This morning the business meeting of the Transportation Science and Logistics (TSL) Society of INFORMS took place in a virtual format. There were over 100 participants, with even Norway, Germany, and Israel represented!I'd like to thank the […]

It has been exciting, and quite interesting, to be back to teaching face to face at UMass Amherst in the pandemic.When the COVID-19 pandemic was officially declared by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, I was on sabbatical for that […]

“The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.” William Zinsser, On Writing Well In my previous post, I introduced an excerpt from On writing well by William Zinsser about how writing is work and we can learn […]

When I was preparing for my preliminary exam, a friend gave me a copy of the 25th anniversary edition of On writing well by William Zinsser. I read it at once, devouring it in a couple of days. It instantly became one of my favorite books and is […]

On this Labor Day, September 6, 2021, I thought it appropriate to write this blogpost in celebration of labor in the pandemic. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has vividly and dramatically shown the importance of keeping our workers healthy and safe in […]

We returned from the West Coast at 1AM this morning from Seattle/Tacoma. I had not flown since the INFORMS Security Conference in beautiful Monterey, California in February 2020. I had also not taken a "vacation" since way before then and, frankly, […]

In my lab meeting this month, we discussed writing operations research publications. We read How to Write About Operations Research by Gerald G. Brown at the Naval Postgraduate School, a fabulous guide for writing technical publications in the field […]

I’m honored to step into the department chair role. As of July 1, 2021, I have been the David H. Gustafson Chair of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Below is an article about this transition and the next […]

The 5th International Conference on Dynamics of Disasters has now come to a close. It was Professor Panos M. Pardalos who had the vision to start this conference series. I have had the honor of co-organizing the last four of them. This year the […]

My Supernetworks group has been hard at work preparing for conferences that we will be speaking at. This Sunday the EURO 2021 Conference begins. It is a hybrid conference, based in Athens, and goes from July 11-July 14. On July 16, the 5th […]

Operations research is a model-centric discipline. We use many mathematical models such as scheduling, assignment, facility location, inventory, and queueing that are presented in operations research textbooks. Formulating new models is often a […]

It has been a whirlwind past two weeks, beginning with the CORS 2021 Conference, which was virtual because of the pandemic, and at which I was honored with the official receipt of the Harold Larnder Prize in a lovely award ceremony. Many thanks to […]

In the past few days I have been quite busy and not just with the preparation of plenary talks for conferences this month and the writing of papers. I have been approached through emails by males in both the US and the UK to answer (or to try to […]

I created a video to congratulate 2021 graduates that I posted on YouTube and am including on my blog. I am looking forward to congratulating graduates in person in the future.

Years ago I helped edit a draft of the first INFORMS code of conduct for meetings. I was also on the INFORMS Board, where I argued in favor of a motion to approve the first INFORMS code of conduct. I am thrilled to say that the motion passed [see […]

As the semester draws to a close, as well as the academic year, I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank the wonderful guest speakers in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class this semester. In a class such as this, the […]

Like many of my colleagues, I have been struggling with burnout. I’ve been ruminating about why this is the case, why I have been feeling more burned out lately, and what are some strategies for preventing burnout. I ended up writing a tweet […]

Since this blogpost was published, sadly, Professor Ailsa Land passed away on May 16, 2021. Please refer to this obituary posted on the London School of Economics website. It was truly extraordinary that she and her husband could view virtually the […]

This past week, the students in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class had the great honor and privilege of having a panel of 8 nursing leaders from the Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts, speak virtually via Zoom. The […]

On March 12, 2021, I received an email from Springer Nature, which is the publisher of the book: Dynamics of Disasters: Impact, Risk, Resilience, and Solutions, that I had co-edited with Ilias. S. Kotsireas, Panos M. Pardalos, and Arsenios Tsokas. […]