I Thoroughly Enjoyed Speaking on Trade Wars and Game Theory at the Great INFORMS Analytics Conference

Conferences can be deeply engaging and energizing and the recent INFORMS Analytics Conference at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center set new standards https://meetings.informs.org/wordpress/analytics/! Many thanks to all those who helped to make this conference a great success!

I love the serendipity of great conferences from the meeting of new colleagues to seeing friends that you did not even realize would be attending! 

There were over 500 attendees and about 60 one hour presentations. I was honored and delighted to be able speak on Trade Wars and Game Theory. Who Wins, Who Loses? The audience was terrific with many excellent, thoughtful questions. And, as promised, I have now posted the slide deck from my presentation: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/Analytics-Nagurney-2026.pdf

I very much enjoyed many of the Edelman Award presentations of the finalists and the networking events. The food was also delicious and the venue was stunning! Engagement of academics with practitioners is critically important and, after I returned, I shared some of the many highlights with the students in my class at the Isenberg School of Management.

Celebrating my 22nd PhD Student - Dr. Deniz Besik

The Covid-19 pandemic has called for new types of celebrations of the successes of our students, including virtual graduation ceremonies at colleges and universities.

Last Friday, UMass Amherst had  an exceptional celebration via a video tribute that included many luminaries from Massachusetts from politicians, to an astronaut and UMass Amherst alumna, as well as celebrities.

Last Friday, the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst also hosted a virtual celebration via Zoom for our PhD graduates, and, among the 9 receiving their PhDs, was Deniz Besik.

Dr. Deniz Besik was my 22nd PhD student and her concentration at the Isenberg School was Management Science. I have chaired the doctoral committees of 12 females and 10 males.

Dr. George Milne, our PhD Director at the Isenberg School, organized the event, with assistance from Mike Korza.  Deniz's family was able to Zoom in from Turkey.

It was such a pleasure to write about Dr. Besik, who came to our program from Turkey, having worked also in Germany. My tribute to her is below. She will be joining the faculty of the Robins School of Business at the University of Richmond in Virginia, in the Fall.

The full brochure with information on all of our PhD graduates can be accessed from the Isenberg website here.

The Sunday before, Deniz and I put on our robes and, with help from friends, had the photos below taken, while practicing physical/social distancing.

Deniz had 6 papers published while a PhD student, which is a remarkable accomplishment, in such journals as the European Journal of Operational Research, the Journal of Global Optimization, and Socio-Economic Planning Sciences. Her multidisciplinary research on perishable food supply chains, with a focus on quality, as well as economic policy instruments such as tariffs and quotas, yielded fundamental tools as well as insights and helped to identify who wins and who loses in the ongoing trade wars, made even more relevant now with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Hard to believe that Dr. Besik defended her dissertation on March 6, 2020, just a few days before the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 pandemic and the world changed.

Deniz excelled in the three dimensions of research, teaching, and service, all very relevant to her future success in academia. Deniz served as the President of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter and was a very engaged and loyal member. The chapter's webmaster, Haris Sipetas, posted a tribute to her, and to her two fellow PhD graduates in Engineering: Rodrigo Mercado and Ekin Koker.

Congratulations to Dr. Deniz Besik! We look forward to celebrating your PhD graduation face to face before too long. Wishing all the 2020 degree recipients all the very best! Your grit and resilience will get you through these challenging times.

Bravo to Deniz Besik on Her Successful PhD Defense

Yesterday, was a very special day. Deniz Besik, who is my 22nd PhD student, successfully defended her doctoral dissertation at the Isenberg School of Management. The title of her dissertation is: "Essays on Competitive Perishable Food Supply Chain Networks: From the Impacts of Tariffs and Quotas to Integration of Quality." I had the pleasure of chairing her dissertation committee, which consisted of Professors Ana Muriel and Hari Balasubramanian of the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst and Professor Priyank Arora of my department at the Isenberg School.

Although the defense took place at 3:30PM on a Friday afternoon, the room was packed with Deniz's friends and colleagues and guests who had come to support her. Some had traveled from Boston and NYC to come to support her. Dr. Pritha Dutta, who was my 21st PhD student, and is now a Professor at Pace University, came from NYC.

Deniz in 4 and a half years as a doctoral student published 6 co-authored papers, which is an incredible accomplishment. Below are images of first pages of some of the articles.

Deniz was recognized for her research with the 2019 Outstanding Doctoral Student Researcher Award from the Isenberg School and took part in the INFORMS, POMS, and DSI doctoral colloquia. And, we recently heard that she was elected into the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. The ceremony will take place in early April and the UMass Amherst graduation in early May (assuming such events will be able to proceed, given the coronavirus).

The audience had great questions, given the timeliness of the dissertation as well as the clarity with which Deniz presented the results in her dissertation. Below is a photo of now Dr. Deniz Besik with her committee members after her defense.

And we managed to take a photo of some of the folks in the audience who stayed until after 5PM to congratulate her.

She was presented with flowers and I also gave her a gift.

Then it was time for a celebratory dinner, which took place at Judie's in downtown Amherst.

Followed by a very special dessert with candle.

I might add that Deniz during her doctoral studies also taught classes and she even served as the President of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. She has accepted a tenure track Assistant Professorship at the Robins School of Business at the University of Richmond in beautiful Virginia. The rewards of being a faculty member are many, but one of the best is seeing a very deserving and hard-working student achieve her dreams. We all wish Dr. Deniz Besik much continuing professional and personal success as she begins a new chapter as an Assistant Professor!

Beginning of My Sabbatical and My Twelfth Year of Blogging

It is hard to believe that this month I am celebrating 11 years of writing on this blog. My first post  was on the New Year - New Administration - New Blog. In that post I also noted a Letter to the Editor that I had had published in The New York Times on the students in my Transportation and Logistics class that I teach at the Isenberg School.  It is quite interesting to look back at the posts. Many provide timely advice. Interestingly, my third post was on my interview with Linda Baker on the Braess Paradox, for an article that she wrote for the Scientific American. And, coincidentally, my most recent article is on The Braess Paradox, an invited chapter for The International Encyclopedia of Transportation.

My blog has over 1,600 posts that I have written!

I am about to start my sabbatical, which means that I will not be teaching this Spring 2020 semester. I must admit that I will miss not teaching Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare and also my PhD Seminar but there are many projects to start and others to finish up and also numerous very exciting speaking engagements and visits. Some service activities to the Isenberg School (and beyond, of course), will still be on my plate.

I am very excited about the INFORMS Security Conference, which takes place next month in Monterey, California. The website is live and the speakers and talks look fabulous - I am especially delighted that all speakers get a 50 minute time slot, so one can really share insights and also gain some!

At this conference, I will be speaking on: Game Theory Network Models for Disaster Relief. Coincidentally, the first conference presentation that I ever gave was when I worked in the high tech sector for the Naval Underwater Systems Center in beautiful Newport, Rhode Island, and it was at an MIT/ONR Conference at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey! I was the only female presenter. In addition to working, I was also pursuing a Master's at Brown University at that time. It will be very special to be back there.

Some other highlights of my sabbatical, in terms of conferences and visits are the following:

In March, I will have the honor of giving a plenary talk at the Netgcoop Conference in Corsica, France, while my PhD student, Deniz Besik, presents on our work on tariffs, quotas, and trade at the INFORMS Optimization Society Conference in Greenville, South Carolina.

In April, I will have the pleasure of being an invited speaker at an International Workshop at the University of Brescia in Italy on Variational Analysis and Applications for Modelling of Energy Exchange. There I will see many wonderful Italian colleagues!

In May, it will be time to fly to Iowa, a state that I have never been to. Many thanks to Professor Ann Campbell for inviting me to give a plenary talk at a very exciting 2-day workshop - Future BA (Business Analytics) Prof! This workshop will take place at the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa and all expenses for accepted applicants will be covered. The workshop is for advanced PhD students and post-docs —especially women and individuals from underrepresented groups — who are interested in academic careers in Business Analytics.

A huge highlight of my sabbatical will be the CORS Conference in Toronto in June. Also at this conference I will have the immense honor of delivering the Harold Larnder Prize plenary talk. The list of previous recipients of this prize can be found here. I am absolutely thrilled by this recognition and am the only the second female to receive this prize, which dates to 1986. The title of my Larnder lecture is: Trade Wars: OR in the Economic Battlefields.

I spoke at the CORS Conference in Halifax and had a tremendous time. Having been born in Canada, and having lived for a few years in Toronto, it will be great to be back. 

I will also be giving a seminar at the University of Toronto in March.

There will be other conferences in June and I will be busy also co-editing a new Dynamics of Disasters volume with Panos M. Pardalos and Ilias S. Kotsireas. We have received a contract from Springer and work has already begin with refereeing some of  the contributions, etc.

And, in late August, as my sabbatical is coming to a close, it will be time for the CLAIO 2020 Conference in Madrid, Spain. In 2019, I had the pleasure of speaking in Chile,  Colombia, and Mexico, and am so honored to have been selected the IFORS Distinguished Lecturer (IDL) at CLAIO. I will give my IDL plenary at this conference with the title: NetwORks: Changing Our WORld for the Better. This will be my first visit to Spain.

Of course, as my schedule and time permit, I will still be supporting the great UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter and its Speaker Series and also directing the Virtual Center for Supernetworks and working with my PhD students! Updates on my sabbatical will certainly be posted on this blog.

Many thanks to everyone for 11 great years of support of this blog!

Supernetwork Center Associates Shine at INFORMS Conference in Seattle

In my previous blogpost, I wrote about the fascinating experiences I had in delivering the opening keynote at the recent Operations Research Conference in Mexico City. However, since I am also teaching this semester, I could not attend the INFORMS Conference in Seattle, because it would not be right to miss classes over a two week period. Moreover, I believed it important to support the Mexican OR Society. This was one of only two Annual INFORMS conferences that I have not been at in over two decades. I appreciate all the messages that I have been receiving that I was missed - thank you very much!

However, our research was presented at INFORMS Seattle and also very special recognitions received by several Supernetwork Center Associates.

In particular, three of my joint papers were presented:

The above talks can be downloaded from the Supernetwork Center site at the Isenberg School of Management and are based on papers recently published in the journals: Transportation Research E, International Journal of Production Economics, and the European Journal of Operational Research. Many thanks to the organizers of the sessions that the above first and third presentations appeared in! Below are photos of the two presenters of those talks.

Usually, at every INFORMS Conference, I host a dinner for Supernetwork Center Associates, many of which are my present or former doctoral students, who are now very successful professionally. Although this year I could not, it was wonderful to receive the photo below.

In the above photo (l-r) are: the females in the front row: Professor Min Yu of the University of Portland, Professor Ke Ke of Central Washington University, Professor Pritha Dutta of Pace University, my PhD student Deniz Besik, and Professor Sara Saberi of WPI. And, in the back row (l-r) are the males: my PhD student Mojtaba Salarpour, Professor Jose Cruz of UConn, and Professor Patrick Qiang of Penn State. Professor Shivani Shukla of the University of San Francisco presented on our cybersecurity research but is not in the photo. Professor Dmytro Matsypura of the University of Sydney also did not make it to the photo (but more on his award follows).

I was delighted to hear that Dr. Matsypura (who was my PhD student at Isenberg) received the INFORMS ENRE (Energy, Natural Resources and the Environment) Best Publication Award in Environment and Sustainability at the conference for his paper on wildfire fuel management, co-authored with Professor Oleg Prokopyev of the University of Pittsburgh  and with Matsypura's student, Aizat Zahar, and published in EJOR, . The paper can be accessed here.  Below is the photo of the awardees, forwarded to me by Professor Matsypura.

Also, I was thrilled that my doctoral student, Deniz Besik, received the Bayer - Women in OR Scholarship and was recognized at the Analytics Society Business meeting at INFORMS Seattle. I had nominated Deniz for this award. Deniz, amazingly, already has 6 published journal articles and will be received her PhD in May 2020. She also took part in this year's Doctoral Student Colloquium immediately before the INFORMS Conference.

Thanks to Dr. Polly Mitchell-Guthrie for her tweet with the image below.

And, Professor Jose Cruz of UConn organized a session on Sustainable and Responsible Supply Chain Management in which multiple Supernetwork Associates spoke.

I was Chair of the 2019 INFORMS Volunteer Service Award Committee, having served on this committee also the two previous years (and was honored to also be a recipient of this award in 2016). Congratulations to Dr. Scott Nestler and Dr. Stefan Karisch for receiving this award this year. Dr. Sadan Kulturel-Konak, a member of this year's committee, presented this award in Seattle in my place.

It was also very gratifying that there were two additional recipients of major awards at INFORMS in Seattle, both of whom I had written letters for.

Plus, even before I flew to Mexico, as the Faculty Advisor to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, I supported the students who practiced their talks in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Tune-Up!

Many thanks to all the companies, universities, publishers, and societies for personal invitations to attend even brunches and meetings at INFORMS Seattle! These were all very much appreciated.

And, in closing, congratulations to all the award recipients and thanks to all the volunteers that help to make INFORMS such a fabulous professional society!

You can find many photos, courtesy of INFORMS, posted on its Flickr page.