Professor at UMass Amherst Receives Two-year NSF Grant to Study Knowledge Supernetworks

May 14, 2003

AMHERST, Mass. - Anna Nagurney, the John F. Smith Memorial Professor at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has received a two-year, $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study knowledge supernetworks and to develop models that examine the management of dynamic business processes under risk and uncertainty. Nagurney specializes in the study of large-scale financial, transportation, telecommunications, power, and other networks, and how they interconnect and function.

Nagurney has also been invited to conduct research at the Bellagio Center in northern Italy, which is operated by the Rockefeller Foundation, in March 2004, along with Monica Cojocaru of Queen's University of Canada, and Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania of Sicily. The team will work on a project that examines how large networks function in an environment of risk and uncertainty as applied to global supply chains and international financial networks. The Bellagio Center was established in 1959 to enable scholars, scientists, artists, writers, and practitioners from all over the world to pursue their scholarly and creative work.


Nagurney says the NSF project is an outgrowth of a presentation she made at a foundation workshop in Washington, D.C., last September 11. The audience included NSF staff members, workshop speakers, and representatives from the National Security Agency.

The project will develop a new framework - that of knowledge supernetworks - for the understanding and management of complex business processes under risk and uncertainty within a knowledge organization. In addition to the theoretical framework, computational algorithms will be designed and implemented to track the evolution of the interactions among multi-criteria decision-makers on multilevel networks and the effects of their decisions on the production, shipment, and financial flows through multilevel networks. Software will also be designed to serve as a management tool.

Nagurney will be working with her former student June Dong, now a professor at the College of Business at SUNY Oswego. Dong received her doctorate in 1994 from the Isenberg School of Management. Dong is the co-author with Nagurney of the book, "Supernetworks: Decision-Making for the Information Age," (Edward Elgar Publishers 2002), and the recent recipient of the President's Award for her scholarly and creative activity from SUNY Oswego.

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