Humanitarian Logistics and Preparing for the Next Global Disaster

My Op-Ed piece, Preparing for the Next Global Disaster, appears in today's Sunday Republican newspaper as part of the Viewpoint series.

In the article, which is available online, I argue for more education on humanitarian logistics in all aspects of disaster management from preparedness and mitigation to recovery and reconstruction.

The article was written to mark the second anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti and to recognize the disasters that have befallen our area of Massachusetts in the past year. The number of disasters is growing as well as the number of people affected by them.

I start teaching my new course on the subject, Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare, on January 24 at the Isenberg School of Management. This is a truly unique course and I have spent weeks preparing the lectures and course materials.

Supernetwork Center Associates at INFORMS in Austin, Texas

Nine of the Supernetwork Center Associates will be presenting papers at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas, November 7-10, 2010 so we will be having a very special reunion.

Dr. Tina Wakolbinger of the University of Memphis will be chairing the session: Decision-Making in Nonprofit Organizations in which she will present a co-authored paper, "Collaborative Information Sharing in Humanitarian Supply Chains." In that session, my doctoral student, Min Yu, will present a paper co-authored with Dr. Patrick Qiang of Pennsylvania State University Malvern and me entitled, " Supply Chain Network Design for Critical Needs with Outsourcing." This paper is now in press in Papers in Regional Science.

Dr. Jose Cruz of the University of Connecticut will be chairing the session: Sustainable and Responsible Supply Chain Management in which he will deliver the paper, "Mitigating Global Supply Chain Risks through Corporate Social Responsibility." In the same session, Dr. Zugang Liu of Pennsylvania State University at Hazleton will speak on, "Consumer Environmental Awareness and Competition in Two-Stage Supply Chains," co-authored with Dr. Cruz and Dr. Trisha Woolley (now Anderson).

Dr. Woolley Anderson will present the paper, co-authored with me, "Environmental and Cost Synergy in Supply Chain Network Integration in Mergers and Acquisitions." This paper was published in Sustainable Energy and Transportation Systems, Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making, Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, M. Ehrgott, B. Naujoks, T. Stewart, and J. Wallenius, Editors, Springer, Berlin, Germany (2010) pp 51-78.

I will be presenting, "Supply Chain Network Design under Profit Maximization and Oligopolistic Competition," in a session on Risk Management organized by Dr. Jussi Keppo and Dr. Jie Ning of the University of Michigan. This paper was published recently in the journal Transportation Research E.

Dr. Patrick Qiang will present our joint paper, "A Bi-criteria Measure to Assess Supply Chain Network Performance for Critical Needs," in the session on Disruptive Event Management.

And Dr. Dmytro Matsypura will be traveling all the way from Sydney, Australia, where he holds the position of tenured lecturer at the University of Sydney to present the co-authored paper, "Margining Option Portfolios by Offsets with Two, Three, and Four Legs" in a Financial Engineering session.

In addition, Center Associate Dr. Padma Ramanujam of SAS Inc. will also be joining us at INFORMS in Austin, Texas.

I will be posting our presentations, as they become available, on the Visuals Page of the Supernetworks Center website.