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.

Tariffs and Trade - Some of Our Studies

Today has been quite the day. It is just mid-afternoon, and, in addition to a Kyiv School of Economics Board of Directors meeting on Zoom on various important issues, I managed, as of now, to do 4 interviews with the media on Trump, tariffs, and trade, because (we will see if this comes to pass), as of midnight tonight, Trump is to impose 25% tariffs on products from our neighbor Canada and 10% tariffs on products from China. The tariffs on Mexican products have been "paused" for 30 days, due to an agreement between the two Presidents. The situation is incredibly dynamic and volatile.

When I agree to interview requests, it is on topics that are not only timely but ones that we have conducted research on. I  remember fondly when we began to write on the impacts of tariffs (and there are several types, I might add). Colleagues, who were then at Cornell University, Charles F. Nicholson and Phillip M Bishop, were working on impacts of ad valorem tariffs on dairy products from Mexico, had reached out to me and then visited me at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. We published a series of papers, including one in the Annals of Operations Research. Since then, collaborations (and publications) have continued, many with a focus on agricultural products and the impacts of trade policies. Thanks to my co-authors: Dana Hassani, Oleg Nivievskyi, Pavel Martyshev, Deniz Besik, PhD, Michelle Li, June Dong, Ladimer Nagurney, and Mojtaba Salarpour for research that continues to resonate, with acknowledgment to journals, including: the Journal of Global Optimization, the European Journal of Operational Research, Transportation Research E, and the International Transactions in Operational Research, that have published our work on tariffs and other policy instruments (such as quotas and subsidies) and their impacts on commodity flows, producer and consumer prices, and consumer welfare! And for a recent podcast that I did on Talk The Talk with Bill Newman and Buz Eisenberg, for WHMP, on Trump, tariffs and tradeoffs, click here: https://soundcloud.com/whmp/umass-isenberg-school-prof

Below is a collage of first pages of several of our papers on tariffs.

You can find many preprints of the above articles and other ones on the Supernetwork Center website: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/dart.html

An Incredible Blackett Lecture Experience at the Royal Society in London

We returned yesterday from London, in time for me to teach my last Transportation and Logistics class of the Fall 2024 semester this morning.

It was a whirlwind week. My husband and I flew from Boston Logan on December 3 (after I taught my class), and, after a few hours of sleep, we had the pleasure of taking part in an Isenberg School get together hosted by my former PhD student, Dr. Stavros Siokos, the co-founder of Astarte Capital. It was a lovely event with Dean Anne P. Massey taking part as well as Senior Associate Dean Bill Brown, plus several Isenberg School development folks, alums and friends.

And, on December 5, it was time for my Blackett Lecture and the annual awards given out by The Operational Research (OR) Society of the United Kingdom. 

The venue was The Royal Society. This society is the oldest scientific society, dating back to 1660. The event was lovely - beautifully organized with the awards taking place first, followed by my one hour Blackett Lecture, a cocktail hour, and then a delicious dinner. The OR Society will be posting a video of my lecture on its youtube channel soon as well as professional photographs on its Flickr.

I was incredibly honored to have the opportunity to deliver my Blackett Lecture, "NetwORks and Policies: OR to the Rescue," at the beautiful venue and to an audience of amazing colleagues, academics and practitioners, as well as friends and invited guests. I would like to acknowledge the President of The OR Society Gilbert Owusu for the warm introduction and for so expertly handling the Q&A, and Gavin Blackett, Carol McLaughlin, Sarah Davies, and Caitlin Griffin of  The OR Society for the hospitality. Special thanks to Graham Rand, Edmund Burke, and Robert Fildes for the conversations and welcome. It's not every day that one gets to be in a photograph next to an oil painting of the Nobel laureate and Founder of OR in the UK - Patrick Blackett! 

It was an honor to have the Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst Dean Anne P. Massey and Senior Associate Dean William Brown in attendance as well as Diane Isenberg and University of Massachusetts Amherst PhD alumnus Stavros Siokos. Recognizing so many in the audience because of professional interactions over the years, made for a very enjoyable experience - thank you all! The slide deck of my presentation has been posted: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/BlackettLecture-Nagurney-2024.pdf

Some additional background on becoming the 2024 Blackett Lecturer can be found here: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2024/11/deeply-honored-to-have-been-selected-to.html

Congratulations to all the award recipients recognized at this very memorable event. The impact of our great discipline is humbling and inspiring. Working together we can continue to make positive change. 

Deeply Honored to Have Been Selected to Deliver the 2024 Blackett Lecture at the Royal Society in London

You probably remember the day that you received some wonderful news and also the day that you received sad news.

This post is about the former.

I was at a conference in Kalamata, Greece in honor of the 70th birthday of Panos M. Pardalos last summer when the great news arrived. I had been selected by The Operational Research (OR) Society to deliver the 2024 Blackett Lecture at the Royal Society in London. Honestly, as I was reading the letter, the tears started to flow since I was so touched that my hard work was being recognized. 

Patrick Blackett, after whom the lecture is named, was the founder of  OR in the United Kingdom. In the US, we, typically, say "Operations Research." He was also awarded a Nobel Prize in physics.

The abstract of my lecture as well as a link to registration can be found here.

The letter from The OR Society, signed by the Executive Director Seb Hargreaves and by the President of The OR Society, Gilbert Owusu, is below.

I have been enjoying preparing my lecture, which will give a panoramic view of OR and policies from tolls for congested urban transportation networks to tariffs and quotas for agricultural supply chain networks. I will be bringing in a lot of personal experiences as well.

I am thrilled that there will even be guests from New England coming.

I Enjoyed Speaking at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland

This past Friday, I had the pleasure of delivering a talk in the Department of Decision, Operations & Information Technologies (DO&IT) Research Seminar Series at the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland in College Park. I flew out after teaching on Thursday, October 31, 2024, which was Halloween, and returned late on Friday, November 1, 2024.

The title of my presentation was: "Agricultural Supply Chain Networks: Labor, Trade, Policies, and Resilience." The hospitality extended to me was wonderful. I very much enjoyed breakfast with PhD student Jiannan Xu and a delicious lunch with Chaired Professor Zhi-Long Chen, along with a great conversations. Meetings with Professors Raghu Raghavan, Xiaojia Guo, Alex Estes, and Ashish Kabra were delightful (and much too short). It was terrific to also hear some stories from Professor Bruce Golden as well as Professor Michael Fu, both of whom I had seen at the INFORMS Fellows Luncheon the previous week at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle! I enjoyed also chatting with Professor Wedad Elmaghraby. 

I had been to the University of Maryland several times since I had been on the Organizing Committee of the International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction a couple of years. However, this was my first trip to the Smith School of Business. There are a remarkable number of parallelisms between programs there and at the Isenberg School of Management, so the conversations were both informative and very interesting!

It Was Great to Be Back at MIT to Speak on Agricultural Supply Chain Networks and Trade Policies

This past Tuesday I had the pleasure of speaking at MIT at the Center for Transportation and Logistics in its seminar series. I'd like to thank Austin Iglesias Saragih for the invitation to speak. The title of my presentation was: Agricultural Supply Chain Networks: Trade, Policies, and Resilience.

In my seminar, I first highlighted research that we had done on food supply chains over the past decade with collaborators: Min Yu, Deniz Besik, and Pritha Dutta (all of whom were my former PhD students, and now are thriving as Professors), and, more recently, with my present PhD student Dana Hassani and collaborators at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) Professor Oleg Nivievskyi and Dr. Pavlo Martyshev. 

In my presentation, I did a deep dive into the paper, "Exchange Rates and Multicommodity International Trade: Insights from Spatial Price Equilibrium Modeling with Policy Instruments via Variational Inequalities," Anna Nagurney, Dana Hassani, Oleg Nivievskyi, and Pavlo Martyshev, Journal of Global Optimization 87: (2023), pp 1-30.

The paper was the lead article in the volume and was also displayed at the INFORMS Phoenix conference. In the below photo I am standing next to the journal Editor, Professor Sergiy Butenko, and my PhD student Dana Hassani. The Springer editors Razia Amzad and Christian Rauscher are next to Dana.

I also discussed some results from my Labor and Supply Chain Networks book.

I am very grateful to the audience for the excellent questions and discussions and to Austin for handling the logistics of my visit. 

It was also extra special to have one of my former students, Emilio Alvarez Flores, who is now pursuing an MBA at Sloan at MIT, come to my presentation. In addition, I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Dr. Elenna Dugundji, who is a Research Scientist at the Center for Transportation ad Logistics at MIT.

My talk was also streamed on Zoom (which I had not been informed of). It was great to see MIT faculty Zooming in and others from different locations, including Georgia Tech.

It was terrific to be back at MIT. Coincidentally, the Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) is located at 1 Amherst Street in Cambridge so I felt right at home. I had spent 2 years at MIT and recall when the OR Center was also located there.

In my presentation, I discussed the importance of alternative routes and appropriate policies for agricultural trade with a focus on the impacts of Russia's war on Ukraine and, that night, as we all know, the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed after being hit by the cargo ship Dali. I had multiple requests for media interviews but had to decline because of my presentation and meetings at MIT. Lo and behold, whom did I see on the TV news, a few hours afterwards - none other than the Director of CTL, Professor Yossi Sheffi! He had hugged me when he saw me at MIT, something his PhD students told me they have never seen him do before. Professor Sheffi was also my host when I had an NSF Visiting Professorship for Women at MIT and I spent my first year at CTL, which was then located in Building 1.

The slide deck of my seminar presentation is posted on the Supernetwork Center website.

I had previously given a seminar at MIT in December 2015 and was hosted by Professor Carolina Osorio, who is no longer at MIT. She and Professor Jim Orlin joined us for dinner after my talk and Professor Orlin even Zoomed into my presentation this past Tuesday. My blogpost with photos from that visit can be accessed here.

That evening, I stopped by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (RIAS) at Harvard University, where I has been a Science Fellow in 2005-2006. The Fellows that year included Professor Claudia Goldin, who in 2023 received the Nobel Prize in Economics. I had been back to RIAS as a Summer Fellow twice since then.

And to celebrate being back in Cambridge, we enjoyed a delicious Amareno gelato topped by a chocolate macaron.