Monday, August 31, 2015

Co-Hosting Disaster Management Expert from Europe @UMassAmherst

September 2015 is National Preparedness Month and, propitiously, the first speaker of the year in our great UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker series will be an expert on emergency preparedness and disaster management from Europe! His name is Dr. George M. Karagiannis from the University of Crete. I met George last summer at the Dynamics of Disasters conference that  I co-organized with Professors Pardalos and Kotisireas and his talk was fabulous. When he told me hat he would be coming to Boston in September to speak at the coastal disasters conference  I had to figure out a way of bringing him to the UMass Amherst campus. 

Although next week is the first week of classes, in collaboration with the Transportation group in the Civil and Environmental Engineering program, the UMass Amherst INFORMs Student Chapter, and I are co-hosting his visit and talk on September 10. He speaks in Boston on September 11. You can click on the announcement above to obtain a larger image of it.The poster was prepared by the Chapter President, Michael Prokle, with input from Professor Eric Gonzales of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Special thanks to Associate Dean of Engineering Dr. John Collura for also helping out in securing a room, etc., for the presentation.

The poster above has information on Dr. Karagiannis' title and abstract.

His talk will take place in Marston Room 220 at 1PM until 2PM.

Dr. Karagiannis has a PhD and 3 Master's degrees, one of which is an MBA, and for the past several months he has been working in Malta (a country that is on my bucket list) on that country's National Risk Assessment project.

Many thanks for the chapter website manager, Ekin Koker, for putting information on this presentation (although the semester begins on September 8), already on the website. 

Hope to see those who can make it to this great event.