Nagurney Co-organizes International Conference on Dynamics of Disasters

Anna Nagurney, the Eugene M. Isenberg Chair in Integrative Studies at the Isenberg School of Management and the director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, recently co-organized the Fifth International Conference on Dynamics of Disasters, which took place in a virtual format via Zoom.

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Co-organizers of the conference were professors Ilias Kotsireas, Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada; Panos M. Pardalos, University of Florida; and Chrys Vogiatzis, University of Illinois, with support provided by professor Fuad Aleskerov of the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Russia and Sofia Papadaki of Greece.

The conference had four plenary speakers, two from academia, professors Maria Besiou and Oleg Prokopyev, one from the financial industry, who is a UMass Amherst Ph.D. alum, Stavros Siokos, and a government official in civil protection, George Karagiannis. The conference attracted speakers and participants from many countries, including the U.K., Austria, Germany, Italy, Greece, Russia, India, Nepal and the U.S., to exchange the most recent research results and best practices.

Several of the papers had a COVID-19 theme, including papers on human migration, food supply chains, convalescent plasma donations and networks in the spread of the coronavirus. A variety of methodologies were discussed to tackle issues associated with disasters from optimization and game theory to AI and Machine Learning.

Isenberg School alums Deniz Besik, of the University of Richmond, and Pritha Dutta, of Pace University, spoke at the conference, as well as Isenberg School Ph.D. student Mojtaba Salarpour.

More information about the conference and the full list of talks and presenters can be found at http://caopt.com/DOD2021/.

Professor Nagurney will now be co-editing a special issue of the journal Operations Research Forum based on the conference.