Doing Scholarly Operations Research with Undergraduates

Usually when faculty at a Research 1 university, such as UMass Amherst, conduct research they involve doctoral students, since doctoral students need to do research for their dissertation and, upon receiving the PhD, may continue onwards to do research, as faculty at other institutions or perhaps as practitioners. I have supervised the PhD dissertations of 20 PhD students and  I continue to collaborate with quite a few of them, even working with doctoral students of my doctoral students (nice to see the academic genealogy tree growing).

In the last several years, because of the growing prominence of the Commonwealth Honors College at UMass Amherst and also the Isenberg School of Management, under great leadership, we have been attracting truly outstanding undergraduate students and, my personal bias, is towards the Operations and Information Management (OIM) students, since they are in the department in which I teach at the Isenberg School.

I have had the pleasure of co-chairing two honors theses of OIM majors: Emilio Alvarez Flores, who graduated in May 2016, and Karen Li, who graduated in 2017. Emilio now works for Cisco and Karen for Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Emilio's thesis was entitled: Optimizing Non-Governmental Organizations' Operations and Fundraising: A Game-Theoretical Supply Chain Approach. He defended his dissertation at the Undergraduate Research Conference at UMass on April 22, 2016. A paper that we wrote, together with Professor Ceren Soylu of the Economics Department at UMass, was based on his thesis:  A Generalized Nash Equilibrium Network Model for Post-Disaster Humanitarian Relief, Anna Nagurney, Emilio Alvarez Flores, and Ceren Soylu, Transportation Research E 95: (2016), pp 1-18. I have continued to work with Emilio (below is a photo of us with my great collaborator Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy at the Dynamics of Disasters conference that I co-organized and which took place last summer in Greece).

At the conference in Greece, we presented the paper: A Variational Equilibrium Network Framework for Humanitarian Organizations in Disaster Relief: Effective Product Delivery Under Competition for Financial Funds, Anna Nagurney, Patrizia Daniele, Emilio Alvarez Flores, and Valeria Caruso.

The title of Karen Li's thesis was: Hospital Competition in Prices and Quality: A Variational Inequality Framework and she successfully defended it at the Undergraduate Research Conference on April 28, 2017. Her thesis is 100 pages. Below is a photo from the conference and defense - Professor Chaitra Gopalappa, the co-chair came, as well as many of Karen's friends and even family members!

And today we received some wonderful news: Our paper, with the same title as her thesis, was accepted for publication in the journal Operations Research for Health Care! In this paper, we construct a game theory model to capture competition among hospitals for patients for their medical procedures. The utility functions of the hospitals contain a revenue component and a component due to altruism benefit. The hospitals compete in prices charged to paying patients as well as in the quality levels of their procedures. Both prices and quality levels are subject to lower and upper bounds. We state the governing Nash equilibrium conditions and provide the variational inequality formulation. We establish existence of an equilibrium price and quality pattern and also present a Lagrange analysis of the equilibrium solutions. An algorithm is proposed and then applied to numerical examples comprising a case study focusing on four major hospitals in Massachusetts.

What I found especially gratifying in working with these exceptional students was their energy, intelligence, passion for doing good, incredible work ethic, and, frankly, "fearlessness."  We were going to solve these challenging problems, no matter what, and they permeated our dreams, obsessed us, and we did it! Perhaps it is better to have time constraints on the research in terms of a deadline in the form of graduation but, then again, you need the right students, as well as the fascinating problems. And this morning, as part of an email message from Karen, she said: "oh, how much I miss your lectures!!" Karen is the only student that I have ever had who took all the classes that I teach. Can you top the life and joy of being an academic?!

Great Undergraduate Research Conference at UMass Amherst Plus Humanitarian Logistics Thesis Defense

Today I had the pleasure of attending the Undergraduate Research Conference at UMass Amherst held at the Campus Center Auditorium.

This was a system-wide conference and just look at the schools that were represented below.

 I was excited to even get a name tag.

The reason I was there (and this is certainly a very busy time of the year since it is nearing the end of the academic year plus later today we have our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter party to which I a bringing Ukrainian food), was that one of my undergraduate students in Operations and Information Management, Emilio Alvarez Flores, was defending his honors thesis at this special event.  Professor Ceren Soylu of the Department of Economics and I are co-chairing Emilio's  thesis committee. he title of Emilio's thesis: "Optimizing Non-Governmental Organizations’ Operations and Fundraising: A Game-Theoretical Supply Chain Approach."

Emilio had his presentation as an electronic poster.

Emilio is also a student in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class this semester and his thesis passed with flying colors and it a great contribution to humanitarian logistics.  His interests lie in operations research, economics, and game theory, and his thesis was an excellent example of all three areas.

He begins his dissertation with the following quote by Martin Luther King Jr.:
“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is,
’What are you doing for others?’”

The thesis not only develops both Nash Equilibrium and Generalized Nash Equilibrium models for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)  who seek to deliver relief supplies post-disaster to points of demand, while also competing for financial funds, and presents several numerical examples, but, also, contains a realistic case study focusing on Hurricane Katrina. The case study uses the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, as well as other NGOS as the involved disaster relief organizations. In fact, Emilio, Professor Soylu, and I submitted a paper based on the thesis to a research journal because both the model and formulation as well as examples are quite novel. The framework guarantees that there will not be oversupply (resulting in materiel convergence) or undersupply (resulting in suffering and loss of life) of relief items at various demand points, through the imposition of upper and lower bounds on the demands by a higher body or regulatory organization.

As Emilio states in his dissertation:  This research has a host of implications for both coordinating authorities, that is governments and organizing bodies like the United Nations, and managers in the public sector. As far as coordinated authorities are concerned, this research provides a strong argument for their importance in having successful humanitarian relief efforts. In fact, our research suggests that if authorities can impose the constraints on upper and lower demand levels, they can provide an effective mechanism for improving responses to disasters. In particular, it is imperative that we stress the importance having reliable statistics on the population that can be used to create the estimates on the upper and lower bounds on the demand. If NGOs do not believe that this estimates are reliable, it is highly unlikely that a coordinating authority will be capable of imposing the associated constraints in practice. In addition, governments and other authorities should include collaboration with and between NGOs as part of their preparation before a disaster. It is easy to imagine that attempts to perform large-scale coordination efforts during the response phase are likely to go awry or to be ineffective. Coordinating authorities that are successful in doing so should be capable of improving the outcomes of their relief efforts under the assumption that NGOs have the goodwill to be part of this mechanism.

Emilio is graduating from UMass Amherst on May 6 and will be starting his position at Cisco shortly thereafter. The passion and dedication that he has exhibited throughout his research project have been extraordinary. It was truly an honor to co-chair his dissertation and a great experience to also work with Professor Soylu of the Economics Department at UMass Amherst.

It was nice to see some of Emilio's friends come out to support him today.

I enjoyed speaking with several researchers from various colleges and was very impressed by the enthusiasm of the undergraduate researchers for their projects, whether researching Icelandic sagas,  whether journalists should not identify their sources, or the pros and cons of single gender precollege schools, or the effects of  preschool education on high school graduation rates around the world.

Attendance was great at this special event.

Also, I might add, that last week, on April 15, when I was at the University of Waterloo in Canada giving a plenary talk at Analytics Day, Emilio Alvarez Flores was one of ten recipients of an Honors Dean's Award from the Commonwealth Honors College at UMass Amherst. Writing a letter of nomination for him was a joy.

Congratulations to all undergraduate researchers who presented today at the Undergraduate Research Conference at UMass Amherst. I hope that you never lose that intellectual curiosity!