Author: Dana Hassani

On Friday, April 5, the UMass INFORMS community had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Professor Chandra Bhat, Joe J. King Endowed Chair Professor in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and the Editor of Transportation Research B. The talk was part of the Boyer Lecture Series, organized by Professor Mike Knodler, the Boyer Professor and Director of the UMass Transportation Center. Professor Knodler invited UMass INFORMS and its faculty advisor, Professor Anna Nagurney, to help coordinate the event, and we were more than glad to have the opportunity to collaborate in hosting such an insightful talk.

The talk was scheduled for after lunch, but beforehand, the UMass Transportation Center treated Professor Bhat to a tasty meal at the cozy Commonwealth Restaurant here at UMass, accompanied by professors and students from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Professor Nagurney of the Isenberg School of Management.

Professor Bhat had previously been a faculty member at UMass before moving to UT Austin. This visit was nostalgic for him and all his old friends and colleagues at UMass. Professor Nagurney shared fond memories of Professor Bhat’s days here at UMass. Noteworthy is that right before kindly making the long journey to Amherst, Professor Bhat was at Chile attending a conference.

Professor Bhat’s lecture was titled “A Study on Telemedicine Adoption, with Implications for Healthcare, Telecommunications, and Land Use Transportation Planning.” Throughout the talk, he discussed multiple research projects conducted by himself and his PhD students, emphasizing the interdisciplinary approach necessary for transportation research today. The lecture focused on telemedicine adoption in the post-COVID era and provided insights for various sectors.

After the lecture, attendees enjoyed delicious food provided by UMass Catering while chatting with Professor Bhat and other faculty and students present at the event. Professor Nagurney captured a beautiful photo of three of our officers, Dana, Ismael, and Samira, with Professor Bhat and Professor Knodler.

Sadly, this was the last seminar coordinated by UMass INFORMS for the spring semester. However, we look forward to hosting an end-of-semester party with plenty of food and great company, and we are excited to return with many more exciting events next fall.

As always, please keep checking our blog posts and follow our social media accounts to stay updated on our upcoming events.

Now that the holiday season is over and we have started our journey in 2024, it is an excellent opportunity to look back at our Chapter’s last event of 2023. On Friday, December 15, 2023, we gathered with our faculty advisor, Professor Anna Nagurney, officers, members, and other faculty and students interested in INFORMS to cherish all our memories and accomplishments in 2023 over delicious food.

We spent two hours of intellectual conversation and excellent company while indulging in delicious Ukrainian food and desserts from Professor Nagurney and pizza, fruit, and salad from our nationally recognized UMass Catering.

Even Asta and Marharyta, two Ukrainian exchange students who were part of a panel in our previous event, joined us as they missed the taste of delicious Ukrainian Varenyky (or Pierogi as the Polish call it).

Our activities and accomplishments would have been impossible without the everlasting support and passion of our faculty advisor, Professor Nagurney, for the Chapter, our officers’ effort and teamwork, and our members’ presence at our events. As such, the Chapter’s current president, Dana, would like to dedicate this post to Professor Nagurney, Semih, Busra, Josh, Sindhoora, Ismael, Samira, Yukti, and all our active members in gratitude for all their contributions to our Chapter in 2023; UMass Amherst Student Chapter of INFORMS would have been pointless without all the friendships and connections.

In the end, we wish a great 2024 for all our readers on this blog. And, as always, please stay tuned as we will be back with many events and activities as the new semester unrolls at UMass Amherst.

P.S: Due to a migration of blogs at UMass Amherst to a new hosting environment, no new posts will be added before the end of the migration in February. The content on this blog, however, will remain available throughout the migration period.

A few weeks ago, we had the pleasure of hosting a panel with Ukrainian exchange students from the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) at UMass Amherst on higher education in the US and Ukraine, the similarities and differences, and their experiences in the time they have spent in Amherst. We decided to interview the students for those who missed the panel, and you can now watch the interview on our YouTube channel.

Again, we thank Asta Motrenko, Iryna Horobets, Khrystyna Buryhina, and Marharyta Nechytailo for agreeing to have this interview with us for our YouTube channel and for spending this time with us.

It has been three weeks since the 2023 INFORMS Annual Conference in which the UMass Amherst Student Chapter of INFORMS won the INFORMS Student Chapter Annual Award with the magna cum laude degree, and we briefly highlighted our photoshoot with the award plaque in a previous recap post of the conference. However, looking back at the photos, it would be a shame not to dedicate a separate post on our blog to some of the pictures we took that day. The photoshoot was held on Sunday, October 22, 2023, at the Business Innovation Hub at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. First and foremost, here is a close-up picture of the plaque:

Here are a couple of pictures of our former and current officers, Paola Furlanetto, Dana Hassani, Busra Karkili, Semih Boz, Vivian Nwadiaru, Yiwen Wang, Josh Gladstone, and Yukti Kathuria, who have all played an essential role in winning the award, along with our faculty advisor, Professor Anna Nagurney:

And what is a photoshoot with an award plaque if it is all serious and official! So here is a picture highlighting the joy that our officers and members felt by bringing the award back home to Amherst:

Finally, as always, we encourage you to keep updated on our blog posts for more coverage as we continue to showcase all our exciting activities and events.

If you missed Professor Hari Balasubramanian’s brilliant talk on care interventions for patients with medical and social complexities, you can now watch our interview with him on our YouTube channel. Professor Balasubramanian kindly accepted our invitation and shared valuable details about his research and the “healthcare hot-spotting” program created by the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers.

Some related references and more details on the subject can be found in the papers in the below links:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405452618302027

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1906848

Again, we thank Professor Balasubramanian for his time and agreeing to be our latest guest on our YouTube channel.

A week has passed since the 2023 INFORMS Annual Meeting resolved in the warmth of Phoenix, Arizona, and we, the conferees at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, have already started reminiscing about our days at the Phoenix Convention Center where the conference was hosted. Coming back to cold Massachusetts, we were inevitably wondering whether it was the excitement of all the scholars and practitioners at the meeting that resulted in those above-100-degree hot spell days in Phoenix, especially of those who were experiencing the annual meeting for the first time, like some of our officers.

The days were long but needed to be longer for all the sessions, panels, and talks that our Advisor, Professor Anna Nagurney, our current and former officers, and our members had in their plans. On top of presenting on “Defense Critical Supply Chain Networks and Risk Management with the Inclusion of Labor” in a community committee choice session titled “Disaster Management: Networks and Grids,” Professor Nagurney participated in multiple panels and meetings, such as: “The Role of Operations Research in Disaster Risk Reduction, Building Disaster Resilience and Effective Crisis Response”; “Optimization and Resilience: Enhancing Community Resilience Against Natural Hazards”; “Meet the Editors of International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR).”

Our current Vice-President, Sindhoora Prakash, started the conference very early on Sunday morning, presenting in the session on “OR Models in Healthcare Systems.”

Then, before our current President, Dana Hassani, presents his first published paper in the “Global Supply Chains” session on Monday afternoon, our previous President, Paola Furlanetto, presented her research in the early morning hours in the session titled “Modeling for Equity and Sustainability.”

Then came the turn for our Treasurer, Josh Gladstone, and our YouTube officer, Semih Boz, to present on Tuesday afternoon at different sessions on “Assortment Planning” and “Drone Delivery Systems.”

Our former Secretary, Vivian Nwadiaru, who was also among the recipients of the 2023 SCOT INFORMS scholarship, presented on Tuesday at the session on the “DEI Ambassador Program,” while our former Treasurer, Yiwen Wang, and our Social Media Officer, Busra Karkili, presented on the last day of the conference, i.e., Wednesday morning, on sessions titled “Planning and Operating Hydropower” and “Innovations in Public Sector Operations.” Busra was also a proud panelist at “MIF Life as a Ph.D. Student Panel.”

And what better way to wrap up a conference than receiving the 2023 INFORMS Student Chapter Annual Award with the Magna Cum Laude degree for the UMass Amherst Student Chapter of INFORMS.

We came back to Amherst, and the first thing we did as a Chapter was to set a time for a proud photoshoot with our deserved award. It was a Sunday morning, but some donuts and a lot of joy from bringing the award plaque to Amherst gathered us at the Business Innovation Hub building at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

And last but not least, we must mention all the new connections we made thanks to the Annual Meeting and the opportunity to meet and greet all the old friends, former officers, colleagues, classmates, etc.

We already miss our time at the conference and downtown Phoenix. All we can do is wait for the 2024 INFORMS Annual Conference. However, in the meantime, our officers and members will engage in impactful research and professional service, and we will hold many, many exciting events through our INFORMS Student Chapter to obtain yet another INFORMS Student Chapter Annual Award, this time at Seattle, Washington.

On October 6, 2023, with the INFORMS Annual Meeting just around the corner, we had a Tune-Up session where four of our student members had the opportunity to present their research and gain valuable feedback from their peers and faculty. Interestingly, this year’s INFORMS Annual Meeting will be the first for all the students who presented at our Tune-Up session this year.

The talks were quite varied, which made the session even more enjoyable. Semih focused on transportation and last-mile delivery, while Josh talked more about retailing; Sindhoora informed us of her impactful research on healthcare, and Dana talked of international trade.

After the session, we posed for a picture with everyone present. Students were incredibly thankful to the faculty members who dedicated the time to attend the event and provided them with valuable feedback.

Afterward, we ended our session by interacting with the attendees over some delicious yet healthy refreshments.

Again, we are very thankful to all the students who volunteered to present at this Tune-Up event and to all students and, especially, faculty who attended the session and gave the presenters insightful tips on their presentations. Students will be presenting the same research topics, although, hopefully, much improved with the use of feedback they received at the Tune-Up Session, in this years INFORMS Annual Meeting.

Please routinely check our blog and other social media outlets as we continue covering our forthcoming exciting events.

With the beginning of the new academic year and students coming back to campus, UMass INFORMS is also back to coordinating many exciting events. On September 22, we hosted Dr. Hari Balasubramanian, Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as our first guest speaker this academic year.

Professor Balasubramanian gave an insightful talk on the care interventions for patients with complexities in their medical condition and their social background, and the presentation was very impactful in terms of its relevance to the problem of availability and affordability of medical care for all. According to Dr. Balasubramanian, this research has directly resulted from the time he has spent collaborating with New Jersey’s Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers.

The attendance for Dr. Balasubramanian’s talk was quite significant, and even a student reporter from one of the local newspapers attended the event, with follow-up questions from Dr. Balasubramanian, Professor Nagurney, and the officers after the session to write a full coverage.

After the session, along with Dr. Balasubramanian and our advisor, Professor Anna Nagurney, we headed to the Commonwealth Restaurant at UMass Amherst for a delicious lunch with many exciting desserts.

Again, we are very thankful to Dr. Balasubramanian for accepting our invitation and for their insightful seminar. We would also like to thank all those who joined us for this seminar and those who supported us in organizing it.

UMass INFORMS will continue organizing many more exciting events this academic year, and we will continue covering all our activities in our blog.