Our Paper on Integrated Crop and Cargo War Risk Insurance with Application to Ukraine is Published!

The front page of today's Sunday New York Times has an article on Odesa, Ukraine, which is painful to read. This very important port city for Ukraine for trade has been subject to relentless bombing for the past few weeks with even a silo of sunflower oil attacked and the oil spilling into the Black Sea. Residents of Odesa have had to suffer from the bombing, and shortages of water and electric power.

We are all connected. A wonderful colleague at the Odesa Law Academy, Borys Kormych, has been a Virtual Scholar through our global partnership between UMass Amherst and the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) in two cohorts. In the most recent one, my Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Ismael Pour, and I have had the honor and pleasure of collaborating with him. We always worry how our colleagues, collaborators, and friends are doing in the illegal, horrific war perpetrated on Ukraine and Ukrainians.

An outcome of our collaboration  is the paper, "Integrated crop and cargo war risk insurance: application to Ukraine," that was published in the January 2026 issue of the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/itor.70038?af=R A reprint of the paper can be downloaded here: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/articles/IntegratedWarInsurance.pdf

Today the President of Ukraine Zelenskyy will be meeting with President Trump in Mar-a-Lago.  

Peace with security must return to Ukraine. 

After almost 4 years of the full-scale invasion by Russia, with billions of dollars of destruction and so much suffering and loss of lives, the war needs to end with the aggressor also paying for all the consequences. 

Presented Our Integrated War Risk Insurance Paper at EURO in Leeds

The outstanding EURO 2025 conference in Leeds is now over and delegates have disbursed. Scientific conferences are essential to knowledge exchange and also to networking and building communities.

It was an honor to present our recently published paper, "Integrated Crop and Cargo War Risk Insurance: Application to Ukraine," in the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) at this conference.

The paper was co-authored with my Isenberg School of Management PhD student Ismael Pour and Professor Borys Kormych of the Odesa Law Academy in Ukraine. Professor Kormych was a Virtual Scholar, in the first and second cohorts, thanks to the partnership between UMass Amherst and the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE). We enjoyed our collaboration very much.

The paper can be accessed here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/itor.70038?af=R

The paper was presented on Monday, June 23, 2025, in a very relevant session on Data Science in  Insurance and Finance. Information on the session is below.

Integrated crop and war risk insurance

Anna Nagurney, Ismael Pour, Borys Kormych

Finding robust profiles of mental well-being across Europe

Irene Albarran

Premium calculation using Parametric Quantile Regression for insurance count data

Fabio Baione, Davide Biancalana, Aurora Ferri

Implementing non-dominated sorting into asset preselection within portfolio problem

Tomáš Tichý, David Neděla, Sergio Ortobelli Lozza

We took a selfie of the speakers and the session chair.

Thanks to all who came to our session, including Christina Phillips! The link to our slide deck, from which our full presentation can be downloaded, is here: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/EURO-2025-NPK.pdf

Three Papers Accepted in One Week!

My Mother always said that "good news comes in threes" and this week we certainly had some much appreciated good news.

My paper, "NetwORks and Policies: OR to the Rescue," which is based on the Blackett Lecture that I delivered at The Royal Society in London, England on December 5, 2024, thanks to The Operational Research Society, was accepted for publication in the Journal of the Operational Research Society. And, incredibly, I received the galleys of the paper yesterday (a Saturday) and they were in great shape. Below is the first page.

And, since the Blackett Lecture experience was so special I include a collage below made of photos from the event, with deep gratitude for all that took part.

Many thanks also to The Operational Research Society for posting my Blackett Lecture online on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-LsIEsi-m0

Also, we heard from the International Transactions in Operational Research that the paper, "Integrated Crop and Cargo War Risk Insurance: Application to Ukraine," that I co-authored with my PhD student Ismael Pour and Professor Borys Kormych of the Odesa Law Academy in Ukraine, was accepted for publication. We hope to receive the galleys soon. Professor Kormych is a Virtual Scholar in our terrific UMass Amherst - Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) partnership. He was in the first cohort and is also in the second cohort. You can read more about the Virtual Scholars and their Faculty Hosts at the Isenberg School of Management here: https://www.umass.edu/global-affairs/news/kyiv-school-economics-and-university-massachusetts-amherst-launch-second-round-virtual-scholar

We heard the good news shortly after Ismael Pour presented the paper in the doctoral seminar in Management Science that I am teaching this semester. We took the nice photo below with him and Yongdong Chen and Samira Samadi (both also PhD students in the seminar) after Ismael's presentation.

Ismael will present this paper at the POMS Conference in Atlanta next month.

Also, Samira (full first name is Samirasadat) and I got the paper, "Multicommodity Trade, Tariffs, and Rerouting," accepted in a very special volume: Convex and Variational Analysis with Applications: In Honor of Terry Rockafellar’s 90th Birthday. Panos M. Pardalos and Themistocles M. Rassias, Editors, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. This is a very interesting and timely paper, given the trade wars that are happening now in real time. It discusses the evasion of tariffs and impacts through rerouting, with minimum processing, except for repackaging/relabeling in other countries.

We are grateful to the Editors and reviewers of our papers.