Honored to Have Played a Part in Influencing National Policy on Blood Supply Chains

For quite a few years, my research group and I have been very engaged in studying and writing about blood supply chains. Blood is a unique product that is life-saving and that cannot be produced but must be donated.

Our work on blood supply chains is part of our broader work on perishable product supply chains and we even wrote a book on the topic that was published a decade ago.

During this festive time of the year with the holiday season, there are also often blood shortages, and, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was greatly concerned about the shortages. One day after the WHO declared the pandemic, I published my article, "How coronavirus is upsetting the blood supply chain," in The Conversation. The article was reprinted on multiple news sites, from Live Science to Salon. 

I am deeply humbled and honored that my article on blood shortages in the COVID-19 pandemic, has influenced national policy not once, but twice. On March 31, 2023, 22 Attorneys General signed a memo to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Robert Califf, and my article was cited first

The full memorandum can be accessed here.

Therein is also a citation to the April 22, 2020 memo from 20 Attorneys General, including Maura Healey, now our Massachusetts Governor, to the Honorable Admiral Brett Giroir, MD, at that time the Assistant Secretary for Health, with my article also as the first citation.

On May 11, 2023, the FDA finalized individual risk assessment guidelines for blood donation eligibility. 

In my discipline of Operations Research, as well as in Economics, we try to "Do Good" to improve social welfare and well-being. The tools that we use include analytical techniques, mathematical models, research studies, and, of course, education of students. However, as I often state in invited conference talks and seminars that I give,  it is also critical to get results out where they can be applied.

That is why I continue to write essays and OpEds that can reach a broader community, as my article on blood shortages has.

 I am very glad that the American Red Cross has now adopted a more inclusive blood donation policy, following the FDA recommendations.

 More blood centers are following the FDA revised guidelines with this article, appearing just a few days ago on the PBS News Hour, noting other blood centers following suit, including one in the Pacific Northwest. The donors, who can now give blood, are grateful and, I am sure, the recipients are as well.

Brilliant Lecture by Dr. George Karagiannis on Risk Assessment and Disaster Management

One of the best parts of the intellectual life at a university is the wonderful people -faculty, students, and staff - plus guest speakers that one interacts with.

Today, we had the great pleasure and honor of hosting Dr. George Karagiannis from the Technical University of Crete, who I had met last summer at the Dynamics of Disasters conference that I co-organized in Kalamata, Greece. When he told me that he would be in Boston this week to speak at the Coastal Disasters conference and was eager to also speak at UMass Amherst, I knew that this was an opportunity that we could not miss out on.

Through the assistance of the UMass Transportation Center, the UMass ITE Chapter, as well as the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, and the Isenberg School of Management, his visit to our campus and his presentation were a great success. The title of his talk was: "Coordination by Design, or the Common Operational Picture: From Risk Assessment to Disaster Response." George has completed 2 national risk assessments - for Greece and Malta and has worked also with the Greek Red Cross and the training of workers of the German Red Cross. He has immense field experiene and he had the audience captivated.

I was a bit anxious since he was traveling from Boston via Peter Pan bus lines and his arrival was to be shortly after my Transportation and Logistics class was ending. I made it to the Fine Arts bus stop 2 minutes before the bus arrived and together we went to the University Club for a delicious lunch which was hosted by the Transportation group of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (a big thank you).  Attending the lunch were: Professor and Associate Dean John Collura, Professor Eric Gonzales, and two former UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Presidents: Michael Prokle and Shivanii Shukla.

Faculty and students came to Dr. Karagiannis' talk from the Isenberg School of Management, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.

We learned about civil defense and organization of military operations and how they differ from emergency preparedness and disaster relief today. In the former, the organization is always hierarchical whereas in the latter each involved organization can have a hierarchical structure but the key to success is coordination. In many disaster relief operations there can be dozens or even hundreds of organizations involved so information exchange and situational awareness and a common operational picture are essential. Nevertheless, even with the latest in software and ICT if there is not trust among the stakeholders, that is, if the network has not been built on relationships, then there will not be success. Also, the emergency managers must be trained accordingly in the use of technology. In addition, Dr. Karagiannis emphasized the importance of capturing real time data efficiently and then one can make use of operations research tools more effectively. But getting the data quickly is still a major challenge in disasters even with the prevalence of social media (which messages can be trusted?).

Coordination is imperative; otherwise, locations may receive relief materials in duplicate or supplies not needed whereas others have shortages or no relief supplies.

What is needed is Next Generation Emergency Management - in essence, a Dr. Spock from Star Trek.

He also emphasized the migrant crisis facing the European Union for the past several months which has greatly accelerated recently. He spoke of the European Commission as not being a political union and, hence, decision-making can be very protracted despite earlier studies of scenarios foretelling the migrant crisis, decision-making is hampered. There were even decisions made earlier as to where to build shelters.

Tools act as a bridge between people but it is the network connecting people that is essential for the success of emergency operations. And, as Dr. Karagiannis noted in his talk, there is a disaster striking somewhere in the world every week and every 3 weeks one that requires international intervention. Disasters cannot be managed just by throwing resources at them.

Needless to say, Dr. Karagiannis' brilliant lecture, filled with many vivid examples, including a crash in a tunnel (and which county/province would be responsible for relief) brought the issue out dramatically to the audience. This will be a talk that we will be discussing for a long time to come and it has stimulated many exciting research questions.

Co-Hosting Disaster Management Expert from Europe @UMassAmherst

September 2015 is National Preparedness Month and, propitiously, the first speaker of the year in our great UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker series will be an expert on emergency preparedness and disaster management from Europe! His name is Dr. George M. Karagiannis from the University of Crete. I met George last summer at the Dynamics of Disasters conference that  I co-organized with Professors Pardalos and Kotisireas and his talk was fabulous. When he told me hat he would be coming to Boston in September to speak at the coastal disasters conference  I had to figure out a way of bringing him to the UMass Amherst campus. 

Although next week is the first week of classes, in collaboration with the Transportation group in the Civil and Environmental Engineering program, the UMass Amherst INFORMs Student Chapter, and I are co-hosting his visit and talk on September 10. He speaks in Boston on September 11. You can click on the announcement above to obtain a larger image of it.The poster was prepared by the Chapter President, Michael Prokle, with input from Professor Eric Gonzales of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Special thanks to Associate Dean of Engineering Dr. John Collura for also helping out in securing a room, etc., for the presentation.

The poster above has information on Dr. Karagiannis' title and abstract.

His talk will take place in Marston Room 220 at 1PM until 2PM.

Dr. Karagiannis has a PhD and 3 Master's degrees, one of which is an MBA, and for the past several months he has been working in Malta (a country that is on my bucket list) on that country's National Risk Assessment project.

Many thanks for the chapter website manager, Ekin Koker, for putting information on this presentation (although the semester begins on September 8), already on the website. 

Hope to see those who can make it to this great event.

Would Proper Risk Assessment and Management Have Minimized the Damage to Japan?

The New York Times in a provocative article is raising the question of whether attention to risk assessment for nuclear power plants in Japan might have reduced the scale of the damage from the triple earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster. The article even highlights that Japanese engineers focused on deterministic as opposed to probabilistic approaches in determining the safety of the associated engineering structures. According to the article, over the decades, preparedness against tsunamis never became a priority for Japan’s power companies or nuclear regulators. They were perhaps lulled, experts said, by the fact that no tsunami (itself a Japanese word) had struck a nuclear plant until two weeks ago. Even though tsunami simulations offered new ways to assess the risks of tsunamis, plant operators made few changes at their aging facilities, and nuclear regulators did not press them.

Also, engineers took a similar approach with earthquakes. According to Masaru Kobayashi, an expert on quake resistance at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Japan’s nuclear regulator, "When it came to designing the Fukushima plant, official records dating from 1600 showed that the strongest earthquakes off the coast of present-day Fukushima Prefecture had registered between magnitude 7.0 and 8.0." We all know that the earthquake that struck Japan on March 11, 2011, has now been upgraded from an 8.9 earthquake to a 9.0 one.

The Times article stated: For whatever reasons — whether cultural, historical or simply financial — Japanese engineers working on nuclear plants continued to predict what they believed were maximum earthquakes based on records. Those methods, however, did not take into account serious uncertainties such as faults that had not been discovered or earthquakes that were gigantic but rare, said Greg Hardy, a US-based structural engineer.

Indeed, in the West, risk management and assessment has become a focus not only of engineering studies and analyses but also a critical component of business decision-making. Drawn from techniques in finance, probability, and, I would add, optimization and decision-making under uncertainty, risk management has been integrated with design and analysis with a notable body of literature now in existence especially in the area of global supply chains (clearly also impacted by the Japanese set of disasters).

As a faculty member in the Department of Finance and Operations Management at the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst, I have been researching, along with my students and associated colleagues, risk management in different network systems from transportation and logistic ones to economic and financial ones. Our research on the integration of risk management and decision-making under uncertainty with complex networks began over half a decade ago and has yielded publications such as:

Supply Chain Networks, Electronic Commerce, and Supply Side and Demand Side Risk
Anna Nagurney, Jose Cruz, June Dong, and Ding Zhang, European Journal of Operational Research 26: (2005) pp 120-142.

Multitiered Supply Chain Networks: Multicriteria Decision–Making under Uncertainty
June Dong, Ding Zhang, Hong Yan, and Anna Nagurney, Annals of Operations Research 135: (2005) pp 155-178.

Global Supply Chain Network Dynamics with Multicriteria Decision-Making Under Risk and Uncertainty
Anna Nagurney and Dmytro Matsypura, Transportation Research E 41: (2005) pp 585-612.

Financial Networks with Intermediation: Risk Management with Variable Weights
Anna Nagurney and Ke Ke, European Journal of Operational Research 172: (2006) pp 40-63.

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.

Supply Chain Outsourcing Under Exchange Rate Risk and Competition
Zugang Liu and Anna Nagurney, Omega 39: (2011) pp 539-549.

Risk Reduction and Cost Synergy in Mergers and Acquisitions via Supply Chain Network Integration
Zugang Liu and Anna Nagurney, to appear in the Journal of Financial Decision Making.

Supply Chain Network Design for Critical Needs with Outsourcing
Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, and Qiang Qiang, Papers in Regional Science 90: (2011) pp 123-142.

Only with the right methodological and analytical tools can we assess risk and prepare appropriately for emergencies and disasters!