MSA Previous Spotlights

September 2005

MSA Staff Outing to the Musem of Science

On August 10, the MSA staff had an outing to the Butterfly Garden exhibit at the Museum of Science http://www.mos.org/doc/1475 .

The most impressive of the butterflies, of course, were the largest ones, the Moth Butterflies

which are tropical insects (seen here eating orange slices).

For the most part the exhibit contained North American varieties, including heliconians, fritillaries, and swallowtails.

Fritillary:

Heliconian:

Here is another pretty heliconian that I didnít catch a photo of:

http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/distr/lepid/bflyusa/usa/65.htm

Not sure about this one:

(male) (female)

The exhibit also hosts a lush array of flora, either habitat or food plants for the butterflies that live there.

We all had a good time, and it was quite a nice break from the office.

More links:

http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/distr/lepid/bflyusa/usa/59.htm

http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/distr/lepid/bflyusa/bflyusa.htm

http://butterflywebsite.com/gallery/index.cfm

I took these pictures using a Nokia 6610i camera, and using PC suite to download the images to computer.

-Shiba Nemat-Nasser

August 2005

Congratulations on Your Promotion

Georgia Perakis and Andreas Schulz were recently promoted to Associate Professor, with tenure. Professors Perakis and Schulz are both with the Operations Research group at the Sloan School of Management at MIT.

Professor Georgia Perakis	Professor Andreas Schulz

Professor Perakis' research interests include applications of optimization and equilibrium in transportation, dynamic pricing, the study of auctions and competitive supply chain management. She has received the CAREER / PECASE award, the Graduate Student Council Teaching Award for excellence in teaching, the Sloan Career and subsequently the J. Spencer Standish Development Chair. Professor Perakis has been an Associate Editor for the journal Management Science and for the journal of Naval Logistics Research, an Area Editor in the area of Supply Chain Management and Services for the journal Networks and Spatial Economics and the editor in Chief for the Journal of Pricing and Revenue Management. Professor Perakis was a member of the Informs Council, and the chair of the Pricing and Revenue Management Section of the Informs society. At Sloan she teaches courses in Nonlinear Optimization, Data Models and Decisions, Decision Technologies for Managers, and Special Seminars in Operations Research. She has also taught courses for SMA.

Andreas S. Schulz is Associate Professor of Operations Research at MIT, where he teaches MBA and distance education courses at the Sloan School of Management and Ph.D. courses at the Operations Research Center. His research focuses on mathematical optimization; he is author or co-author of over 50 scientific publications, with results on various aspects of combinatorial optimization and integer programming as well as its applications. He has been on the editorial boards of several journals, including Algorithmic Operations Research, Discrete Optimization, INFORMS Journal on Computing, Journal of Scheduling, Naval Research Logistics, and Operations Research. In 2000, he was elected founding member of the Young Academy of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina. Other awards include an excellence-in-teaching award from Sloan's MBA program (2003), the Class of 1958 career development chair (2002), which recognizes and encourages innovative and imaginative teaching by gifted junior faculty members, the dissertation prize of the German Society for Mathematics, Economics, and Operations Research, and the Carl-von-Ramsauer prize, sponsored by DaimlerChrysler (both in 1996). He holds a doctoral degree in Mathematics from the Berlin University of Technology (Germany) and was Assistant Professor of Discrete Mathematics at its Department of Mathematics.

Sharon Novak is a Visiting Professor in the Operations Management group. Professor Novak's research focuses on analysis and management of supply chains. In particular, she focuses on the interaction of product development and the make/buy decision in affecting the coordination costs faced by the firm. Using insights she gained in her study of product development and sourcing in the global automobile industry, she is now exploring the relationship between design of supply chains and design of products in a variety of applications including luxury retail supply chains. Professor Novak received the Kellogg Chair's Core Teaching Award for 2003-4 and 2001-2.

Boris Maciejovsky holds Master's degrees in Psychology and International Business Administration, as well as a doctoral degree in Economic Psychology, all from the University of Vienna. His research interests focus primarily on behavioral and financial decision making and on experimental economics

As recently noted in the February 2004 isue of OR/MS Today, the MIT Operations Research Center is "the largest and arguably the best and most influential university graduate operations research program in the country."

This year, the MIT OR Center will celebrate its 50th anniversary. The OR Center was established at MIT in 1953 by Philip M. Morse, a well-known physicist. After 50 years of operation, the ORC's academic program still continues to be recognized as ranking among the very best nationally and internationally. The program, moreover, is repeatedly cited as achieving an excellent balance between applications and methodology.

The OR Center will be holding its 50th Anniversary celebration on April 24 and 25, 2004. On April 24, they will hold a one-day symposium in which OR Center graduates will discuss their views of OR over the past 50 years. On Sunday, April 25th, they will hold joint activities with the INFORMS Practice Meeting, which will be held in Boston, starting on April 25th. Thomas L. Magnanti, Dean of the MIT School of Engineering, will present a keynote address.

Welcome Back Gabriel Bitran

Professor Gabriel R. Bitran is the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Professor of Management Science at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. He has served as Deputy Dean of Sloan, Head of the Management Science area, and Faculty Head of the Senior Executive Program. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of Management Science and is currently a member of the editorial boards of several journals. He is also president-elect of the Production & Operations Management Society (POMS).

He holds a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. and a M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from the Escola Politécnica of the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Professor Bitran’s research interests lie in the field of operations management in manufacturing and the service industry. Recently he has been working on pricing for high-tech services, fashion retail goods and services, and design of bandwidth markets, as well as related revenue management problems. His present research activities focus on acquisition and retention of customers in the service industry and in the internet environment, understanding the customer and designing customer relationship management systems, delivering excellence in services, creation of value pricing systems, and supply chain management.

Professor Bitran has consulted with companies in the banking, financial services, computer, telecommunications, semiconductor, electronics, medical instrumentation, hospitality, and automotive industries. He has also published numerous articles on a wide variety of topics in operations management.

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