Magnificent OIM Awards Celebration 2026

On April 20, 2026, my Operations and Information Management (OIM) Department at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst helds its Awards Celebration event.

A big CONGRATULATIONS to ALL the amazing students that were recognized and to the recipient of the OIM Distinguished Alumni Award Paul Cichocki! The awards celebration, which included a delicious banquet meal at The Inn at Boltwood in Amherst, was lovely - with expert organization, thanks to the Department Chair Professor Senay Solak, the Associate Department Chair Professor Michele Burch, and our great Office Manager Samantha Whittle. 

Congratulations to: the RSM U.S. Foundation Consulting Scholarship Recipients: Iris Cabral and Kamila Velez; The NCG Operations and Information Scholarship Recipient: Wendy Zou, and to The Nagurney Scholarship Recipient: Campbell Hatcher. Bravo to the Isenberg Senior Leadership Award Recipient: Gowri Vellanki and to Spencer Zbitnoff on his Isenberg Academic Excellence Award. The OIM Exceptional Impact Scholarship Recipients are: Reese Barnett, Suzanne Patti, Alfonso Alvarez Ribeiro, and Josie Wu! Congratulations to all the OIM Elevate Scholarship Awardees: Darrius Lupo, Ryan Bonia, and Carolin Zorrilla We also recognized two PhD students with the OIM Elevate Scholarship: Yue Xue, who is pursuing her doctorate in Information Systems, and Solmaz Abbaspour, who is pursuing hers in Operations Management. 

Many thanks to the OIM Faculty Scholarship Committee Members: Professors Susan Boyer, Ying Liu, and Shirley Shmerling. Many of the faculty, students, and their supporters lingered after the ceremony as we basked in the warmth of this truly special academic community. Best to all our students as they pursue their dreams!

This was the third time that my department held such an Awards Celebration and it is one of our favorite events of the academic year. It was also very special to have Campbell Hatcher receive The Nagurney Scholarship, which my husband and I established. Campbell wrote us a lovely letter a while back. She is majoring not only in OIM but also in Sport Management and, after her graduation next week, will be joining Kerry in Wisconsin. Her work ethic and engagement in so many activities, including mentoring ones, while working about 25 hours a week are inspiring.

Why I Love O.R. -- A Photo Essay

Why I Love Operations Research

I love O.R. because of the:

Fascinating Research and the Great Conferences:

Wonderful People that We Get to Meet:


Special Communities:


Places that We Get to Go (like Argentina and Iceland):


Our Wonderful Students, Guest Speakers, and Colleagues, and the


Intellectual Giants that made all the above possible!

An Auto Executive and Former Student Comes Back

I think that everyone remembers one's first day on the job.

As a professor, I still remember teaching my first classes at UMass Amherst in the School of Management. I was hired, fresh with my PhD in Applied Math with a specialty in Operations Research from Brown University, and with several years of high tech work experience in the defense sector in Newport, Rhode Island, to teach MBA courses in Management Information Systems and Management Science.

One of the classes that I was responsible for teaching was a night class in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Several of the students in that class were over twice my age and doubted my credentials, so I even brought my Brown PhD diploma to show them.

In that class was a student who stood out with his energy, enthusiasm, and ambition. Plus, he was close to my age so there was a natural comfort level between us. He was trying to get into the MBA program while working as a bagger for a local food store and the then MBA Director told him that he would need to evaluate his performance in 3 courses before considering him for full-time admission. One of the courses was the course that I was teaching.

Well, he made it, received his MBA, got a terrific position with a Big Three auto company (which is profitable even today) and has moved stellarly through the ranks with assignments in NYC, Philly, Cincinnati, Detroit, the DC area, and, my favorite -- in Dallas, Texas (which was considered an international assignment because Texas is just so different from the rest of the US).

Now my former student has reached the position of Director with responsibilities for North America and he came back yesterday. We spent two hours at lunch reminiscing and catching up and his stories of transportation and business were captivating (and the time much too short).

We ended on such a high note -- he had me doubled over laughing as he regaled me with stories of all the UMass Amherst alums he comes across in his business and how they remember fondly their experiences on this campus, with its student and faculty diversity and numerous activities and events, which prepared them really well for survival and excelling in the real world.

We walked back together from lunch since I had to take part in a teleconference and he was going to meet his child, who, yes, is now a student at UMass Amherst.

Fashion Supply Chain Management, School Ties, and the Preppy Handbook

Our paper, "Fashion Supply Chain Management Through Cost and Time Minimization from a Network Perspective," is now available online on the Supernetworks Center website.

This invited paper was co-authored with one of my doctoral students, Min Yu, for an edited volume on fashion supply chains.

As the abstract states: In this paper, we consider fashion supply chain management through cost and time minimization, from a network perspective and in the case of multiple fashion products. We develop a multicriteria decision-making optimization model subject to multimarket demand satisfaction, and provide its equivalent variational inequality formulation. The model allows for the determination of the optimal multiproduct fashion flows associated with the supply chain network activities, in the form of: manufacturing, storage, and distribution, and identifies the minimal total operational cost and total time consumption.The model allows the decision-maker to weight the total time minimization objective of the supply chain network for the time-sensitive fashion products, as appropriate. Furthermore, we discuss potential applications to fashion supply chain management through a series of numerical examples.

We very much enjoyed conducting the research on which this paper is based.

Working with students on research can take one on intellectual journeys that yield discoveries in terms of new analytical methodologies as well as conceptual frameworks and exciting new applications, that one may not have pursued individually. Collaborations are key to successful research and, when they work well, yield intellectual, professional, and personal rewards.

Building networks through collaborations, beginning at one's educational institutions, may yield life-long partnerships. This is something that I aim to support as the Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks. This is an exciting time of the year when we begin to welcome new students and associates. Our newest Student Center Associate is Mr. Nathan Kollett, who has matriculated into our doctoral program in Management Science at the Isenberg School and who for the past two years has worked at State Street Corporation in Boston.

Speaking of "school ties," the latest issue of Vanity Fair has several articles featuring my fellow alums from Brown University with one article on Steve Rattner, Obama's "Car Czar," who was the former editor of the Brown Daily Herald, and another on the revised "Preppy Handbook," True Prep, by Lisa Birnbach, another Brown alum, with Chip Kidd. True Prep will be released on September 7 and I am sure that it will be very entertaining reading.

I am a product of an inner city high school, Yonkers High School, which had outstanding teachers and I received four degrees from Brown University, including my PhD. The excerpt from True Prep states that a preppy always has a navy blazer, a fashion piece that is part of my frequent flier uniform, so I guess that aspect of my academic ambience ultimately did rub off on me or perhaps I just subconsciously adopted the uniform of the male execs in business class.

Students Who Will Succeed -- First and Lasting Impressions

Yesterday, I met with a group of my doctoral students at the Isenberg School of Management. I wanted to make sure that I gave them proper directions on their research while I was away at conferences in Europe.

As I came up to my office there was a student, who had recently defended his PhD dissertation successfully, and wanted to say good-bye to me. He greeted me with a beautiful bouquet of flowers in appreciation (featured above). I was very touched that he would take the time to do this and to leave a "last" lasting impression. Now, as a "Dr." he will, in a few days, be starting his excellent position in statistical and economic consulting with a major consulting firm in Washington DC. Although I was not on his dissertation committee, as Area Coordinator of the Management Science track of our PhD program, I spend a lot of time helping to recruit doctoral students, who come from around the world, and in making sure that they are comfortable and succeed upon matriculation.

This latest successful PhD to graduate from our program is from Europe. He finished his PhD in 4 years, despite the untimely death of his original dissertation advisor last December. In his most recent email message to me, he said: Thank you for all your support throughout my doctoral studies. If not our phone interview and your invaluable guidance four years ago, I don't think I would be in the program at all. Thank you!

Wouldn't the world be a better place, if people took the time to say hello to their colleagues and co-workers, if bosses treated their employees with respect and kindness, and if we all supported one another and celebrated the successes of our students, staff, faculty, and even administrators?!

Manners go a long way and kind words can make any day, even a difficult one, truly special.

The above student will continue to succeed because of his thoughtfulness and courtesy.

Coincidentally, yesterday, I also received a message from a new doctoral student who will soon be traveling thousands of miles to begin her studies in our PhD program. In her message she wrote:

Cannot wait to see you now! My hometown ... is a very beautiful city. Have you heard of it before? Is there something (food, for example) you like very much in ... ? I can bring some for you. Also, if you cannot decide which one you like most, I will pick something very interesting by myself as special gift for you :). Thanks again for the help and concern from you ....

The circle of academic life is very special.

As a community, though, we need to regularly celebrate the achievements and milestones of all involved and, at the very least, to extend our congratulations to students who get into our programs, who make good progress, sometimes, under challenging circumstances, and who, ultimately, earn their degrees and get terrific jobs.

A Thank You from a Student

The surprise gift and Thank You card were left in my office mailbox. These unexpected acknowledgments that I received yesterday came from an excellent, and very hard-working, undergraduate student that had taken my Transportation & Logistics class last semester. She is majoring in Operations Management and will be graduating later this month from the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst. I have enjoyed the conversations that we shared very much.

The kindness and thoughtfulness of this student filled me with a very special warmth.

In the Thank You note that accompanied the beribboned box of Lindt chocolates, the student had written:

Professor Nagurney, You are one of the very few women role models that I have had in my life. You are very motivated and successful and inspire me. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be your student. I got the job as a *********** and that is due to your partial contribution from your referral and your inspiration. Thank you so much! I wish you well.

**************
Fall 09 Student


Last night I wrote back to this student that I will always treasure the Thank You note that she sent me and that I know that she will be very successful both personally and professionally.

Teaching is not easy but the rewards of connecting with students, mentoring them, and seeing them begin to realize their dreams are some of the best acknowledgments that a professor can ever receive.

Students Sharing Their Good Job News

Yesterday, a student came to my office who will be graduating next month with a concentration in Operations Management. He wanted to tell me personally his good news (rather than just sending me an email). He had received two excellent job offers recently and had made his decision. When he told me that he will be working for a company located in the Prudential Center in Boston, I was thrilled. He was so excited about accepting this offer (and told me that he had a 30 minute time window in which to notify both companies that had extended him offers, which had been stressful). He decided to go with a privately held company, which may be more risky. His father, who is a postal worker, had told him that he regretted taking the more conservative professional route in his life and wanted his son to avail himself of exciting opportunities. My former student will have full health and dental benefits as well as partial payment towards additional academic coursework. Plus, what a location to be working in -- right in downtown, gorgeous Boston!

It was wonderful to share in this student's happiness. I look forward to meeting his parents at next month's UMass Amherst graduation. This time of the year with graduations is truly special and marks wonderful milestones in our students' (and their families) lives.

Also, another student (this one a doctoral student, whose dissertation advisor was a colleague of mine, who died this past December) wanted to share her good news with me. She received a tenure track Assistant Professorship offer from a university in the South and has accepted it. Her doctoral concentration is in Management Science and she will be teaching quantitative methods at the university's business school. She said: I feel extremely lucky as well as grateful for the training I received from our doctoral program. I want to personally thank you, for being such a good teacher and inspiring professor. I hope in the years to follow, I can represent our school and our program well.

It is very gratifying to have students excel both in the classroom and on the job market and to have them take the time to acknowledge their professor. Students that have the work ethic (and wonderful manners) will do well. I am very proud of them.

Special Messages from Students (Unsolicited and When I Needed a Boost Badly)

In this blog, I often write about what a professor does on a given day and, despite regular teaching schedules, no two days are ever alike. Students are often told that the times that they are in college or in grad school are truly some of the best times of their lives and, sooner or later, they do come to this realization. Although there are numerous "bumps in the road" and the challenges of being a professor never stop, with the heavy loads of research, teaching, and onerous service responsibilities, every once in a while, one receives messages and feedback that make (some of) the workload worthwhile.

Just this week, during a period during which I was feeling especially "bounced around," I received messages from three former students, all of whom had taken my Transportation & Logistics undergraduate course at the Isenberg School. Two of these students will be graduating in May and one, a female, had graduated several years ago and has a marvelous position with a major consulting company. All majored in Operations Management.

One message from a former student said: I am graduating SOM in May. I have never enjoyed course material more so than that offered in your FINOP 341 class. I took it last semester and if you remember, I was the one who tried applying your course material to the transportation problem presented by ... I really, really want to get into the logistics field of business. In four years of class at Isenberg, and numerous internships and co-op opportunities, I have never really found any topic that satisfies me more than logistics and using mathematical algorithm(s) and applications to solve real life problems. The ability to enumerate a practical, real life problem and solve it using logic is among the most satisfying experiences I have encountered...

Another student, whom I nominated for a leadership award, and who will be receiving it soon at a reception at UMass Amherst, which his parents will be attending as well, and so will I, wrote: Great -- I tell my parents a lot about you so I look forward to introducing you! ... I really appreciate your help; it's great to be part of a large University and having someone who cares about you personally really making the large campus experience much easier and more intimate... I wont forget the people who have helped me so much especially as you have done!

Finally, a former student, who graduated a few years ago and has had a very successful professional career, wrote:

Hi Professor Nagurney,

How are you?

Just wanted to let you know that I will be in Amherst this weekend, probably heading up on Friday. I'll be speaking on an Alumni panel for Open House weekend. Let me know if you'll be around on Friday. I would love to stop by and say hello!

To the students who wrote the above messages, I give a BIG Thank You!

Some of my course lecture notes are available here.

United Nations of Students and a Mini Reunion

This past week, a group of my present and past doctoral students gathered in my Supernetworks Lab at the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst for a mini reunion. The occasion was that it was the week before the UMass Amherst spring break and a former doctoral student, who had arrived from Australia, had joined us as a Visiting Scholar. Dr. Dmytro Matsypura, who received tenure at the University of Sydney and is on sabbatical now, will be with us through mid-May. He received his PhD with a concentration in Management Science in 2006 and joined the Faculty of Economics and Business at Sydney in January 2007. Dr. Matsypura is originally from Ukraine.

Another former doctoral student of mine, Dr. Jose M. Cruz, who is now an Assistant Professor at the School of Business at the University of Connecticut (UCONN) in Storrs, drove up with his wife and gorgeous, almost one year old, twins (a boy and a girl). Dr. Cruz received his PhD from UMass Amherst (also with a concentration in Management Science in 2004). He has 5 degrees from UMass Amherst (in engineering, computer science, applied mathematics, an MBA, and a PhD) and is one of ten children. (His parents in Cape Verde deserve multiple trophies!) Two of my doctoral students were also able to join us for some conversation, exchanges of advice, and serious "catching up."

I have chaired the dissertations of 15 doctoral students and you can find the complete list of their names, graduation dates, and the titles of their dissertations on this academic genealogy website.

What impresses me most about my students is their congeniality and support of one another and their respectful natures. They come not only from the US but from many different countries. Even after graduation, they continue to collaborate and support one another. Quite a few continue to be active Center Associates of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I direct. They have written journal articles together, shared rooms at conferences together, and congratulate one another when notable goals (both personal and professional) are achieved.

For example, Professor Jose Cruz told us at his visit this past week that he had just received the annual undergraduate teaching award from the UCONN School of Business as the best undergraduate teacher (and this evaluation was done over a three year period)! The congratulatory messages were flying but especially thoughtful was one from a Full Professor, Dr. Ding Zhang of the State University of New York at Oswego, who is originally from China, that stated that Jose was not born in the US but in Cape Verde (islands now part of Africa) and in a different culture. Hence, Dr. Cruz's receipt of an undergraduate teaching award at such a big business school is truly impressive. Plus, he was even a finalist for the graduate teaching award!

My doctoral students (present and past) have come from (as already mentioned) Ukraine and Cape Verde, and from Japan, Korea, China, India, Austria, Greece, and the US. I call them the United Nations and they realize the benefits and personal satisfaction of working together, sometimes struggling together, always supporting one another, and laughing together. The synergies that are created benefit education, research, as well as personal and professional growth and success.

Above I share with you a photo taken in my Supernetworks Lab at our recent mini reunion, where many friendships have been made! Each of us in the photo was born in a different country and only the twins were born in the USA!

Operations Students as Models

I always say that I have the best students! I teach at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst and one needs to be very flexible as an academic because one never knows what "opportunities" cross one's path on any given day.

For example, as part of a development effort, I was asked to gather a group of my students for a photoshoot, which took place today and took over an hour. It was a new experience for my undergraduates, all seniors, which took part (but not for me), and they graciously gave up part of their Friday morning (during midterm time) to be photographed with me.

Afterwards (I like to schedule such opportunities/events efficiently), a group of us (we were all nicely dressed for the photoshoot) took part in a videotaping in my research lab, the Supernetworks Lab for Computation and Visualization, which is part of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, that I direct. My research team was selected to be part of a video that will be entered into a competition. This was another "good cause," so I obliged.

As one of my undergrads today said, after we were photographed, numerous times, "if we don't get a job in business, we can always be models." My students are already model students and now they are even models!

Above are some photos that I took this morning -- before even any of the official ones get processed.

Calling American Students Lazy is Hurtful

In the meantime, I have heard from Dr. Dennis Hanno, the undergraduate dean at Babson. Dr. Hanno was a former colleague of mine at the Isenberg School of Management, and also a former neighbor in Amherst. He is an amazing individual, educator, and administrator. I urge you to read the commentary on his blog regarding the recent OpEd piece in the Boston Globe that I wrote about below. I am adding this link today (December 24, 2009) due to the uproar created by the OpEd piece. Please read Dean Hanno's commentary here.

In today's Boston Globe there is an OpEd piece written by Kara Miller, who teaches at Babson College. The article is entitled, "My lazy American students," and the author writes how she prefers having students from other countries in her classes since she feels that they have a much better work ethic, despite their, perhaps, poorer English.

I found this OpEd piece painful to read and insulting to all the hard-working students, American or international ones. This past semester was not easy with the H1N1 pandemic, with many families losing jobs and income because of the recession, among other additional stressors on both students and faculty alike.

I would like to counter the arguments in that article and say, in contrast, my students at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst were terrific this past semester. They showed up to do their presentations despite a big snowstorm. They showed up at their final exam besides it being dark and cold outside (and the heat was up to 80 degrees for some reason in the exam classroom). ALL of my students handed in their presentations on time and the students in my undergraduate class at the Isenberg School of Management were some of the best and the most hard-working ones I have ever had the privilege to teach.

American students are terrific as are the international ones! Interestingly, in my undergraduate class this term I had only one international student (from Hong Kong) whereas in my graduate class I had only one American student with all others being international ones.

As I have heard it said before "Apples don't fall far from the tree." Faculty serve as role models and are as much at fault if the students don't do well as the students are themselves. Honestly, if you can't say something nice perhaps it's best to let it be left unsaid.

Traffic Assignment and the UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series

Today we will be hosting Dr. Hillel Bar-Gera of Israel in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Spring 2009 Speaker Series. He will be speaking on a new algorithm for traffic assignment. His talk will take place at the Isenberg School of Management in Room 112 at 11AM. There is a lot of excitement surrounding his visit and presentation. Dr. Bar-Gera's dissertation advisor at the University of Illinois at Chicago was Professor David E. Boyce, who received the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award from the Transportation Science Section of INFORMS (the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). Professor Boyce is now a Professor Emeritus and is affiliated with Northwestern University. He is also a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International and renowned for his work in transportation and regional planning. Dr. Bar-Gera is spending this year in the US and has been based both at Arizona and at Purdue.

Effective and efficient algorithms for large-scale congested networks, including transportation, are critical in evaluating traffic flows on networks, and associated costs and travel times; where new roads should be built (or not); how to determine optimal tolls (a big topic now even in developing countries and especially in China); how to determine optimal and equilibrium product flows in supply chains, and even how to predict flows and prices in electric power generation and distribution networks. In today's competitive economies, one needs to be able to not only conceptualize difficult problems and to model them but also to solve them! Hence, algorithms and good implementation of them are essential to practice. I have been conducting research in large-scale network models, analysis, algorithms, and applications since receiving my PhD at Brown and teaching and researching in this area is always exciting and fun. Plus it is very rewarding to see one's publications not only cited but results in them applied.

This semester is the 10th semester that I have been advising and helping the award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter organize its Speaker Series, which has brought about 70 speakers to the Isenberg School. Students have heard talks this year by Tom Vanderbilt, the author of the book, "Traffic," by Professor Daron Acemoglu of MIT, who is a recipient of the Bates Medal, by Dr. Grace Lin, of Global Solutions at IBM, by Dr. Alex Pentland, the author of the book, "Honest Signals." The series also gave a platform to two of our newest faculty members at the Isenberg School, Professors Ahmed Ghoniem and Senay Solak, to speak on their fascinating and highly original research. Professor Kevin Fu of the Computer Science department at UMass Amherst spoke on implantable medical devices and security issues. This semester, we hosted Professor Ellis Johnson, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, who is from Georgia Tech. Professor Hari Balasubramanian of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at UMass Amherst regaled the audience with his experiences of working and researching healthcare at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Professor June Dong of SUNY Oswego informed the audience of the unexpected and wide-ranging impact of supply chain disruptions.

On May 8, 2009, we will be hearing the last speaker in this year's series, Professor Robert Pollin, speak about "green jobs."

I believe that education takes place both in and out of the classroom. Organizing, running, advertising, etc., such a series requires a lot of hard work as well as financing, which we manage to stitch together creatively. The other day an undergrad (a junior) wandered into my office and we ended up talking for an hour about the speaker series, research on networks, and even PhD programs. This undergrad told me that on Fridays when there is no speaker he is disappointed. Hence, even with the economic and financial crisis affecting endowments in a major way, how can one turn off/shut down such a series?! Yesterday, another undergrad (a graduating senior) came to my office to chat. We talked about the transportation & logistics class that I taught last semester and that he took; we talked about how terrific the Operations Management major is at the Isenberg School; we talked about future opportunities and some contacts that I had had recently with companies interested in advancing their supply chains, and, yes, we talked about today's speaker, Dr. Bar-Gera, and his upcoming presentation on traffic assignment algorithms. One story that this undergrad shared with me that I really enjoyed was that his parents told him that even as a 5 year old he was absolutely fascinated by traffic!

So with renewed energy and enthusiasm, we are now in the process of starting to plan next year's UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series. Many thanks for the support that we receive for doing this series. In the end, seeing the audience listening and interacting with the speakers and then continuing the discussions days and weeks afterwards is a priceless dimension of this addition to the educational/intellectual enterprise. I/we can't thank the speakers enough for their brilliance and generosity in sharing their work with us! You have opened the eyes and the world to many!