Media Coverage of Our Blood Supply Chain Research

It has been a very busy time since my article, "Uncertainty in blood supply chains creating challenges for industry," was published in The Conversation last month, and not only since the new semester has begun at the University of Massachusetts Amherst!

The article was reprinted in several publications, including: Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, the LA-based magazine GoodHealth, and even ORMS Today, the magazine of my favorite professional society, INFORMS, made a note of it in the February issue.

Since my article's publication, I have also received numerous emails from around the world, including from researchers and practitioners in the United Kingdom and in Israel, as well as from the United States, and have had extended conversations as well.

In particular, I very much enjoyed speaking with  Dr. Brian White and Jarrian James of Bloodbuy. Dr. White wrote this interesting blogpost: "Bloods and circuits: The RAND Corporation report on the role of technology in maintaining a stable blood supply," which references my article in The Conversation.

The Isenberg School of Management posted this piece by the Isenberg School's terrific Senior Editor, Lou Wigdor, entitled: ``Lessons learned from blood supply chains," which noted my wonderful collaborators on blood supply chain research, who were two of my former doctoral students: Dr. Amir H. Masoumi of Manhattan College and Dr. Min Yu of the University of Portland. Together, with the "other" Professor Nagurney, we co-authored the book, Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products, which was published by Springer in 2013.

I also was interviewed by Karen Brown, an award-winning health journalist. You can listen to her  report:   "America's blood economy: Vulnerable to economic trends, health advances"
on New England Public Radio.

The full transcript of the radio segment can be viewed here.

And our research on the topic of blood supply chains in the new economic climate continues. I will be presenting the paper, "Mergers and acquisitions in blood banking systems: A supply chain network approach,"  co-authored with Drs. Masoumi and Yu,  at the IFORS conference in Quebec City. 

Also, Pritha Dutta, a doctoral student in Management Science at the Isenberg School, will be presenting our paper, "Competition for blood donations: A Nash Equilibrium network framework, " 
at the New  England Decision Sciences Institute (NEDSI) Conference, which is being held not far from Amherst, in Springfield, Massachusetts, next month!

What a Week It Was!

This week has certainly flown by quickly!

Besides teaching my two courses and holding office hours, I was:

1. interviewed for a radio program on the news of my latest publication, that was highlighted both on physorg.com and on the homeland security newswire and was also the subject of a UMass Amherst news release;

2. interviewed by several journalists on my research on the negation of the Braess paradox and the wisdom of crowds, the subject of my latest article, and asked to comment on some preprints of other researchers;

3. contacted by UMass Amherst development to see whether I could help host an executive who is also an alum;

4. contacted by a representative who was wondering whether I was willing to have a photo of George Dantzig (the founder of operations research who passed away at ago 90) and me, that was taken at a conference, be used in a new edition of a book, and whether I was willing to provide a high resolution image of the photo (coincidentally, I had just shared that photo with the students in my graduate class the day before);

5. a participant in a teleconference for the SBP 2011 conference that I am serving as the tutorial chair for;

6. busy working on a multiple investigator NSF proposal, and

7. trying to finish up two research papers on sustainable supply chain management and on electronic recycling with collaborators;

8. busy contacting all the INFORMS student chapter Faculty Advisors and Chapter Presidents that I am responsible for to see how their chapters were doing and the activities that they were planning for this semester, and

9. trying to catch up with the reviewing of a pile of papers;

10. taking out a senior colleague to lunch who is a distinguished teacher, since I wanted to document his pedagogical wisdom (will write about what I learned later on this blog), and

11. starting my reviews of proposals for a scientific foundation of another country (luckily, this country pays for this kind of hard work).

All of the above I somehow managed to do as our community was having a very hard time dealing with the sudden death of a terrific colleague.

And the above does not even mention any duties/activities as a wife and mother!