Congratulations and Kudos

As 2022 draws to a close, it is important to make note of the immense challenges this year and how we gathered together to do our best to address them.

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a major invasion of Ukraine, which is continuing and is now over 10 months long. As the Center Director, I have had the honor to serve on both the International Academic Board and the Board of Directors of the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) in Ukraine, for several years. In March, I was elected a Co-Chair of KSE, and have worked in support of this great higher education institution. KSE not only, after a few months, began, again, face to face instruction in wartime, but it has also done amazing work in humanitarian relief as well as in informing the media and producing important white papers on the impacts of the war. I was delighted that UMass Amherst and KSE established a partnership, which includes a Virtual Scholar Program, in which now 8 Virtual Scholars are working with faculty in the Isenberg School. 3 of them are affiliated with the Center and collaborative research has already begun. On November 30, 2022, we hosted a Virtual Welcome event and all showed up, with many of our colleagues in Ukraine, including the KSE Rector, Tymofii Brik, in a bomb shelter in Kyiv. We are grateful to Kalpen Trivedi, the UMass Amherst Vice Provost for Global Affairs, and to Isenberg School Dean Anne P. Massey, as well as to Provost Emeritus John McCarthy, for their outstanding support of this partnership! Thanks also to the President of KSE, Tymofiy Mylovanov, for his leadership and vision. An article on the event and partnership can be found here.

Our supply chain expertise was widely sought in the pandemic by the media and we responded enthusiastically. With the war on Ukraine, we continued to write OpEds, Letters to the Editor, and to speak on the impacts of the war with journalists for print media, TV, as well as radio. Some of the interviews and articles can be found on this link.

With boosters available, conference travel opened up and I was delighted to give a keynote at the ODS conference in beautiful Florence, Italy, in late August. My keynote was in a museum! It was wonderful to see Center Associate Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania there. Some highlights with photos are presented here.

On September 17, 2022, I had the pleasure and honor, along with Center Associate Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford, in taking part in a conference and fundraising event at the Harvard Club in NYC for Ukraine. Some highights and photos can be found on the following blogpost.

The INFORMS Annual Meeting took place in mid October and attracted more than 6,000 conferees from around the globe for this face to face conference. It was very special to have so many Center Associates there speaking on their latest research including: Professor Deniz Besik of the University of Richmond, Professor Pritha Dutta of Pace University, Professor Amir H. Masoumi of Manhattan College, and Professor Mojtaba Salarpour of Texas A&M Commerce. We all enjoyed a dinner in a rotating restaurant in Indianapolis that I hosted. Some of the highlights, including an advocacy panel that I spoke on, the Stella Dafermos mid-career award, and the Minority Issues Forum event, are summarized in the post.

Additional photos can be found on the Center site.

On December 24, 2022, I had the great honor of delivering the IFORS Distinguished Lecture at the CLAIO 2022 conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which was an especially exciting place to be since it was the week of the semifinal and final of the World Cup, with Argentina winning the World Cup! More information about the lecture and conference can be found here.

I would like to thank all of our supporters and to extend my congratulations to the Center Associates on their achievements! Dana Hassani has joined the Center as a Doctoral Student Center Associate and is working on supply chain network problems.

Delighted that, in the midst of the war, and with many challenges globally, I managed to complete the book, Labor and Supply Chain Networks, which will be published by Springer next month.