MIT was terrific. I had received my promotion and tenure two years prior (four years after getting my PhD from Brown University in Applied Mathematics, with a specialty in Operations Research) and I was always open for new challenges and experiences.

UMass Amherst, I suspect, was pleased with what I was doing in terms of research and I was lucky to receive a UMass Faculty Fellowship after my VPW, which allowed me to take another year to think, conduct research, and to write, so I elected to stay at MIT. I loved living on Mass Ave (past Harvard right next to a trolley bus station), riding the T, interacting with the students and colleagues at MIT, and taking advantage also of seminars at Harvard. That year, I hosted several visitors from around the world, whom I would treat to the buffet lunch on the top floor of what was then the Sloan School of Management building.

I especially enjoyed running into the Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson, whether in the cafeteria, the snack shop, or the elevator, resplendent always in his bow tie, who seemed to like to eat as much as I did. His query: "Anna, have you proved any good theorems lately?" stays with me. It was a marvelous year and even on Saturdays (I won't mention names) there was always a Full Professor who put on the pot of coffee at Sloan. Surrounded by brilliant, collegial minds in operations research and in economics, life was good!

As Dickens, however, wrote in his Tales of Two Cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

That September, of my second year at MIT, my mother passed away and that April, shortly before she would have turned 50, my dissertation advisor, Stella Dafermos, also died. I received the phone call in my Sloan office just before I was to give a seminar at the OR Center, which I did. Stella's funeral in Providence and her burial in April, 1990 in the cemetery on Blackstone Boulevard, as the snow was melting and the daffodils were popping up, I will never forget.

Within 7 months, I had lost my two mothers.

Stella had been the second female PhD in Operations Research. I was asked to write several obituaries, including one that was published in Operations Research, and, as her first PhD student, this was a special, albeit painful, honor and privilege. In preparing my writeups I conversed with many leaders in OR (including Nemhauser) and we concluded that she had been the second female OR PhD (although some of us had thought that she had been the first). She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, moved on with her husband to Cornell, and then settled at Brown University.

I never had Stella as an undergraduate at Brown, but heard from my fellow Applied Math majors (many of whom were female), including my room-mate, about what a great teacher she was.

After receiving two degrees from Brown and working in the defense sector in Newport, RI, running marathons, and having my companies pay for my Master's degree at Brown, I decided to enroll full-time at Brown and Stella became my advisor. Her grants supported me and in 3 years I completed my PhD. Stella needed a student who was good at computing and since I had really enjoyed computing while at Brown and in industry plus I was always fascinated by transportation and networks, it was a great match. I also sought out the only female faculty member in Engineering and in Applied Math.

We would talk for hours in her office and even in her home, when she would welcome her children from school. Regularly, on Thursdays, she would go up to MIT for the OR seminars.

Together we published multiple papers that appeared in Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Transportation Research B, and several economics and regional science journals.

We would read our papers out loud since not only did the work have to be good but it had to sound good --OR as poetry/literature (non-fiction, of course)! Manuscripts were written and rewritten multiple times until it was time to get them typed-up and then submitted.

Being a teaching assistant for Stella was always enjoyable, and with the likes of Irv Lustig, in classes, it made my job easy (and with Les Servi also at Brown then always pleasant).

Even as a doctoral student, I had opportunities to travel with Stella to conferences (sometimes with my husband as the navigator). At OR conferences, during the academic year, while I was an Assistant Professor, we would often share rooms at conferences (not only to save grant funds but because it was fun).

With Stella, we explored Tokyo, Athens (she was the guide there), and had some of our most memorable adventures in Amsterdam (en route to my first European conference, which was in Delft). We thought we would be settled in our hotel room, and then there would be a knock on the door -- it would be Stella asking us to join her on another adventure (in Amsterdam, we were even offered "family discounts" and on a dinner canal boat ride asked whether we wanted to be seated with our "mother-in-law" or not).

All four of Stella's PhD students (3 of whom were females) are now Full Professors (she died while her 4th student had not yet completed her PhD) and three of my former PhD students have also reached the Full Professor rank.

Stella, you gave us standards that we continue to aspire to.

Your legacy is eternal and your academic children, grandchildren, and cousins thank you.

This blogpost was written for the INFORMS blog Challenge on OR and Families.

For additional perspectives on academic genealogies and words of wisdom, connect with the writings of my fellow colleagues, Mike Trick and Laura McLay.

Rest in Peace, Dr. Rosalyn Yalow, Nobel Laureate

As I was growing up in Yonkers, New York, I read The New York Times at every opportunity.

While I was a student at Yonkers High School and in college at Brown University, I would periodically come across articles on the amazing scientist, Dr. Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, who had been born in NYC. She passed away on May 30, 2011, in NYC at age 89.

Her parents never finished high school, but she went on to graduate magna cum laude from Hunter College and then struggled to get accepted for graduate school. When she applied to a midwestern university (I won't mention the name but you can find it here and times have changed somewhat since I was recruited by the same one a few years back for a tenured faculty position) to further her studies in physics, the university wrote back to her professor: She is from New York. She is Jewish. She is a woman. If you can guarantee her a job afterward, we’ll give her an assistantship. This could not be guaranteed, so she was rejected.

Despite being hurt by this rejection, she got a job as a secretary at Columbia University and with World War II opening up academic opportunities for women, she received a teaching assistantship at the University of Illinois in Urbana in engineering. She was the only female teaching fellow/faculty member out of 400! She received her doctorate in nuclear physics in 1945, moved back to NYC, where her incredible scientific career with discoveries in radioimmunoassay, with her collaborator Dr. Berson, continued.

Many new, creative ideas are met with resistance. According to The Times, scientific journals, at first, rejected her research with Berson on insulin antibodies. She did not forget this experience and included the rejection letter in her Nobel prize lecture. She received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1977, only the second woman at that point to have been awarded this major accolade. Speaking to schoolchildren several years after receiving the Nobel about the challenges of a life as a scientist, she said, Initially, new ideas are rejected. Later they become dogma, if you're right. And if you're really lucky, you can publish your rejections as part of your Nobel presentation.

Although Berson predeceased her, and, hence, could not share the prize with her, she named her lab after him, so that his name would appear on her publications afterwards. Yalow was not only a great scientist but also a great person.

This week, the 2011 World Science Festival (WSF) is taking place in NYC, and I hope to catch a part of it, since it is an amazing set of 50 events over 5 days. One of the themes this year, and Yalow would have been pleased, is Women in Science.

Some highlights of my experiences at the 2009 WSF can be found here.

Hosting Italian Academics and a Funeral

Today we will be hosting two female academics from Italy, one of which works in applied mathematics and the other in behavioral finance. They are collaborators and are now in the US prior to going to a conference in Toronto. I have known about this visit for months now and am reciprocating, in part, the hospitality extended to me when I gave a plenary talk in Rome at the NET2009 conference last May. There was no way in which to reschedule this visit.

I have written before how academics have to be very adaptable since no two days tend to be alike, even with a regular teaching schedule.

Last Saturday, a colleague of mine in the Finance and Operations Management Department at the Isenberg School of Management died while walking his dog and his wife saw it happen. Yesterday evening I went to his wake. The day before he died he was at school. Today is his funeral but I am obligated to host international visitors, who are scheduled to arrive precisely at the same time as the funeral. His death also brings to light all the other activities he was involved in, over and above teaching several courses in finance as a senior lecturer. The administration managed to find quickly how to cover the courses, which is something that is essential since one can't reschedule courses either. The programmatic and cross-college activities that he was involved in will be much tougher to fill.

Faculty are now doing more and more with less and less (support). Teaching and research should come first but it is service that ties all the components together.