My "Labor and Supply Chain Networks" Book is Published!

I was delighted to receive a shipment of my new book, "Labor and Supply Chain Networks," yesterday. The book was published by Springer Nature and contains 12 chapters, with Acknowledgments, Preface, and an Appendix.

Writing this book was a true labor of love. The book is dedicated to: essential workers and to those fighting for freedom in Ukraine, with gratitude for your heroism. It is the result of many years of  research and writing, accompanied by adrenaline during the COVID-19 pandemic and now the war on Ukraine. 

Springer has produced both hardcopy and online versions, with more information available on the Springer website for the book. I am indebted to Elizabeth Loew of Springer for her outstanding shepherding of this book project with publication even ahead of schedule!

The front matter for the book, with the Preface and the Acknowledgments, is available for free download. In the Acknowledgments, I thank the great Isenberg School Dean Anne P. Massey, the two Operations and Information Management Department Chairs: Professors Bob Nakosteen and Senay Solak, over the period that this book was written, as well as the Vice Provost for Global Affairs at UMass Amherst Kalpen Trivedi, for his leadership of international programs. With the war in Ukraine still raging, and with my service for the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) in Ukraine a very important part of my life, both professionally and personally, I also thank the President of KSE Tymofiy Mylovanov and Rector Tymofii Brik plus KSE colleagues Oleg Nivievskyi and Nataliia Shapoval, who have done extraordinary work on documenting the impacts of the war. 

Collaborators throughout this challenging time have made work fascinating and enjoyable. I am indebted to Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford, Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy, Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Professor Deniz Besik of the University of Richmond, Professor Sara Saberi of WPI, Professor Pritha Dutta of Pace University, and Professor Mojtaba Salarpour of Texas A&M Commerce. All are Center Associates of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I founded in 2001 and continue to direct. Acknowledgments are also extended to my long-time collaborators on Dynamics of Disasters conferences and co-edited volumes: Professor Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida and Professor Ilias S. Kotsireas of Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. I also thank my PhD student Dana Hassani.

Of course, writing a book requires a great deal of focus and time and dedication, and I am so thankful to my family for their support. And, in the pandemic, having a professional society such as INFORMS that helped us to stay connected and informed and also advocated our work to the media and government, was incredible supportive and sustaining.

Workers need to be valued, supported, recognized, and paid for their contributions. Supply chains would collapse without them, as we have seen. I hope that my book, which contains chapters on both profit-maximizing firms and non-profits, including blood service organizations and those in emergency response and disaster management, helps in decision-making as well as policy-making. I believe that students will also appreciate and gain value from the material therein.

I hope that this book will inspire further research as well as implementation in practice of results therein from wages that should be paid to laborers to the productivity investments that should be made for the benefit of workers, consumers, firms, and organizations.

After all, as I wrote in my ORMS Today invited essay (thank you, INFORMS): In the End,  It's All About People!

Celebrated Publication of Our Cybersecurity Investment Game Theory Paper at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University

Today, I had the pleasure of seeing my most recent PhD student from the Isenberg School of Management, Shivani Shukla, who successfully defended her dissertation in May, and is now Dr. Shivani Shukla. She will soon assume her new tenure track academic position in San Francisco - very exciting!

Shivani and I were celebrating the publication of our paper, which is on cybersecurity investments, and which appears in the July issue of the European Journal of Operational Research. 

I also very much wanted to show Shivani the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (RIAS) at Harvard University where I am spending the summer as a Fellow. I had been a Science Fellow at RIAS in 2005-2006, which was quite the historic year with Harvard's President at that time, Dr. Larry Summers, resigning, and the Dean of Radcliffe, Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, becoming the first female President of Harvard. She announced her resignation recently, after serving for 10 years.

And, what serendipity, when Shivani and I entered the gorgeous RIAS Fellows  Building, Byerly Hall, we saw a UMass Amherst colleague, Dr. Andrea Nahmod of the Math/Stats Department, who is also a Summer Fellow and had just returned from a conference in France!

I gave Shivani a tour and emphasized all the features that make RIAS so special - from the focus on interdisciplinarity, to the ambience, the staff, the Fellows, and even the beautiful garden, where we posed in with our latest paper.

Of course, we also enjoyed a delicious lunch at Algiers and then treats at Burdick's.

As an academic, it gives me great joy to see my 20th PhD student begin on her new academic journey with a nice portfolio of journal articles already in hand! I hope that, one day, she will be a Fellow at RIAS!

Celebrating Student Achievements - A First Prize Award

The best part about being a faculty member is working with students.

And with the beautiful month of September and the beginning of the new academic year, there is a renewed energy on campus.

Faculty who work closely with students are also happiest when their students achieve and such achievements should be celebrated.

This past week has been filled with wonderful news concerning students.

For example, yesterday evening, my doctoral student in Management Science, Shivani Shukla, who had traveled by public transportation - quite the challenge in itself  - to our sister campus, UMass Lowell, to take part in the Air Force Association (AFA) Cyber Workshop  shared with me some wonderful news. The poster that she had presented, "Game Theoretic Model for Cybersecurity Investments with Nonlinear Budget Constraints," was awarded the first prize in the poster category!

Part of Shivani's poster presentation was based on the paper: A Supply Chain Game Theory Framework for Cybersecurity Investments Under Network Vulnerability, Anna Nagurney, Ladimer S. Nagurney, and Shivani Shukla, which was just published last week in Computation, Cryptography, and Network Security, N.J. Daras and M.T. Rassias, Editors, Springer International Publishing Switzerland (2015) pp 381-398. A nice writeup is here.

Below is a photo of Shivani with Bruce Baikis from MITRE and Joe Carriere from L3 Communications, who gave her the award. MITRE is also the home base of one of my absolutely favorite INFORMS colleagues, Dr. Les Servi (who is also a fellow Brown U. alum).

The prize consisted of a check plus an Air Force medal, which is considered a badge of honor.

The first prize in the paper category went to Patrick Dynoff, who is a high school student, and has been working with faculty at the Naval Postgraduate School. So impressive!


Congrats to all the entrants in the AFA Challenge!

Clearly, the way forward with cybersecurity is through research and education, which must include great students!  At the Isenberg School of Management and at UMass Amherst our students are fabulous and a delight to work with.

Investing in the Nation's Infrastructure but Doing it Right

In an interesting Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, Dr. Laura Tyson of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and a member of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, is calling for a new stimulus package to invest in the nation's infrastructure.

My colleagues and I at the Supernetworks Center have been writing a lot on how to identify not only the costs of infrastructure degradation from our roads and bridges and even the Internet, from an economic and performance standpoint, but also on how to identify the effects of enhancement and investments by taking into consideration the behavior of those who will ultimately be using the infrastructure. In addition, it is imperative that the investments are made with cognizance of climate change and how best to adapt our infrastructure investments accordingly from transportation networks to supply chains and electric power generation and distribution networks.

Our paper, which contains highlights from our research and major findings, but in a more condensed fashion than found in our Fragile Networks book is entitled: "Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain Age,"and it is in press in the journal International Transactions in Operational Research.

I just hope that if a new stimulus does get passed and even an Infrastructure Bank established, that economists, engineers, operations researchers and management scientists, and even environmental scientists, all work together so that what gets built, renovated, expanded, enhanced, and where, can have the greatest positive impact economically not only in the short-term but also in the long-term.