Honored to Be Named a Fellow of The OR Society

The official good news arrived a few weeks ago and, this past week, I received the certificate.

I am humbled and thrilled to have been named a Fellow of the Operational Research (OR) Society,  which is based in the United Kingdom.

It has been quite an amazing year, thanks to both The OR Society and to another professional society that I am a member (long-time one) of - that of INFORMS.

On December 5, 2024, I delivered the Blackett Lecture at The Royal Society in London, thanks to The OR Society, and blogged about the magical experience here: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2024/12/an-incredible-blackett-lecture.html

Below is a collage of photos to capture this truly memorable experience:

An article that I wrote about my  Blackett Lecture was published (and is feely accessible this year) in The OR Society flagship journal The Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2025.2494706

And, just this past week, on the day before Thanksgiving, an article that I wrote with my Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Samirasadat Samadi, on tariffs, supply chain networks, and labor was published in JORS: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2025.2592758

I am so grateful to outstanding professional societies for providing us with communities and support.

Thank you to The Or Society Fellows Committee, its Board, and to those who wrote letters of support for me!

Many thanks also to INFORMS for recognizing my work (and thanks to my students and collaborators) with the 2025 President's Award: https://www.informs.org/News-Room/INFORMS-Releases/Awards-Releases/Anna-Nagurney-Honored-with-2025-INFORMS-President-s-Award

Our work continues.

Excellent INFORMS Tune-Up Event Hosted by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter!

Yesterday, the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter held its annual INFORMS Tune-Up event at which PhD students, who are chapter members, practice the presentations that they will give at the upcoming INFORMS Annual Meeting. This year, the conference will take place in Atlanta, Georgia, October 26-29, 2025. The website for the conference is here: https://www.informs.org/Meetings-Conferences/INFORMS-Conference-Calendar/2025-INFORMS-Annual-Meeting

The presenters and their titles are on the poster below.

It was great to have speakers from the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department (MIE) at UMass Amherst as well as from the Operations and Information Management (OIM) Department.

I very much enjoyed all the talks. Ali Jafari and Yukti Kathuria are from MIE and Samira Samadi, Ismael Pour, and Dana Hassani are from the OM side of OIM. The latter three are also my PhD students.

The audience included faculty and students and valuable comments and suggestions were given on the presentations and there were also great questions. It was an excellent practice session.

The presentations by Ali and Yukti focused on on unsupervised learning approaches and Bayesian networks to healthcare, respectively, and those by Samira, Ismael, and Dana were on food quality under trade disruptions, integrated crop and cargo war risk insurance, and the quantification of international trade network performance, respectively.

Samira's presentation was based on  a paper that we co-authored with Professor Deniz Besik of the University of Richmond.

Ismael's paper was based on a paper that we co-authored with Professor Borys Kormych of the Odesa Law Academy and which is the lead article in the January (2026) issue of the International Transactions in Operational Research. It is available for free here: 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/itor.70038?af=R

Dana's paper, in turn, was also co-authored with me, and with colleagues at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev. The paper was published in the latest Dynamics of Disasters  (2024) co-edited volume: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-74006-0_7

Special thanks to faculty: Professor Peter Haas of the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, UMass Amherst, Professor Hari Balasubramanian of MIE,  and Professor Zihao Qu of OIM for taking the time to support the students and offering their suggestions. 

I took the nice photo below:

The pizza, fresh fruit, and coffee were delicious.

This student chapter will be recognized at the INFORMS Atlanta conference with the Cum Laude Award on October 27. We will have a nice group there to receive the award and to also celebrate!

I have been the chapter's Faculty Advisor since its inception in 2004 and have very much enjoyed seeing how the students have grown professionally and socially. I stay in touch with many once they receive their PhDs and go on to careers either in academia or industry!

Outstanding Making an Impact Lightning Talks: Honored to Speak on Tariffs, Trade, and OR

This post is the third in a series on the EURO Conference, which took place in Leeds, UK, June 22-25, 2025.

I was honored and delighted to have been invited by Ruth Kaufman to deliver a lighting talk in the Making an Impact session on Monday morning, June 23, of the conference at 8:30AM. All 13 speakers, from several different continents, showed up. The full list of speakers, their presentation titles, and abstracts can be found here: https://euro2025leeds.uk/making-an-impact/. The breadth of topics was fantastic and included algorithms for fighting crime, reducing food waste on airplane flights, and emergency ambulance service planning. 

My presentation was on Tariffs, Trade, and OR.

This session was a truly outstanding beginning to this scientific conference.

Below is photo of the speakers with Ruth Kaufman and Jane Parkin, followed by a photo of the audience.

I have been publishing on tariffs (of different types) for quite a few years now, so I very much enjoyed preparing and delivering my presentation, which is now posted on the Supernetwork Center website: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/EURO2025_MakinganImpact-Tariffs,%20Trade,%20and%20OR.pdf

The Spring Supernetwork Newsletter Is Published!

I am delighted to share that the 2025 Spring Edition of The Supernetwork Sentinel, the newsletter of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I founded in 2001 and continue to serve as the Director of, has now been published.

It was an extraordinary spring semester with many activities and news items to report.

It is wonderful to see that our research is making impact and that we continue to be sought by the media for our expertise on supply chains and various policies, including tariffs. This summer will be busy with conferences and also with work on international trade as well as food security.

The Spring 2025 newsletter, as well as all other earlier newsletters, can be accessed here: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/newsletters/sentinel.html

Thank you for the support!

Three Papers Accepted in One Week!

My Mother always said that "good news comes in threes" and this week we certainly had some much appreciated good news.

My paper, "NetwORks and Policies: OR to the Rescue," which is based on the Blackett Lecture that I delivered at The Royal Society in London, England on December 5, 2024, thanks to The Operational Research Society, was accepted for publication in the Journal of the Operational Research Society. And, incredibly, I received the galleys of the paper yesterday (a Saturday) and they were in great shape. Below is the first page.

And, since the Blackett Lecture experience was so special I include a collage below made of photos from the event, with deep gratitude for all that took part.

Many thanks also to The Operational Research Society for posting my Blackett Lecture online on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-LsIEsi-m0

Also, we heard from the International Transactions in Operational Research that the paper, "Integrated Crop and Cargo War Risk Insurance: Application to Ukraine," that I co-authored with my PhD student Ismael Pour and Professor Borys Kormych of the Odesa Law Academy in Ukraine, was accepted for publication. We hope to receive the galleys soon. Professor Kormych is a Virtual Scholar in our terrific UMass Amherst - Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) partnership. He was in the first cohort and is also in the second cohort. You can read more about the Virtual Scholars and their Faculty Hosts at the Isenberg School of Management here: https://www.umass.edu/global-affairs/news/kyiv-school-economics-and-university-massachusetts-amherst-launch-second-round-virtual-scholar

We heard the good news shortly after Ismael Pour presented the paper in the doctoral seminar in Management Science that I am teaching this semester. We took the nice photo below with him and Yongdong Chen and Samira Samadi (both also PhD students in the seminar) after Ismael's presentation.

Ismael will present this paper at the POMS Conference in Atlanta next month.

Also, Samira (full first name is Samirasadat) and I got the paper, "Multicommodity Trade, Tariffs, and Rerouting," accepted in a very special volume: Convex and Variational Analysis with Applications: In Honor of Terry Rockafellar’s 90th Birthday. Panos M. Pardalos and Themistocles M. Rassias, Editors, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. This is a very interesting and timely paper, given the trade wars that are happening now in real time. It discusses the evasion of tariffs and impacts through rerouting, with minimum processing, except for repackaging/relabeling in other countries.

We are grateful to the Editors and reviewers of our papers.

I Had a Great Time Speaking on Agricultural Supply Chain Networks at the University of Louisville in Kentucky

I returned from Louisville, Kentucky, past midnight. Immediately after my Humanitarian Logistics & Healthcare class at the Isenberg School of Management this past Thursday, I headed to Bradley airport for my flight to Detroit, and onwards to Louisville. I was very excited to have been invited to speak at the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Louisville. I was invited by Professor Lihui Bai, who, along with Professor Monica Gentili, co-directs the Logistics and Distribution Institute there. Professor Bai's PhD advisor at the University of Florida was Don Hearn, who was a good friend of my PhD advisor, Stella Dafermos of Brown University. Both have passed away.

It was also wonderful to be in a warmer climate with even flowers, after a very long winter in New England. It was great to meet in the morning with Professors Yunmei Liu and Thomas Riedel (a University of Massachusetts Amherst PhD alumnus), and to hear Professor Bai's PhD students speak on their fascinating research! One of Dr. Bai's PhD students is now working with one of my former PhD students and Dr. Bai.  A feature of academia that I love is all the connections that we have across the miles. Thanks also to Professor Brian Yueshuai He for meeting with me and discussing congestion pricing in Manhattan. He has a PhD from the Tandon School at NYU.   I thoroughly enjoyed speaking about agricultural supply chain networks and the many challenges that exist today (including tariffs) and how we quantify resilience and robustness under disaster scenarios. I also spoke on making an impact and interacting with journalists and the media as well as legislators. The Q&A was excellent after my presentation and we took a nice group photo.

The lunch at the University Club with Interim School of Business Dean Jeff Guan, the Chair of Computer Science and Engineering Wei Zhang, and Dr. Bai, which included oysters, was delicious. Another highlight was a group discussion with the IE PhD students, from so many countries (Turkey, Iran, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh....). Their energy, enthusiasm, and passion for their research are uplifting. I was surprised by a beautiful gift of stunning coasters presented to me with Kentucky Derby artwork on them.  We will use them when we toast the derby in early May! 

Sincerest thanks to all and especially to Professor Lihui Bai for the exceptional hospitality extended to me and for the great attention to detail in organizing my visit.

Many thanks to Delta for terrific 4 flights and for upgrades! 

Kudos to the Organizers of the First International Virtual Conference on Ukraine

Today we mark Ukraine's Independence Day (33 years of independence) and the past two days I had the distinct pleasure of taking part in the first International Virtual Conference on Ukraine. It was excellent and I wanted to express my thanks to Professors Almas Heshmati, Lars Hartvigson, and Olena Nizalova for putting together such a timely and interesting program. It was laudable how the scheduling was done with speakers and participants from Hawaii, California, Texas, Massachusetts, multiple European countries, including Ukraine, as well as Vietnam, Australia, and Morroco!

Jonkoping International Business School (JIBS) in Sweden was the host of this virtual conference, in collaboration with its partners.

I took a snapshot of the closing session, which is posted below.

Each day, the conference began at 3AM, my time; but, despite this, I thoroughly enjoyed the sessions that I managed to join and, of course, it was an honor to present our latest research with my PhD student Dana Hassani and Kyiv School of Economics colleagues Oleg Nivievski and Pavlo Martyshev.

The presentation was based on our paper, noted above, which will be published any day now in the INFORMS journal Transportation Science. The slide deck of our presentation can be downloaded here. I was delighted that all the co-authors of our paper were present! Plus, I enjoyed "seeing" colleagues in Ukraine, with whom I have also published: Elena Besedina of the Kyiv School of Economics and Myroslava Kushnir of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv.

I also thoroughly enjoyed being on a panel with: 

Pham Khanh NAM, UEH University Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Hans LÖÖF, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden

Vesa KANNIAINEN, University of Helsinki, Finland

Mykola TKACHENKO, CEO of SOE Prozorro (Transparency), Ukraine.

Yuriy BILAN, regrettably, could not make our panel, as scheduled.

A remarkable amount of information was exchanged and the discussions were terrific.

The keynote talks by Roman Sheremeta and Yuriy Gorodnichenko were excellent! I wish that all presentations could have been recorded and posted since with the different time zones it was challenging to hear all in real time.

Themes that resonated throughout included: the resilience of Ukrainians; the fact that Russia's war on Ukraine is a massive threat to global security; Ukraine needs immense support from its allies; economic & military aid to Ukraine is the best investment; agriculture and IT continue to be shining lights in Ukraine whereas steel production has essentially collapsed; investing in transportation routes is critical and keeping maritime routes safe and efficient; human capital must be brought back and nurtured; security is of the utmost importance; damages are immense to educational institutions, healthcare, critical infrastructure (energy, transportation, logistics, supply chains), and the environment, and so much more!

I was impressed how much researchers and practitioners and even PhD students who took part want to help. There was emphasis on the need to get research results in front of policy and decision-makers more quickly.

Information on this conference can be found here. 

The full program has been posted here.

It Was Great to Be Back at MIT to Speak on Agricultural Supply Chain Networks and Trade Policies

This past Tuesday I had the pleasure of speaking at MIT at the Center for Transportation and Logistics in its seminar series. I'd like to thank Austin Iglesias Saragih for the invitation to speak. The title of my presentation was: Agricultural Supply Chain Networks: Trade, Policies, and Resilience.

In my seminar, I first highlighted research that we had done on food supply chains over the past decade with collaborators: Min Yu, Deniz Besik, and Pritha Dutta (all of whom were my former PhD students, and now are thriving as Professors), and, more recently, with my present PhD student Dana Hassani and collaborators at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) Professor Oleg Nivievskyi and Dr. Pavlo Martyshev. 

In my presentation, I did a deep dive into the paper, "Exchange Rates and Multicommodity International Trade: Insights from Spatial Price Equilibrium Modeling with Policy Instruments via Variational Inequalities," Anna Nagurney, Dana Hassani, Oleg Nivievskyi, and Pavlo Martyshev, Journal of Global Optimization 87: (2023), pp 1-30.

The paper was the lead article in the volume and was also displayed at the INFORMS Phoenix conference. In the below photo I am standing next to the journal Editor, Professor Sergiy Butenko, and my PhD student Dana Hassani. The Springer editors Razia Amzad and Christian Rauscher are next to Dana.

I also discussed some results from my Labor and Supply Chain Networks book.

I am very grateful to the audience for the excellent questions and discussions and to Austin for handling the logistics of my visit. 

It was also extra special to have one of my former students, Emilio Alvarez Flores, who is now pursuing an MBA at Sloan at MIT, come to my presentation. In addition, I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Dr. Elenna Dugundji, who is a Research Scientist at the Center for Transportation ad Logistics at MIT.

My talk was also streamed on Zoom (which I had not been informed of). It was great to see MIT faculty Zooming in and others from different locations, including Georgia Tech.

It was terrific to be back at MIT. Coincidentally, the Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) is located at 1 Amherst Street in Cambridge so I felt right at home. I had spent 2 years at MIT and recall when the OR Center was also located there.

In my presentation, I discussed the importance of alternative routes and appropriate policies for agricultural trade with a focus on the impacts of Russia's war on Ukraine and, that night, as we all know, the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed after being hit by the cargo ship Dali. I had multiple requests for media interviews but had to decline because of my presentation and meetings at MIT. Lo and behold, whom did I see on the TV news, a few hours afterwards - none other than the Director of CTL, Professor Yossi Sheffi! He had hugged me when he saw me at MIT, something his PhD students told me they have never seen him do before. Professor Sheffi was also my host when I had an NSF Visiting Professorship for Women at MIT and I spent my first year at CTL, which was then located in Building 1.

The slide deck of my seminar presentation is posted on the Supernetwork Center website.

I had previously given a seminar at MIT in December 2015 and was hosted by Professor Carolina Osorio, who is no longer at MIT. She and Professor Jim Orlin joined us for dinner after my talk and Professor Orlin even Zoomed into my presentation this past Tuesday. My blogpost with photos from that visit can be accessed here.

That evening, I stopped by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (RIAS) at Harvard University, where I has been a Science Fellow in 2005-2006. The Fellows that year included Professor Claudia Goldin, who in 2023 received the Nobel Prize in Economics. I had been back to RIAS as a Summer Fellow twice since then.

And to celebrate being back in Cambridge, we enjoyed a delicious Amareno gelato topped by a chocolate macaron.