The Value of Q&A Sessions with Top Operations Researchers from Industry

Last Friday, we had the pleasure and honor of hosting Dr. Mary E. Helander of IBM Yorktown Heights at the Isenberg School of Management through our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. I help the students to organize chapter activities and since Dr. Helander wanted to visit us, we decided to do something a bit different. The event was so successful that one of the students present said afterwards: "Professor Nagurney we have to have more of these Q&A sessions!"

 

Amazingly, it was almost entirely a female audience!

Dr. Helander told the students that they could ask her ANY question.

First, some background on Dr. Helander. She is on the program committee of the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research that will take place in Boston next spring. She is a Master Inventor and Research Scientist and is currently the IBM Research Division leader for Consumer Products. Presently, she is the technical lead for two interdisciplinary research projects involving food safety and traceability.  Not only does she hold a PhD in Operations Research but she is also a Docent in Quality and Software Engineering from Linkoping University in Sweden. At lunch she and I talked about living in Sweden and she told me some mesmerizing stories about her surname -- I'll let you do the research -- another movie should be made.

Plus, Mary was part of one of the 2013 Edelman Award finalists:

McKesson: A Holistic Supply Chain Management Solution

Presented by:
Don Walker, McKesson; Kaan Katircioglu, IBM Research; Bob Gooby, McKesson
Authors:
McKesson Corporation: Robert Gooby, Nathan Mott, David Wagnon, Graeme Case, Matt Johnson
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center: Kaan Katircioglu, Pawan Chowdhary, Youssef Drissi, Mary Helander, Karthik Sourirajan, Lin Li, Karthik Subbian
IBM Global Business Services: James Kalina, Howard Smith
IBM Japan: Takashi Yonezawa.

The Edelman Award is like an Academy Award for analytics and operations research, so although her team did not win to be a finalist is a huge achievement!

From Mary we learned a lot about IBM, and about her research and contributions there. We learned about functional foods and microtoxins and my favorite takeaway and quote from the Q&A session.

Mary said: People that you work with will bring you joy.

Frankly, I think that it is Dr. Mary Helander who is making such a positive impact on all those around her and beyond through her great operations research contributions and dynamic personality, which the students really appreciated!

Thank you so much, Dr. Mary Helander, for coming to the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst!

You are an operations research rockstar!

Food Safety in Global Supply Chains

What is more important than the air we breathe and the food that we eat?!

The news coming from the European continent is shocking with 18 deaths reported, and close to 2,000 suffering from a rare E. Coli bacteria that officials believe was in the food supply, most likely in raw vegetables (cukes, tomatoes, and lettuce have been prime suspects, although the specific strain has not been found in the vegetables), with the majority of the illnesses being traced to northern Germany, specifically, Hamburg.

At this time of the year, when spring is in the northern hemisphere and the consumption of produce is up, to have hundreds hospitalized with severe kidney malfunctions is horrifying.

I travel a lot and enjoy the local, fresh cuisine whenever possible and who would expect such food-borne illnesses in such a highly developed country as Germany? A Swede has died after traveling to Germany and there are supposedly several in the US, also who traveled to Germany, now ill. We actually heard about this major health calamity from the owner of one of our local farms who has a wonderful soft ice cream stand, since she has relatives in that part of Germany, before the news even reached the major western media.

Food safety is essential as is food traceability. Dr. Mary Helander who spoke on a research panel on food safety recently at the INFORMS conference at UMass gave a brilliant talk on the topic in our Speaker Series and you can access her presentation here, which I wrote about on this blog. Ironically, shortly after her talk, there was an outbreak of E. Coli poisoning in hamburgers in the US.

A few years ago, I was on the doctoral dissertation of a student, Mr. Diogo M. Souza Monteiro, whose dissertation was entitled, Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of the Economics of Traceability Adoption in Food Supply Chains. He is now a professor in England, and visited us last Fall. He had also been a student in one of my Management Science classes in which we used my Network Economics book and had done a very nice project on vertical integration in food supply chains. He also cited several of our papers on supply chains and risk management in his dissertation. His dissertation advisor, Professor Julie Caswell, served on a major FDA panel on food safety and risk.

What is happening in Europe now regarding the food supply is turning into a major international incident since countries are refusing produce from certain countries.

I was invited to give keynotes at two different conferences in China that took place last week. Reading about food safety issues there as well as pollution gave me serious pause (you probably have seen the articles on watermelons exploding there due to injected chemicals, the milk being adulterated, and I stop here) and I was advised not to travel there. One of my keynotes in Shenzhen was delivered via videotape. Now, interestingly, Chinese scientists, from Shenzhen, are helping German scientists, to decipher the genetic code of the rare E. Coli bacteria! According to The New York Times, this Chinese laboratory said that the contagion had been caused by a “new strain of bacteria that is highly infectious and toxic.”

Food safety in global supply chains will require not only technology but also the cooperation among all the stakeholders from producers and distributors to consumers as well as regulators. In the meantime, people are very afraid and will continue to be until the source(s) of this severe outbreak is found.

Hamburgers, Food Safety, and Network Economics

Today's New York Times has an article that may convert everyone to vegetarianism. The article documents the trail that a hamburger, which was adulterated with E. coli, most likely took that resulted in the paralysis of a young female consumer. The article Trail of E. Coli Shows Flaws in Inspection of Ground Beef states that the prefrozen hamburger patty that she consumed had parts that originated in Texas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and even Uruguay! The processor noted that such processing was cheaper by about 25%. Clearly, the true costs are not being appropriately assigned.

What is also extremely frightening is that certain beef suppliers will only sell their "product" to processors that do not check the quality of their beef. There is, hence, tacit agreement or collusion between decision-makers in tiers of the food supply chain to explicitly and outrightly ignore quality of the product. And here we are speaking about food that we eat!

Food safety was a topic of Dr. Helander's presentation on September 18, 2009 in our speaker series at the Isenberg School. She (as the article also notes) stated that it appears that incidents of food adulteration are becoming more and more common. Ironically, other countries (and especially the continent of Europe) are paying much closer attention to the safety of the food that its consumers eat and are passing appropriate regulations and legislation. Indeed, a few years back I was on the doctoral dissertation of a student, Mr. Diogo M. Souza Monteiro, whose dissertation was entitled, Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of the Economics of Traceability Adoption in Food Supply Chains. He is now a professor in England. He had also been a student in one of my Management Science classes in which we used my Network Economics book and had done a very nice project on vertical integration in food supply chains. He also cited several of our papers on supply chains and risk management in his dissertation.

Also, his dissertation advisor, Professor Julie Ann Caswell, had delivered a talk on food safety and what it would take the first year of our speaker series.

A very interesting paper of theirs, which cites my Network Economics book, focuses on the multi-ingredient nature and the economics of food supply chains and traceability.