Speaker: Anna Nagurney

John F. Smith Memorial Professor Director, Virtual Center for Supernetworks Department of Operations and Information Management Isenberg School of Management,University of Massachusetts - Amherst

“Supply Chain Networks Against Time: From Food to Pharma”

Abstract: Supply chains consist of networks of suppliers, manufacturers, transportation service providers, storage facilities and distributors, as well as retailers, and consumers. They serve as the critical infrastructure backbones for the provision of goods and services in our modern global economy. Supply chains have revolutionized the way in which products are sourced, produced, distributed, and consumed around the globe. They may involve thousands of stakeholders from suppliers and manufacturers to hundreds of thousands of demand points.Supply chains, however, are not just about complex manufactured products such as airplanes, automobiles, or computers. While many of the products of supply chains are durable goods that can be shipped and stored for a prolonged period prior to use, others are perishable – from the food that we ingest,  the medicines and vaccines that heal us and save lives, and, for the fashion-conscious – the clothes that we wear.

In this talk, I will overview our research that emphasizes multiple disciplines from engineering and operations research and management science to chemistry and physics, all with a unifying theme of supply chain networks,  and associated perspectives, to model product deterioration over time and perishability. I will first emphasize the importance of capturing the behavior of decision-makers and will describe certain paradoxes. I will then discuss our network models of food supply chains, medical nuclear supply chains, electric power supply chains,  and a case study in the pharmaceutical industry. I will also highlight our work on network performance measurement and node and link rankings and overview some recent research in the humanitarian logistics and disaster relief sphere. Some of the work has appeared in our recent book, “Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products.

Bio: Anna Nagurney is the John F. Smith Memorial Professor at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, which she founded in 2001. She holds ScB, AB, ScM and PhD degrees from Brown University in Providence, RI.  She is the author of 12 books, with her most recent book being, “Competing on Supply Chain Quality: A Network Economics Perspective,” with Dong  Li,  more than 175 refereed journal articles, and over 50 book chapters. She presently serves on the editorial boards of a dozen journals and two book series and is the editor of another book series. Professor Nagurney has been a Fulbrighter twice (in Austria and Italy), was a Visiting Professor at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden for the past 4 years. and was a Distinguished Guest Visiting Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. She will be a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College at Oxford University during the 2016 Trinity Term. Anna has held visiting appointments at MIT (at the Center for Transportation and the Sloan School of Management) and at Brown University and was a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2005-2006. She has been recognized for her research on networks with the Kempe prize from the University of Umea, the Faculty Award for Women from the US National Science Foundation, the University Medal from the University of Catania in Italy, and was elected a Fellow of the RSAI (Regional Science Association International) as well as INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) among other awards. She has also been recognized with several awards for her mentorship of students and her female leadership with the WORMS Award, for example. Her research has garnered support from the AT&T Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation through its Bellagio Center programs, the Institute for International Education, and the National Science Foundation. She has given plenary/keynote talks and tutorials on 5 continents. She is an active member of professional societies, including INFORMS, POMS, and RSAI. She has chaired 18 doctoral dissertations and has helped to place her students at major universities internationally. Many of her former students (undergraduate and graduate)  have prominent positions in industry.

Anna’s research focuses on network systems from transportation and logistical ones, including supply chains, to financial, economic, social networks and their integration, along with the Internet. She studies and models complex behaviors on networks with a goal towards providing frameworks and tools for understanding their structure, performance, and resilience and has contributed also to the understanding of the Braess paradox in transportation networks and the Internet. She has also been researching sustainability and quality issues with applications ranging from pharmaceutical and blood supply chains to perishable food products and fast fashion to  humanitarian logistics. She has advanced methodological tools used in game theory, network theory,  equilibrium analysis, and dynamical systems. She was a Co-PI on a multi-university NSF grant with UMass Amherst as the lead: Network Innovation Through Choice, which was part of the Future Internet Architecture (FIA) program and is presently a Co-PI on an NSF EAGER grant.

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