Looking Forward to Speaking on Supply Chains in Sweden and in Austria

My suitcases are (almost) packed and soon I will be heading back to Europe as part of my sabbatical this year.

And, the lectures that I will be giving on supply chains  as well as a short course on humanitarian logistics and healthcare are prepared and I am very much looking forward to giving them.

I am bringing a few copies of our new book, "Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products,"  just published by Springer Business and Science Media New York, to give to my hosts at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and to also donate a copy to the library.

On Monday, March 4, 2013, I will be presenting a seminar, "Grand Challenges and Opportunities in Supply Chain Networks: From Analysis to Design," at the Chalmers University of Technology, which is also in Gothenburg. This seminar is part of the Optimization Series.

 

 I will have a week to meet with my wonderful colleagues and the students in Gothenburg and then I will be off to Vienna, Austria, where I will speak on one of the themes of our new book: "Perishable Product Supply Chains in Health Care: Models, Analysis, and Computations," at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. The title of my talk in Vienna, which is part of the research seminar series of the Research Institute for Supply Chain Management is: "Perishable Product Supply Chains in Health Care: Models, Analysis, and Computations."

I have several wonderful colleagues there, including Professor Manfred Fischer, and my former doctoral student, Professor Tina Wakolbinger, who recently visited us at the Isenberg School and also took part in the AAAS Sympsoium on Dynamics of Disasters that I organized and which took place February 17 at the Hynes Center in Boston.

 

While in Vienna, I will also teach an intense course on Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare. I am told that the students who have registered for my course are from many different countries so this should be a very interesting and timely course.

Congratulations to the Newly Elected 2013 RSAI Fellows!

I was delighted to receive the great news below, which is also posted now on the RSAI (Regional Science Association International) website. The Fellows Award recognizes distinguished scholars in Regional Science. I know each of the scholars below and saw Professor Capello and Professor Thill at the NARSC meeting in Ottawa, back in November. Professor Puu I have known through his work with Professor Martin Beckmann, who was on my doctoral dissertation committee at Brown University, and is renowned for his book, "Studies in the Economics of Transportation," and other research. At the INFORMS National Meeting in San Francisco in 2005, I organized two sessions to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of this great book and the presentations and many photos can be accessed here.

I had met Professor Puu in Umea in Sweden years ago. Professor Kobayashi and I had spent, along with several others, including Professors Geoff Hewings, Takayama, Johansson, a magical few weeks in Mallacootta, Australia at a regional science workshop.

As for Professor Thill -- he did some behind the scenes work, I was told by Professor David E. Boyce, to arrange the schedule at the NARSC Ottawa meeting so that I would be at the awards luncheon at which my receipt of the 2012 Walter Isard Award for Scholarly Achievement was announced. I had no idea that I would be the recipient and, coincidentally, Professor Bill Anderson of the University of Windsor in Ontario (I was born in Windsor) gave me this award and he had been in Umea when it was announced that Professor Jacques Thisse and I were the recipients of the Kempe Prize (also a complete shock to me and I fainted).

I look forward to celebrating with the 2013 Fellows at the 60th NARSC Conference next Fall in Atlanta!

2013 elected RSAI Fellows

RSAI is pleased to announce the election of the following Fellows in 2013:

Roberta Capello, Polytechnic Milano, ITALY Roberta Capello is professor in Regional and urban economics at the Politecnico of Milan. Past-President of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI). Editor in chief of the Italian Journal of Regional Science and co-editor of Letters in Spatial and Resource Science (Springer Verlag). Editor in chief of Papers in Regional Science from RSAI. Author of many scientific papers and a textbook in Regional Economics, published in Italian and English.

Kiyoshi Kobayashi, Kyoto University, JAPAN Kobayashi is the recipient of several awards and prizes for his research including the Hinomaru Prize in 1988, the JSCE (Japan Society of Civil Engineers) Research Prize in 1993, 2001 and 2007. In 2007 he was included in the Top 50 City Creators and Urban Experts of the Ministry of the Environment of Denmark. From 1978-1986, Kobayashi was a Research Associate in Graduate School of Engineering of Kyoto University. In 1987 he became an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Systems Engineering at Tottori University, where in 1990 he became a full time Professor. In 1996 he returned to Kyoto University as a full time Professor at the Graduate School of Engineering. In 2007 he became the Vice Dean of the Graduate School of Management of Kyoto University and in 2009 he became the Dean.

Tönu Puu, University of Umeå, SWEDEN Tönu Puu, born in 1936 in Tallinn, was Professor of Economics at Umeå University from 1971 to 2001. Afterwards he worked at the Centre for Regional Studies (Cerum) for ten years. In total, he has published twenty books and 130 scholarly articles in economics, mathematics and philosophy.

Jean-Claude Thill, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA Jean-Claude is Professor of Public Policy, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA. He has previously held positions at SUNY - Buffalo, the University of Georgia, Florida Atlantic University and the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. He has also served NARSC superbly for many years in many administrative capacities. His research has centered on the spatial dimension of mobility systems and their consequences on how space is used and organized in modern societies; statistical and computational methods of spatial analysis; and most recently urban land-use dynamics.

Back to the Vikings in Sweden

I am so looking forward to being back in Sweden later this week as part of my sabbatical!

Perhaps you saw the recent special report, The Next Supermodel, on the Nordic countries in The Economist, February 2-8, 2013 issue. I enjoyed reading the follow-up Letters to the Editor on this report, as well, especially the one  from Jens Baunsgaard from Bornholm, Denmark  that said: SIR – Thanks for a very interesting special report about the Nordic countries. However, I must correct you concerning your cover photo: the Vikings never had horns on their helmets. It was Carl Doepler, working for Richard Wagner, who invented horned helmets for the Nibelungen Ring. The myth has been common since then.

 

As an academic, with associations in this region for over a decade, especially Sweden, I marvel at the visionary perspectives of this region, especially its emphasis on and appreciation of environmental sustainability, which I thought was not noted sufficiently in the special report. As a Visiting Professor at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, thanks to an ad in The Economist that I responded to, I continue during my stays there to be transfixed by the trams, trains, busses, much utilized, and the pedestrian walkways under foliage and next to bicycle lanes, and the continuous improvements to the infrastructure, even with seasonal flower plantings. The citizens love the outdoors, their parks and their mobility, so that even the restaurants and cafes provide blankets for customers who wish to dine al fresco.

Every time that I return back to the US I say "Why can't the US be more like Sweden" and the special report provided concrete evidence on how public-private partnerships that support innovations can excel and how people can work and live truly well.

Great Books by My Isenberg School of Management Colleagues

Business School Profs are dynamic.

Some  do fundamental theoretical work, others make more applied contributions, but all who conduct research  write and speak about their observations and discoveries.

The reputation of any school, including a school of business or management, rests on the caliber of its faculty and that of the students that it graduates.

Some business school profs also write books. These might be of a technical nature, depending on one's discipline, or meant for a popular/mass audience.

Below are photos of (some of the) books by Isenberg School of Management authors that are displayed in our school. 5 of my books are featured.

For a fairly recent list of books authored by Isenberg faculty, see the webpage on the school's website.

At the request of our wonderful Associate Dean, Jane K. Miller, I brought over my latest book, "Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products," that I co-authored with Dr. Min Yu, Amir H. Masoumi, and Dr. Ladimer S. Nagurney, featured in the photo below and just published

Min received her PhD with a concentration in Management Science at the Isenberg School last May and is now a Professor at the Pamplin College of Business at the University of Portland, and Amir recently successfully defended his doctoral dissertation. I was their dissertation advisor. As for Dr. Ladimer S. Nagurney, his college has already started to celebrate the publication of our book. This was a great collaboration, which the Isenberg School helped to bring together.
 

Leadership and WORMS -- Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences

Leadership comes in many forms -- scientific, political, intellectual, academic, business and industry, professional, artistic, and societal from the individual to the familial levels and beyond.

Great leaders have courage and integrity and, through their vision and ability to capture the imagination and support of others,  can elicit fundamental change.

Being a great leader is never easy and one can experience isolation, marginalization, and even discrimination -- it is the work and novel ideas that matter and the documentation of them.

Great leaders care about others and, under what, at times, may seem to be too many constraints, create opportunities and long-lasting effects. You may become a great leader even if your own organization, for whatever reasons,  does not understand or appreciate your contributions.

Leaders help to build communities. 

There is a lot of renewed interest in women and leadership lately with the new PBS production that starts airing next week entitled: Makers: Women Who Make America to Sheryl Sandberg's forthcoming book, Lean In, with a provocative article in The New York Times: A Titan's How-To on Breaking the Glass Ceiling. Sandberg is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook.

One of my favorite communities is WORMS -- Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences.

WORMS is a forum of INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences).

According to the WORMS website, the goals of WORMS are to:

• To encourage interest in the field of operations research and the management sciences;
• To encourage discussion and interaction among individuals having interest in the issues facing women and its relationship to the profession of operations research and the management sciences;
• To advise the INFORMS Board on aspects of issues facing women in the profession of operations research and the management sciences and to keep the INFORMS Board apprised of developments in this area.

WORMS organizes great activities and also recognizes those who have contributed significantly to the advancement and recognition of women in the field of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (OR/MS) through the awarding of the WORMS Award.

Recently, we received the message below, which announces the immediately past and incoming new WORMS Officers.

Dear WORMS Members, 

As the outgoing WORMS President, I wanted to write and officially welcome the incoming WORMS Officers. Our "new" officers as of January 2013 are:

President Laura McLay, Virginia Commonwealth University, lamclay@vcu.edu

President ElectSusan Martonosi, Harvey Mudd College, martonosi@g.hmc.edu

Past President Esma Gel, Arizona State University, esma.gel@asu.edu

SR VP of Meetings  Mary Beth Kurz, Clemson University, mkurz@clemson.edu

JR VP of Meetings Erica Klampfl, Ford Motor Company, eklampfl@ford.com

SP VP of Communications Anna Nagurney, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, nagurney@isenberg.umass.edu

JR VP of Communications Lisa Yeo, University of Alberta, myeo@ualberta.ca

SR Treasurer Guzin Bayraksan, University of Arizona, guzinb@sie.arizona.edu

JR Treasurer Muhong Zhang, Arizona State University, Muhong.Zhang@asu.edu

Secretary Renata Konrad, Worchester Polytechnic Institute, rkonrad@wpi.edu

Please remember to renew your membership for 2013 and let us know if you have any questions/concerns/comments! 

Regards,

Esma Gel 

Past President, WORMS 

Coincidentally, the past several days there have been several professional activities that I have been involved in from the Dynamics of Disasters Symposium that I organized for the 2013 AAAS Annual Meeting in  Boston that took place Sunday, February 17, to the hosting of Professor Tina Wakolbinger for a talk at the Isenberg School, with the great help of our award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMs Student Chapter. 

In the former,  the new President of WORMS, Professor Laura McLay, was a panelist and also blogged about the experience, and Professor Tina Wakolbinger, who traveled all the way from Vienna, Austria, where she is a Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business,  was a discussant (our photo at AAAS Boston is above).

When we hosted Professor Wakolbinger for her seminar this past Tuesday, Professor Ana Muriel of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at UMass Amherst, who is a past President of WORMS, came to the lunch, reception, and presentation, along with a nice group of her students.

 

And, I might add, Professor Wakolbinger is a past Senior VP of Communications of WORMS!

Celebrating the Return of My Academic Daughter to the Isenberg School

When family members get together, whether for holidays or other occasions, these are, typically, special events.

Who isn't happy to see one's child return from college for a break, from a trip abroad, or even from summer camp?

Today, we hosted one of my former doctoral students at the Isenberg School of Management, Tina Wakolbinger, who received her PhD with a concentration in Management Science in 2007 from UMass Amherst. After receiving her PhD she became an Assistant Professor at the Fogelman College of Business and Economics at the University of Memphis in Tennessee and less than 4 years after, became a Full Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria. She is also the Head of the Research Institute on Supply Chain Management there. 

She skipped the "Associate Professor" part in the usual progression in academia of Assistant Professor to Associate Professor and then, hopefully, promotion to Full Professor.

Since I was the chair of Tina's doctoral dissertation committee, I am her academic "Mom." She was my 13th PhD student (in her case this was a very lucky number).

Tina was in Massachusetts for the Dynamics of Disasters Symposium that I organized for the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston and she very much wanted to come back to her alma mater. So, yesterday we drove back from Boston and she checked into the Campus Center hotel in the middle of UMass Amherst. She really enjoyed the spaciousness and comfort of the room. We dined at Arigato in downtown Amherst, since that is where she went to celebrate after getting the job offer from the University of Memphis.

It was really pleasant to stroll through downtown Amherst and to see what had changed in the past 6 years since she received her PhD.

Today, we had a celebratory lunch in honor of her visit at the University Club.

We took some photos in the Supernetworks Lab, where Tina also had an office as a PhD student.

Then it was time for her seminar: The Value of Information Systems for Product Recovery Management, which was based on a paper that she had co-authored with Fuminori Toyasaki and William Kettinger and which was just published in the International Journal of Production Research.

Her talk was hosted by me and the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter and the attendance was great.Tina had been the former President of this Student Chapter and received the Judith Liebman Award from INFORMS for her terrific work. She also helped me with the Speaker Series and we used Room 112, which was the (revised) venue for her talk today, so the site was perfect.

We had a reception before the talk.

After her fabulous presentation, in which she discussed models that she and her co-authors developed that quantify under what conditions investments in Information-intensive Product Recovery Systems (IPRS) are economically justifiable for manufacturers and when policy-makers need to consider facilitating their implementation.She focused on PCs as an example and discussed different frameworks in different countries in Europe (whether centralized collection strategies were used or decentralized ones).

After the talk, we took some more photos and presented Professor Wakolbinger with a gift from the Isenberg School.

Then it was time to put Professor Wakolbinger on the Peter Pan bus since she was off to visit another former doctoral student of mine, Professor Jose Cruz, who is a tenured Associate Professor at the School of Business at UConn. She will be giving a talk there tomorrow.

Photos from the AAAS Boston Symposium: Dynamics of Disasters

The 2013 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston, which took place February 14-18, 2013,  is now over and it was an intellectual feast. The venue at the Hynes Center was perfect, given the frigid temps.

The photos below were taken at the AAAS meeting with the majority at the symposium that I organized: Dynamics of Disasters: Harnessing the Science of Networks to Save Lives, which took place on Sunday, February 17.

All the panelists and discussants showed up -- as the organizer of this symposium, I breathed a sigh of relief, since the weather was unusually windy and cold and there was even some snow accumulation. Although we did have a technological disruption during Professor David McLaughlin's talk, once we located a technician,  the issue was resolved.

The symposium consisted of 3 panelists and 2 discussants with the former delivering 20 minute presentations, and the latter 10 minute ones. The perspective was multidisciplinary with engineering, operations research and management science, computing, applied mathematics, and even economics represented by the panelists and discussants (sometimes under one hat). We heard about radar placement and tornadoes, emergencies and snowstorms, evacuation networks under disruptions, material convergence and congestion post disasters, and the location of disasters world-wide.

The panelists:

David McLaughlin, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Chasing Storms Across Disciplines

Laura McLay, Virginia Commonwealth University
The Emergency Medical and Fire Calls During Severe Weather Events

Panos M. Pardalos, University of Florida
Assessing the Vulnerability of Evacuation Plans via Critical Element Detection

The discussants:
Jose Holguin-Veras, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who focused on disasters that he had studied from the earthquake in Haiti to the triple disaster in Fukushina  and Tina Wakolbinger, Vienna University of Economics and Business, who provided an excellent overview of the symposium with an emphasis on humanitarian logistics.

We had 1 or 2 questions after each presentation and then opened up the symposium to additional Q&A.

I would like to thank the outstanding panelists: Professor David McLaughlin, who is also the Director of CASA (Center for the Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere) at UMass Amherst,  Professor Laura McLay of the Department of Statistical Sciences and Operations Research at Virginia Commonwealth University, who wrote a blogpost on our symposium, Distinguished University Professor Panos M. Pardalos, who is an AAAS Fellow and an INFORMS Fellow,  Professor Jose Holquin-Veras, William H. Hart Professor at RPI, and the Director of the Center for Infrastructure, Transportation, and the Environment, and Professor Tina Wakolbinger, Head of the Research Institute for Supply Chain Management, who traveled from the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria,  for their scientific leadership on problems of great societal importance. Thanks also to Professor Ed Aboufadel and AMS for supporting our symposium.