Dr. Radhika Kulkarni, VP of Advanced Analytics R&D at SAS, to speak at the Isenberg School

We are delighted to announce - so be sure to mark your calendars - that Dr. Radhika Kulkarni, VP of Advanced Analytics R&D at SAS, will be speaking at the Isenberg School of Management on Friday, March 6, 2015, just over a month away!

This visit has been in the planning for a while and we are delighted that we will have an opprtunity to welcome Dr. Kulkarni to UMass Amherst.

Dr. Kulkarni's presentation title is: Succeeding with Business Analytics: Key Challenges.

The officers of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter prepared the nice poster below announcing her presentation, which I expect will attract a standing room only audience.

I have known Radhika for a while through WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) and she is the supervisor of one of my former doctoral students, Dr. Padma Ramanujam, whose doctoral dissertation received the best dissertation award from what is now the Transportation Science & Logistics Society of INFORMS. I was a very proud academic mother when the announcement was made.

I have visited both Padma and Radhika at SAS's beautiful campus  in Cary, NC.

That morning we will have a meet and greet with Dr. Kulkarni, followed by a reception, and her presentation and lunch with a roundtable afterwards with grad students.

The student chapter and I are very grateful to the INFORMS Speakers Program which is sponsoring her visit, in part, along with my Operations & Information Management Department, with additional support from my Chaired Professorship Smith Funds.

Radhika is the recipient of the WORMS Award in 2006 (and when I received the same award the year after, she presented me with the ward). She was elected an INFORMS Fellow in 2014 at our San Francisco meeting. This time around I preceded Radhika since I became an INFORMS Fellow in 2013.