Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Super News from the Supernetworks Center at the Isenberg School

This has been a very eventful semester!

As we begin to wrap up a great academic year (and although I am on sabbatical) I thought it appropriate to share news even before our next Supernetwork Sentinel newsletter comes out.

Now, some of the latest highlights from the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management and its Center Associates.

Professor Jose M. Cruz, who received 5 degrees from UMass Amherst, including his PhD in 2004 from the Isenberg School with a concentration in Management Science, is the recipient of the 2013 UConn School of Business Graduate Teaching Award. In addition, he will be the Director of the UConn M.S. in Business Analytics and Project Management for the next two years and continues as an Ackerman Scholar until 2014.

Professor Cruz in 2010 received the Undergraduate Teaching Award from UConn's School of Business. We hosted him in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Speaker Series last December and his talk on how to get a tenure-track job and then get tenure was brilliant. When he shared the above great news with me he noted how much his education at UMass Amherst has helped him in his success (and as his PhD dissertation advisor, I could not be prouder).

Amir H. Masoumi will be receiving his PhD this coming Friday in Graduate Ceremonies at UMass Amherst, an event I am very much looking forward to, since now the advisor will be hooding the PhD recipient. This event will take place at the grand Mullins Center in the morning. Amir had requests for over a dozen on campus interviews when he was on the job market this past year and will be assuming a tenure-track faculty position at the School of Business at Manhattan College. He, together with Professor Min Yu, who graduated with her PhD last year (I was also her advisor), Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford, and me, had our book, Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products, published in 2013. This was a great supernetwork team effort!

Also, the special issue of Computational Management Science on Financial Networks, which I guest edited, is now in production. It will be a double issue consisting of 8 papers and I am so grateful to the authors (and the anonymous reviewers) for assistance in this big effort. My editorial, which discusses the papers in this special issue, can be accessed and read here.

Professor Dmytro Matsypura of the School of Business at the University of Sydney has been granted a sabbatical and will be visiting the University of Pittsburgh for two months. He, along with several other Center Associates, including Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business, will be presenting research at the Euro-INFORMS Conference in Rome, Italy this summer. Professor Wakolbinger spoke in our series this past February, after the AAAS Dynamics of Disasters Symposium in Boston with other OR/MS and Engineering luminaries such as Professors Laura McLay, Panos M. Pardalos, David McLaughlin, and Jose Holguin-Veras.

And speaking of conferences, I wrote about the wonderful Computational Management Science Conference in Montreal that I recently returned from, which overlapped by a day with the POMS Conference in Denver. My doctoral student, Dong "Michelle" Li did a great job presenting our latest work on medical nuclear supply chains and pharmaceutical supply chains with outsourcing there.

Michelle Li with Center Associate Professor Patrick Qiang of Penn State Malvern at POMS in Denver and with two other doctoral students in Management Science from the Isenberg School in first photo below.
Michelle with Professor Dayo Shittu, UMass Amherst PhD in Industrial Engineering, who is now a Professor at Tulane University at POMS in photo above.

Our work on our big multi-institution, collaborative  NSF project: Network Innovation Through Choice continues and our paper, The Cyber-Physical Marketplace: A Framework for Large-Scale Horizontal Integration in Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems,Tilman Wolf, Michael Zink, and Anna Nagurney, will kick-off The Third International Workshop on Cyber-Physical Networking Systems, in Philadelphia, in July.

And, speaking of graduations -- what a happy time of the year this is for the graduates, their proud family members, and professors. I will be back at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden soon, as part of my sabbatical this year, and will be giving (for the second year in a row) the graduate commencement address there. The next day, I will fly to Athens, Greece to give a plenary on our NSF project at the Network Models in Economics and Finance conference.

No two days for an academic are ever alike and this is one aspect of the academic life that makes it an honor and truly special.