Marking the 30th Anniversary of the Passing of Dr. Stella Dafermos, the Second Female PhD in Operations Research in the World

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us are hearing from relatives and friends, from far and wide, offering support during these extremely challenging times.

Last week, I heard from my Brown University room-mate, with whom I shared a dorm room for 2 years. She was also a fellow Applied Math major, with a love of Operations Research, and an exceptional ballerina from South America, who then became a member of Brown's women's crew team. I co-founded the Brown Women's track team.

My room-mate wrote to me: "Stella Dafermos has appeared on my horizon these days. I can see Stella, wearing her grey knitted vest, writing on the blackboard, remember? It may well be that we’re living one of those math models she was trying to explain back then."

And then in a follow-up message last week, she continued: "I have a memory, crystal clear in my mind’s eye: we were sophomores, we were in our room (4th floor Diman), I am looking at my notes from her latest class, literally turning the notebook upside down and sideways to see if any of it would make any sense, thinking I really don’t think this is for me..  you were changing into your running clothes, munching on an apple, you come over, eye the notes and say.. oh, yeah, there it is, that’s good! You’ll get it!   And off you go running. I didn’t get it, but later, much, much later, from Vedic texts where they teach how our reality is actualized out of infinite probabilities, well, now the value of those lessons is evident."

Interestingly, unlike my room-mate, I never had Stella while I was an undergraduate student at Brown but I would hear about her from other female Applied Math majors. 

Dr. Stella Dafermos, the second female to receive a PhD in Operations Research (OR), passed away on April 5, 1990, so we now mark the 30th anniversary of her passing.  She was the only female Professor in the Divisions of Applied Math and Engineering at Brown at that time, and I became her first PhD student. Although she passed away at the age of 49, her incredible legacy on contributions to transportation and networks, notably, continues. Her contributions were recognized in an obituary that I wrote for the journal Operations Research, the only female thus honored. Her PhD was from Johns Hopkins University in 1968, and she was surrounded by luminaries in OR there.

Below is the academic genealogy tree, with academic ancestors including Maxwell, Newton, and Galileo. It, in an expanded form, with my PhD students, hangs in my office for inspiration. You can see the list of my PhD students, with the latest, Deniz Besik, to be added soon, here.

And, in a very interesting blogpost by the esteemed Dr. Mike Trick, who happens to be not only a fellow Canadian by birth, but also my academic cousin, you can read more.

Stella passed away on a Thursday. I was that year a Visiting Scholar at the Sloan School of MIT, and, shortly after I received the phone call about her death, I gave a talk at the OR Center. Such resilience is needed now, more than ever. I recall Professor Jim Orlin coming to my office to support me. Interestingly, Dr. Les Servi, now of MITRE (and with whom I also corresponded this week), was on sabbatical at the Sloan School then, and also offered much appreciated support. 

My husband drove us to the funeral, which was on the following Saturday. I remember the daffodils at the cemetery on beautiful Blackstone Boulevard and also some snow falling. I always consider daffodils to be Stella's flower because of her surname "Dafermos."  I wrote a tribute to my "Academic Mother" here.  I also wrote a bit on my personal journey in another post, in which I recognised the 20th anniversary of her passing.

One of Stella's paper (on variational inequalities, of course) is among the most impactful ones published in the INFORMS journal Transportation Science in 50 years!

Brilliant Lecture on Resilience by a Great Dane - Dr. Rasmus Dahlberg

Yesterday, we had the honor and pleasure of hosting Professor Rasmus Dahlberg of Denmark in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series. His talk on "Resilience - the Danish Version" was brilliant. It is not often that one has the opportunity to hear from someone who is not only a disaster research scholar and a practitioner, with many fascinating experiences in a spectrum of emergency management exercises and events, including ones in the Arctic, but is also a novelist and media personality!

I had had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Dahlberg previously and met him when he presented a paper in the first Dynamics of Disasters conference that I co-organized in Kalamata, Greece. The paper that he delivered at this conference appears in the refereed conference proceedings.

Coincidentally, Dr. Dahberg delivered his talk yesterday in Isenberg's new Business Innovation Hub, which was designed by the award-winning Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. Last April, Ingels came and spoke at the unveiling of the hub and accompanying celebrations.

I gave some opening remarks and then Mojtaba Salarpour, the President of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, welcomed the speaker and the audience. It was great to have faculty and students from the Isenberg School, the UMass Amherst College of Engineering, and the College of Computer and Information Sciences in attendance, as well as faculty from other universities, and even several journalism students who were excited about covering the event!



Dr. Dahlberg is a faculty member at the Royal Danish Defence College and considers himself a "disaster historian." He has worked for the Danish Emergency Management Agency in the Department of Crisis Management.

He emphasized that there are no natural hazards in Denmark and that "all disasters are man-made." What is especially challenging now is that there are more risks from climate change and advanced technology. And many disasters have been the result of human error, due to complexities of advanced technology.  He also emphasized that Denmark is one of the most peaceful countries but is being faced with sea level rise, along with expansions of maritime routes, which can lead to more maritime accidents and disasters.

He noted that emergency management in Denmark has evolved from "civil protection" and that Denmark in the Anthropocene is seeing more and more extreme weather events with extreme rainfall.

He brought up numerous interesting points, including the need for  "zero responders," who are volunteers rising up to assist. He mentioned an incident of extreme rainfall and flooding in Denmark in 2013, for which multiple shelters were identified but very few citizens actually used them. The Danes, through social media, had informed the community that they had opened up their own residences to those needing shelter and, in effect, solved the disaster response effectively. People, for the first time, in Denmark, used one another and social media in this way. The peer to peer coordination and communication was very successful!

Dr. Dahlberg, on February 7, 2014, contributed to a Danish Emergency Management Association Workshop which he called "Resilience 101," in which he spoke about resilience as being the ability "to bounce forward" after a disturbance that disrupts normal operations. He noted the work of Dr. Tierney, who was also on his PhD dissertation committee, who defines "resilience as the obverse of risk" and the work of Dr. Alexander Augustine, who notes that "We need to build resilience to the uncertainties that lie ahead."

A more resilient Denmark is needed to tackle climate change. He also emphasized that "we cannot build our way out of everything" and mentioned the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities program.

Dahlberg believes that one must stress the system for resiliency.

He also emphasized that it is expensive to invest in emergency management and singled out the "Arctic Response Force." He singled out the possibility of a cruise ship disaster in Arctic waters. He has even written up disaster scenarios, which were then used in Denmark for disaster preparedness and response exercises!

After his presentation, there was a terrific Q&A; we took a group photo of those who were still in attendance, followed by a delicious lunch at the University Club at UMass Amherst, at which the stimulating conversations continued.

And, at lunch, he told us how to escape from a car sinking in the water and provided us with advice to always wear hiking boots while flying (helps in climbing out should you need to evacuate while taking off or landing).

We thank Dr. Rasmus Dahlberg for his brilliant lecture on resilience and wish him much continuing professional and personal success! His work and energy inspired all of us.

We ended the perfect intellectual and social day with dinner at Judie's in Amherst, complete with their iconic item - popovers!

Cybersecurity and Vulnerability - Brilliant Lecture by Dr. Art House, Chief Cybersecurity Risk Officer of Connecticut

After teaching my Transportation and Logistics class this morning, it was time to help host the guest lecture of Dr. Arthur H. House, who is the Chief Cybersecurity Risk Officer of Connecticut. Former Isenberg School Dean, Dr. Thomas O'Brien, had made the introductions to Dr. House, for me and my great Finance colleague, Professor Mila Sherman. His lecture was part of the UMass Amherst Security Series.  The topic of his talk was: Cybersecurity and Vulnerability. Mila and I had had several grants on cybersecurity with colleagues from the Isenberg School and the College of Engineering and both of us continue to do research and to publish in this area. The UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter also helped to publicize his talk and the turnout was fabulous, with students and faculty from multiple schools and colleges at UMass Amherst!

We began his visit with a nice lunch at the University Club and we talked for 2 hours!

Joining Dr. House and me at lunch were: former Dean Tom O'Brien, a friend of House's for 6 decades, Chris Misra, who is the CIO at UMass Amherst, and Professor Mila Sherman.

Dr. House has had an incredible career, having earned his PhD at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University.  He became the Chief Cybersecurity Risk Officer for the State of Connecticut in October 2016, after four years as Chairman of Connecticut's Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA). He recently returned from speaking in Latvia (and we compared notes, given my recent visit to Kyiv, Ukraine). His work includes cybersecurity strategy and action plans in the Black Sea and Balkan regions.  

He has worked in national security, and served as Director of Communications in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.  As a White House Fellow, he was Special Projects Officer at the National Security Council. Tom O'Brien was also a White House Fellow. House spent 10 years in the Congo, and shared some of those fascinating experiences with us at lunch. He also worked for the World Bank and  was a Congressional Adviser to the United States Mission to the United Nations.

In the United States Senate, Dr. House was Chief of Staff to Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd and Senator Abraham Ribicoff and Legislative Assistant to Senator Chris Dodd.  Amazingly, as can be seen from various writeups on his career, specific assignments included the Camp David Peace Agreement, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Tokyo Round Trade Negotiations. The stories he shared with us at lunch even included the SALT negotiations at which he was present in Russia, with Brezhnev in attendance. It is not every day that you get to have lunch with someone who has taken part in major historical events in the US!  And can he do imitations of famous people; honestly, SNL should just hire him. His ability to reproduce accents is simply incredible and hilarious.

Since there were no classrooms available for this guest lecture at Isenberg, since it was prime class time, his talk took place at the Computer Science building. It was good to walk after the leisurely lunch (and we did share desserts).

Dr. Mila Sherman  introduced our speaker and then he began his mesmerizing lecture, which had the audience at the edge of their seats throughout.

He began his lecture by sharing some personal details and then asked the question: "Are we safe" and answered: "Of course, not!" We can't assume that a business or organization is safe from cyberattacks since even the Pentagon has been compromised.

He made the following points, which he then elaborated upon:

1. We are dependent on the digital world (computers and Internet) and, hence, vulnerable;

2. We need to protect ourselves;

3. We need to anticipate strategic surprises, and

4. States must play a critical role in cyber defense.

He emphasized that the advantages of cyber are immense from air traffic control to critical infrastructure but so are the vulnerabilities. The Internet was not designed with security in mind since it was supported by DARPA and was initially for academics who trusted one another. He envisions 3 Internets eventually, with Bakanization, and you can probably guess who would be behind the other two.

He spoke about who is behind the threats and the monetary aspects of selling the hacked products (which I have actually published a paper on in the INFORMS journal Service Science). Even health records are commodities that can be sold. He talked about phishing attacks as well as ransomware with the latter sometimes targeting smaller enterprises from hospitals to municipalities, etc. for payments in bitcoins.

Sadly, he stated that the "US is losing its edge" in cyber defense and also spoke about cyberwar and asymmetries.

He spoke about certain nation states targeting our elections and critical infrastructure and the details that he had were quite frightening. And, he even showed a slide of Kyiv at night after the cyberattack in 2015 on its power grid.

He emphasized that we need norms and rules and he suggested a great idea - for businesses and organizations to have a cyber rating similar to a credit score, and this would be audited regularly, since one's brand reputation as well as stock value can be seriously negatively affected after a cyberattack.

"Cyber is the perfect weapon" he said and "We need to defend ourselves." We can't get the feds to do this, so states must, and Connecticut is leading the way! 

He also noted the need to create a positive cybersecurity culture; to plan, and to be ready for the unexpected. Sad to say, he also sees "massive complacency." 

After his talk, Art House stayed to meet and continue the discussions with the audience. I was so delighted that even some of my undergrads, in addition to my PhD students, came. This was an incredible talk and educational experience!

Many thanks to Dr. Tom O'Brien for giving us this incredible opportunity with special thanks also to Professor Brian Levine, the Director of the Cybersecurity Institute at UMass Amherst! The brilliant lecture by Dr. Arthur H. House we will never forget!

Beautiful Boston is Back

I was in Boston yesterday on a gorgeous sunny Sunday.

This was my first time back since the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, 2013.

I have been spending a lot of time in Sweden, as part of my sabbatical this year and, upon my return to Massachusetts, knew that I had to go back to Boston to visit the locations of the bombings and to pay tribute to all those who have suffered so much. The shock of that day continues but, as I have written on other occasions, New Englanders are resilient.


In the photos below, taken around the Boston Common yesterday, I tried to capture the pure joy of  the people in Boston and the beauty of nature coupled with the architecture and landscaping.

I also meandered on Boylston Street and stood close to the marathon finish line where the two bombs had exploded that day a few seconds and just over 200 yards apart.   

At the next INFORMS annual meeting, which is taking place in Minneapolis, I will see one of the Boston marathon runners, Professor Alla Kammerdiner, from New Mexico State University, who invited me to speak in a session that she organized for the conference on cybersecurity and big data. She managed to finish the race before the bombs struck and then heard the news as she was making her way back to her hotel.

Yesterday, I also saw the headquarters of The One Fund Boston, which has raised over 60 million dollars to assist the victims and their families. The administrator of One Fund Boston is the UMass Amherst alum, Ken Feinberg. I heard him speak on April 27, 2013 at the UMass Rising Gala in Amherst. He is an amazing speaker and has been an administrator of several other well-known victim funds.

 

And, coincidentally, I stopped at the Four Seasons hotel to catch my breath and the staff was setting up for a wedding. Only after I returned back to Amherst, did I find out that the wedding was that of the son of Professor David Simchi-Levi of MIT, who is well-known in operations research and supply chain circles, and his wife, Ethel. The wedding announcement was in The Sunday New York Times. I congratulated David with a hearty Mazel-tov!

Beautiful Boston is back and it felt really good to be back in Boston!

Preparing a Graduate Commencement Speech -- From the Isenberg School of Management to the School of Business, Economics and Law in Sweden

Now is the time for college graduations and, in Massachusetts, over the past several days, we have been the scene for numerous ones -- from the UMass Amherst graduations to graduations in Boston and to even the Smith College graduation last weekend at which Arianna Huffington gave the commencement address. And Oprah Winfrey will be speaking at Harvard University's commencement on May 30.

Last, year, I was honored to give the commencement address at the Master's degree graduate commencement ceremony at the University of Gothenburg's School of Business, Economics and Law on June 14, 2013. My speech was on Life as a Network and it can be accessed here.

A writeup on the speech appeared in the UMass Amherst's In the Loop.

When I received an invitation a few months ago from Dean Maureen McKelvey of the University of Gothenburg to give this year's commencement speech, I immediately agreed.

Giving a commencement speech in the US is one thing -- giving a commencement speech in another country is a truly special experience.

I had the great experience of giving the commencement speech at the Isenberg School's undergraduate commencement in May 2003, which took place at the Mullins Center, so I can say that I have given such speeches on 2 continents.


This will be my fifth visit/stay in Gothenburg, since 2012, and,  as a Visiting Professor of Operations Management there, through its unique Visiting Professorship Programme, Gothenburg, Sweden has become my second home.

I will be delivering my commencement speech on June 12, 2013 in Gothenburg and my theme this year will be Leadership.

I will speak on what makes a great leader -- one of many themes that I have been writing about on this blog and will also bring personal experiences into the text.

I plan on emphasizing resiliency, creativity, communications, diversity, and integrity, and, as I did last year, I will share with you photos from the ceremony.

Crisis Management and Resilient Leaders

People are starting to take notice.

It is hard not to -- with record-breaking temperatures in the United States this summer, severe drought enveloping many states, including some of our major grain and corn states, which will surely drive prices up for food products, extreme weather events and storms happening with increasing frequency, plus climate change even affecting our infrastructure -- from our roads to our electric power networks.

There is even a blood shortage this summer -- the worst in 15 years -- being reported by the Red Cross, partially attributed to the storms and heat this summer.

We have been researching fragile critical infrastructure networks and even wrote the book, Fragile Networks, in which we defined terms such as robustness and quantified synergies associated with network integration, through the prism of supply chains, since, truly, it is supply chains that link our economic activities together through production, transportation, storage, and ultimate distribution. I spoke on Building Resiliency in Washington DC on a special Transportation Research Board panel.

Our world is changing and  leaders must become aware of crisis management.


We are in need of Resilient Leaders.

The Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst has on its homepage the following:

Resilient Leadership for an Evolving Business Climate

and it is great to see new courses being taught around this theme and new initiatives.

There is a feature news article, Students Learn Crisis Management in Innovative Isenberg Course,  on the new course in Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare  that I taught in Spring 2012. In the course, we had speakers from the National Guard, the Red Cross, the UMass emergency preparedness group, and even a disaster communication expert and a former student of mine from the profit sector, who has worked in healthcare. Nice to see my students quoted in the article.

Yes, even the army has realized the importance of location theory in determining where its critical supplies should be stored since it expects a greater role in humanitarian crises and evacuation management -- topics that we studied in my course and timely response and deliveries can save lives in crises.

Our research from blood supply chains to supply chain metrics in the case of disasters can be accessed on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website.

How the US Can Compete and Win in Global Supply Chains

I was delighted to read Thomas L. Friedman's Op-Ed column Made in the World in yesterday's New York Times that quoted Yossi Sheffi of MIT.

Sheffi was my host at MIT when I held an NSF Visiting Professorship for Women.

Yossi Sheffi is the author of Urban Transportation Networks in which many of the papers of my dissertation advisor, Stella Dafermos, are cited, and one of my papers as well, although it was published just shortly after I received my PhD from Brown. He has graciously made this book available for download.

Of course, he is also the author of The Resilient Enterprise, which focuses on supply chains and how to minimize and respond to disruptions. I refer to his books in various courses that I teach at the Isenberg School from my Transportation & Logistics course to the new Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare course that I am presently teaching.

According to Friedman's column: But America can thrive in this world, explained Yossi Sheffi, the M.I.T. logistics expert, if it empowers “as many of our workers as possible to participate” in different links of these global supply chains — either imagining products, designing products, marketing products, orchestrating the supply chain for products, manufacturing high-end products and retailing products. If we get our share, we’ll do fine.

And here’s the good news: We have a huge natural advantage to compete in this kind of world, if we just get our act together.

One of my primary areas of research is supply chain networks, and I fully concur with Friedman's ending paragraph:

If only — if only — we could come together on a national strategy to enhance and expand all of our natural advantages: more immigration, most post-secondary education, better infrastructure, more government research, smart incentives for spurring millions of start-ups — and a long-term plan to really fix our long-term debt problems — nobody could touch us. We’re that close.

Our approach to supply chains focuses on the network system as described in my Supply Chain Network Economics: Dynamics of Prices, Flows, and Profits book.

Information on some of our latest research on supply chains, from medical nuclear ones to pharmaceutical and even fashion ones, can be accessed on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website.

Before Disasters Strike -- Assessing Supply Chain Performance Under Disruptions

As documented in numerous studies, as well as books, including our Fragile Networks book, the number of disasters is growing as well as the number of people affected by disasters.

Having the appropriate supply chains in place that are resilient to disruptive scenarios will not only save lives but make the disaster recovery process less painful and costly.

Along with my collaborators, notably, Dr. Qiang of the Graduate School of Professional Studies at Penn State University Malvern, and my doctoral students, Min Yu and Amir H. Masoumi, we have been developing quantitative tools and metrics for supply chains in humanitarian operations and healthcare.

In particular, we have been focusing on a broad class of products known as critical need products.

Critical needs products and supplies are those that are essential to human health and life. Examples include food, water, medicines, and vaccines. The demand for critical needs products is always present.

Our first paper on the topic, Supply Chain Network Design for Critical Needs with Outsourcing, Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, and Qiang Qiang, was published in the Papers in Regional Science 90: (2011) pp 123-142.

Critical needs supply chains also play a pivotal role during and post disasters during which severe disruptions can be expected to have occurred. Indeed, the past few decades have visibly demonstrated that disasters, whether natural or man-made, may severely damage infrastructure networks, such as transportation and logistical networks, may cause great loss to human life, and also may result in tremendous damage to a nation's economy.

Hence, critical needs supply chains are essential in both healthcare and humanitarian logistics operations. Given their importance also in terms of emergency preparedness and planning, special attention to them is needed, since their functions are so important to the well-being and the very survival of our societies.

Specifically, in the case of disruptions to critical needs supply chains, there are two primary parameters that may be seriously affected:

1. the capacities of the various supply chain network activities (production, storage, transportation, etc.) and

2. the demands for the products may not be satisfiable.


Indeed, as shown by numerous recent disasters, disruptions may tremendously reduce supply chain capacities as well as impact the demands for critical needs products.

Hence, it is essential for organizations to have performance metrics which enable them to assess what are the costs associated with supply chain disruptions under different scenarios. Moreover, will the demands be met and, if not, what can one expect to be the unmet demand?

To provide appropriate metrics and tools to organizations ranging from humanitarian ones to governmental ones as well as international bodies, as well as corporations, we have constructed a bi-criteria supply chain performance indicator that captures the probabilities of capacity disruptions under different scenarios as well as demand being unsatisfied.

The indicator is developed, discussed, and applied in our paper, A Bi-Criteria Indicator to Assess Supply Chain Network Performance for Critical Needs Under Capacity and Demand Disruptions, Qiang Qiang and Anna Nagurney, to appear in Transportation Research A: Special Issue on Network Vulnerability in Large-Scale Transport Networks.

Since the goals of supply chains for critical needs are quite different from those of commercial supply chains, they should be evaluated by distinct sets of metrics. As pointed out by Beamon and Balcik (2008), the goals for humanitarian relief chains, for example, include cost reduction, capital reduction, and service improvement (see also Altay and Green (2006)). Tomasini and van Wassenhove (2004), similarly, argued that: A successful humanitarian operation mitigates the urgent needs of a population with a sustainable reduction of their vulnerability in the shortest amount of time and with the least amount of resources.

We hope that our paper has contributed to this growing research and application domain in a rigorous way.

Our earlier work on supply chain disruptions in commercial supply chains included the paper, Modeling of Supply Chain Risk Under Disruptions with Performance Measurement and Robustness Analysis, Qiang Qiang, Anna Nagurney, and June Dong, in Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability: Tools and Methods for Supply Chain Decision Makers, T. Wu and J. Blackhurst, Editors, Springer, Berlin, Germany (2009), pp 91-111.