Celebrating a Great Operations Researcher and Friend Professor Panos M. Pardalos

Very soon the conference in honor of Distinguished Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida, Gainesville, will take place in beautiful Chalkidiki, Greece. We will be recognizing this great operations researcher and scientist, who has been deservedly lauded with numerous awards from being elected INFORMS Fellow, class of 2006, to his receipt of the Euro Gold Medal Award in 2013, to his being appointed the first Paul and Heidi Brown Preeminent Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Panos' record of accomplishments is breath-taking from his outstanding and voluminous research in optimization and numerous applications from engineering to even medicine. At the same time, he is extremely generous and giving to his numerous doctoral students, collaborators, and colleagues from around the globe. His energy, stamina, knowledge, and vision are legendary.

And he is a very special friend and role model for multiple generations of operations researchers.

When I received an invitation from the organizers of the conference in honor of Professor Pardalos' 60th birthday, Professors Sergiy Butenko and Sakis Migdalas, I had to accept.

The conference in honor of Panos is entitled:  Conference on Optimization Control and Applications in the Information Age will take place June 15-20, 2014.

Speakers will be coming from many different countries, including my former doctoral student at the Isenberg School of Management, Dr. Dmytro Matsypura, who has tenure now at the School of Business at the stunning University of Sydney in Australia!

At the conference we will present Panos with a book, with the cover featured below. More information on the book is available from the Springer website.

 

Another former doctoral student of mine, Dr. Min Yu, of the University of Portland, and I have contributed the paper, A Supply Chain Network Game Theoretic Framework for Time-Based Competition with Transportation Costs and Product Differentiation, to this book, which is edited by  Th. M. Rassias, C. A. Floudas, and S. Butenko, Springer, New York (2014).

I will be presenting the paper, Supply Chain Network Competition in Time-Sensitive Markets, Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, Jonas Floden, and Ladimer S. Nagurney, which builds on the paper in the edited book.

The full presentation can be downloaded from the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website.

Last summer I spoke at a conference on Network Models in Economics and Finance in Athens, Greece, which Panos organized and the photo of us with some researchers is below.

We look forward to celebrating the achievements and the humanity and kindness of Professor Pardalos!

2013 EURO Gold Medal Winner in Rome is Professor Panos M. Pardalos!

I was aware that the good news was coming but now that it is official we can all celebrate.

Our dear friend and colleague, Distinguished University Professor Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida, has been awarded the 2013 EURO Gold Medal at the Euro INFORMS Conference in Rome, Italy. He was recognized for his sustained contributions to Operations Research and Optimization. Information on the selection committee is here.

Panos has chaired 53 PhD dissertations! He is a gentleman, a scholar, and one of the most creative and productive people I have ever met. He is also one of the kindest.

Just two weeks ago, I was with him in Athens, Greece, at the Network Models in Economics and Finance conference that he co-organized. The photo below is from that conference.

And, on February 17, 2013, he was one of the panelists on the AAAS Dynamics of Disasters Symposium that I organized and which took place on Boston in which ORMS star Dr. Laura McLay also spoke.

Congratulations to Professor Panos M. Pardalos on his receipt of the 2013 EURO Gold Medal -- so well-deserved! 

A Thank You to the School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Oklahoma

I made it back late last night from the University of Oklahoma where, on April 1, I had had a whirlwind day, as part of the Dream Course, Understanding and Engineering Systems, that I had been invited to speak in. I delivered two lectures, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening, on supply chains and network vulnerability, respectively.

This post is to thank the School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Oklahoma for the outstanding hospitality!

I stayed two nights in a Sooners Suite, which is actually a  large cabin. My suite had 2 bedrooms,  a huge livingroom, kitchen, and dining area, and I could not resist taking the photos, which feature a lot of University of Oklahoma (OU) decorations and memorabilia. Plus, there was a welcome bag for me upon my arrival.

One of the high points of my visit to OU included getting a quick  (my schedule was packed with meetings with faculty and students) drive around tour of campus by Dr. Randa Shehab, the Director of the School, and I managed to take a few snapshots below. The flowers were blooming, the sun was shining, it was warm (in contrast, it was snowing back home in Massachusetts), and the buildings and landscaping are simply stunning at OU!

 

Several groups of Master's and doctoral students presented overviews of their research projects to me -- very impressive and interesting work that is pushing both conceptual and methodological frameworks as well as applications from supply chains to energy to material science.

I also met with some faculty from the School of Computer Science and the Director of the School of Computer Science and had heard that my UMass CS colleague, Professor Don Towsley, had given a talk there a few months ago. It is such a small world in academia!

After my Dream Course lecture, and prior to my evening public lecture, I had dinner with the Faculty Advisors of the University of Oklahoma INFORMS Student Chapter, Professors Kash Barker and Hillel Kumin, in a room in the beautiful Student Union building -- to prove that I was actually there the photo below is of me standing in one of the rooms -- yes, those are oriental carpets and real flowers and plush chairs:

 

 

The Faculty Advisors for the OU INFORMS Student Chapter are standing to the right of the student chapter team leaders  in the photo above that I took after our dinner. The student chapter was very happy to have received the cum laude award from INFORMS (for the second time) at the Phoenix Annual meeting last Fall. We discussed the activities of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter that I have been the Faculty Advisor of for the past 9 years and compared notes and activities, including taking advantage of the great INFORMS Speakers Program!

Finally, I have to thank my host and the one resposible for this Dream Course, Professor Janet K. Allen, the John and Mary Moore Chair, for such outstanding hospitality. It even included a sumptuous buffet of Indian food at the Himalayas restaurant in Norman on Sunday evening, with her husband, Professor Farrokh Mistree, the Director of the School of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, and L.A. Comp Chair.

They also made sure that I saw the stunning engineering practice building (as told to me if athletes have practice buildings, engineers, should, too) in which I captured some of the student projects that will be entered in various competitions. Would you believe that the College of Engineering at OU has 200 National Merit Scholars!

I carried back an autographed copy of the book, A Letter to America, by David Boren, the President of the University of Oklahoma, given to me by Dr. Shehab.

The University of Oklahoma set new standards for academic hospitality -- thank you and congratulations on all the achievements from research scholarship to education!