UMass Amherst Student INFORMS Chapter Wins Award at National Meeting
Content
At the annual conference of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) in Atlanta this October, the UMass Amherst Student Chapter of INFORMS was honored with the Cum Laude Award at this year’s Student Chapter Award Ceremony. This coveted award celebrates student chapters that demonstrate consistent engagement, leadership, and commitment to the operations-research and management-science community. See related article by UMass INFORMS Student Chapter President Samira Samadi.
Chapter advisor Dr. Anna Nagurney, the Eugene M. Isenberg Chair in Integrative Studies, also received the INFORMS President’s Award, one of the highest distinctions in the field. Nagurney has served as the UMass INFORMS advisor since its founding in 2004. The award presented to Nagurney recognizes individuals whose work has made exceptional contributions to society through operations research and management science.
Beyond the award honoring the UMass INFORMS group, eight students from our chapter, including three from the Riccio College of Engineering (RCOE), made expert presentations about their research projects across a wide range of topics in operations research, healthcare analytics, sustainability, and logistics. In her writeup, Samadi called the showing “an exciting lineup of student presentations that showcased the strength and diversity of our research community.”
The campus chapter of INFORMS is composed of undergraduate and graduate students from various schools and departments, including the RCOE, the Isenberg School of Management, and the College of Information & Computer Sciences. The goal of the UMass Student Chapter of INFORMS is to encourage interest in the fields of operations research and management science as well as to provide a means of communication among many areas of knowledge that benefit from those fields.
The RCOE students who presented their research at the conference were Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Ph.D. students Yukti Kathuria, Faustina Sarfo, and Parisa Lotfibagha.
Kathuria, one of the current INFORMS Blog Officers, participated in the MIF Poster Competition, where she presented “An Order-Based Bayesian Network to Analyze Diagnostic Delay and Type 2 Diabetes-Related Outcomes.” She also presented her work in the session on “Healthcare Decision Analytics Using AI/ML.”
Sarfo, the INFORMS Social Media Officer, presented research at her first INFORMS Annual Meeting. She delivered a talk describing “An Equitable Energy Transition: Integrating Community Perspectives into Power System Modeling in an Emerging Economy” in the session about “Modeling the Energy Transition in Africa.”
Lotfibagha, an INFORMS Treasurer’s Assistant, also presented her research for the first time at an INFORMS Annual Meeting. She shared her research on “A Semi-Markov Decision Process Model to Optimize Return to Clinic Decisions in Primary Care” in the session involving “AI and Analytics in Healthcare Services.”
In addition to the presentations by engineering students, Operations Management Ph.D. students Samadi, Busra Karkili, Ismael M. Pour, Semih Boz, and Dana Hassani from the Isenberg School of Management represented the UMass INFORMS chapter with insightful talks summarizing their trailblazing research.
As Samadi summed up the effectiveness of all these presentations in her article on the UMass INFORMS website, “Each talk showcased the depth, rigor, and diversity of research within our community.”
As the national INFORMS website explained the organization’s purpose, “We are home to a diverse collection of academic and industry experts in the data and decision sciences, including operations research, analytics, management science, economics, behavioral science, statistics, artificial intelligence, data science, applied mathematics, and more.”