Brief Biography
Other Biographies
Biography
Anna Nagurney is the Eugene M. Isenberg Chair in Integrative Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Isenberg School of Management, known for her contributions to networks for supply chains and transportation. Nagurney was born to two Ukrainian refugees in Windsor, Ontario and moved from Canada to New Jersey before settling in Yonkers, New York as a child. She grew up speaking Ukrainian and didn’t speak English until kindergarten. Nagurney was a bright student in grade school (her 7th grade teacher, Mrs. Fuller, predicted that she would one day be a Calculus professor) and had a deep love for music, ballet, and painting. In her youth, she performed piano in New York City and to this day recognizes music and mathematics as languages of a similar vein through which beautiful solutions are found.
As an undergraduate at Brown University, Nagurney studied applied mathematics and Russian language and literature, receiving degrees in both subjects in 1977. Nagurney was drawn to Brown because of its program that supported multiple, concurrent degree paths for students. She credits her Russian studies for giving her an early advantage as her knowledge of the language enabled her to read relevant applied mathematics publications written in Russian. At Brown, she was drawn to the interdisciplinary aspect of operations research, a theme which would define her career.
After receiving her undergraduate degrees, she worked for high tech consulting companies that supported the Naval Underwater System Center in Newport, RI, taking on such projects as programming in assembly language for US submarines to determine the optimal route for avoiding enemy detection. In 1979, Nagurney was the only female at the first professional conference she attended at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, presenting to admirals. A common theme of Nagurney’s industrial career was her being chided by supervisors for being too efficient. This inspired her to pursue a profession where she could work on the projects she wanted to and at the speed she excelled at. Though her employers paid for her to earn a Masters degree at Brown, she decided to become a full-time student to pursue a PhD.
Stella Dafermos, Nagurney’s doctoral advisor, was the only woman on the faculty of applied mathematics and engineering at Brown and the second female operations research PhD in the United States. In Dafermos, Nagurney found a friend and mentor who demonstrated the qualities of being a woman and mother in a male-dominated field. Nagurney can trace her PhD advisor genealogy through Dafermos to James Clerk Maxwell, Isaac Newton, and Galileo Galilei, an important legacy she has taken pride in passing down to her own students. She earned her doctorate in 1983 with a dissertation that investigated variational inequalities.
Nagurney turned down offers from multiple organizations and universities to accept an academic position near her family, joining the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). There she thrived with research into supernetworks (e.g., networks of networks) and studying the inter-relationships between them. In 2001, she founded and has since been the director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks. Her work in networks has expanded beyond operations research as other disciplines, such as physics and healthcare, have recognized the value of her contributions. Nagurney has remained at UMass since her arrival but has held multiple visiting positions around the globe including in Sweden, the UK, and Austria and is Co-Chair of the Kyiv School of Economics Board of Directors. She was a 2005-2006 Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and spent two years at MIT as a Visiting Associate Professor in the Transportation Systems Division and the OR Center and then as a Visiting Scholar (Sloan School).
Among her many research interests, Nagurney has authored or co-authored almost twenty books, over 230 refereed journal articles, and over fifty book chapters on transportation networks and congestion, supply chain networks, financial networks, electric power generation networks, supernetworks, network economics, sustainability, cybersecurity, and emergency preparedness. She has contributed to and been interviewed by leading popular media providers including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the BBC.
Nagurney is a dedicated educator and has been an active supporter of students’ participation in the growing OR community. She is the faculty advisor for the UMass Student Chapter of INFORMS (since 2004), a role for which she received a Moving Spirit Award in 2005. Nagurney was elected a fellow of INFORMS eight years later for “her distinguished leadership as an operations research educator and ambassador, through her extensive contributions to the concepts and properties of transportation and supply chain networks.” She received the INFORMS Volunteer Service Award three years later and was appointed to the International Advisory Board of the Journal of the Operational Research Society in 2024.
For her role as a pioneering woman in the space of operations research, Nagurney was awarded the WORMS Award for the Advancement of Women in OR/MS in 2007 and was one of 44 inspiring women lauded in the book STEM Gems. She remains an active author and academic, recently publishing a book on labor and supply chain networks and teaching courses on humanitarian logistics and healthcare and also on networks, game theory, and variational inequalities.
Other Biographies
University of Massachusetts Amherst. People – Anna Nagurney. Accessed October 19, 2024. (link)
Education
Brown University, AB 1977
Brown University, ScB 1977
Brown University, ScM 1980
Brown University, PhD 1983
Affiliations
Academic Affiliations
Brown University
Kyiv School of Economics
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Key Interests in OR/MS
Methodologies
Networks and Graphs
Optimization, Game Theory, and Variational Inequalities
OR/MS Education
Applications Areas
Supply Chain Management/Logistics
Transportation and Network Systems
Perishable Product Supply Chains from Food to Blood and Pharma
Security Including Cybersecurity
Sustainability
Disaster Management
Oral Histories
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa29HSlAR0o
Awards and Honors
INFORMS Moving Spirit Award for Chapters 2005
Regional Science Association International Fellow 2007
WORMS Award for the Advancements of Women in OR/MS 2007
Jane F. Garvey Transportation Leadership Award 2011
Walter Isard Award 2012
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Fellow 2013
INFORMS Volunteer Service Award 2016
OMEGA RHO Distinguished Lecturer 2018
Network Science Society Fellow 2019
Canadian Operational Research Society Harold Larnder Prize 2020
Blackett Lecturer 2024
Professional Service
INFORMS Speaker Program, Chair, 2011-2012
Journal of the Operational Research Society, International Advisory Board, 2024 – Present
Selected Publications
Dupis P. & A. Nagurney (1993) Dynamical systems and variational inequalities. Annals of Operations Research, 44: 7-42.
Nagurney A. & D. Zhang (1996) Projected Dynamical Systems and Variational Inequalities with Applications. New York: Springer Science+Business Media.
Nagurney A. (1999) Network Economics: A Variational Inequality Approach, second and revised edition. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Nagurney A. (2000) Congested urban transportation networks and emissions paradoxes. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 5(2): 145-151.
Nagurney A., Dong J., & Zhang, D. (2002) A supply chain network equilibrium model. Transportation and Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 38: 281-303.
Nagurney A., Cruz J., Dong J., & Zhang D. (2005) Supply chain networks, electronic commerce, and supply side and demand side risk. European Journal of Operational Research, 164(1): 120-142.
Nagurney A. & D. Boyce (2005) Preface to “On a paradox of traffic planning.” Transportation Science, 39: 443-445.
Braess D., Nagurney A., & T. Wakolbinger (2005) On a paradox of traffic planning, translation of the (1968) original D. Braess paper from German to English. Transportation Science, 39: 446-450.
Nagurney A. (2006) On the relationship between supply chain and transportation network equilibria: A supernetwork equivalence with computations. Transportation and Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 42(4): 293-316.
Nagurney A. (2006) Supply Chain Network Economics: Dynamics of Prices, Flows and Profits. Cheltenham, United Kingdom: Edward Elgar.
Nagurney A. & Q. Qiang (2009) Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Nagurney A. & L. S. Nagurney (2010) Sustainable supply chain network design: A multicriteria perspective. International Journal of Sustainable Engineering, 3(3): 189-197.
Nagurney A. & Q. Qiang (2013) Fragile networks: identifying vulnerabilities and synergies in an uncertain age. International Transactions in Operational Research, 19(1-2): 123-160.
Nagurney A., Yu M., Masoumi A. H., & Nagurney L. S. (2013) Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products. New York, NY: Springer Science+Business Media.
Nagurney A. (2015) A multiproduct network economic model of cybercrime in financial services. Service Science, 7(1): 70-81.
Nagurney A. & S. Shukla (2017) Multifirm models of cybersecurity investments competition vs. cooperation and network vulnerability. European Journal of Operational Research, 260(2): 588- 600.
Nagurney A. Besik D., & Yu M. (2019) Tariffs and quotas in world trade: A unified variational inequality framework. European Journal of Operational Research, 275(1): 347-360.
Nagurney A. (2021) Supply chain game theory network modeling under labor constraints: Applications to the Covid-9 pandemic. European Journal of Operational Research, 293(3): 880-891.
Nagurney A., Hassani D., Nivievskyi O., & Martyshev P. (2024) Multicommodity international agricultural trade network equilibrium: Competition for limited production and transportation capacity under disaster scenarios with implications for food security. European Journal of Operational Research, 314(1): 1127-1142.
Hassani D., Nagurney A., Nivievskyi O., & Martyshev P. (2024) A multiperiod, multicommodity, capacitated international agricultural trade network equilibrium model with applications to Ukraine in wartime. Transportation Science, Articles in Advance https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/trsc.2023.0294
Additional Resources
RENeW: Research, Education, Networks, and the World: A Female Professor Speakers. Anna Nagurney Blogspot. Accessed October 17, 2024. (link)
Note: All the referenced links are hyperlinked to the word “link” and/or the blue, highlighted words under “Awards and Honors” (excluding the YouTube Oral History). In the event the hyperlinks are lost in the copy/paste migration process, here they are in the order they appear:
https://people.umass.edu/nagurney/
https://www.informs.org/Recognizing-Excellence/Award-Recipients/Anna-Nagurney
https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/photos/rsai-2007/rsai-2007.htm
https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/media/2007Winner_Award%20for%20the%20Advancement%20of%20Women%20in%20OR.pdf
https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/media/isomweb030911.pdf
https://www.narsc.org/newsite/awards-prizes/narsc-awards-prizes/
https://www.informs.org/Recognizing-Excellence/Fellows/INFORMS-Fellows-Class-of-2013
https://www.informs.org/Recognizing-Excellence/INFORMS-Prizes/Volunteer-Service-Award
https://www.umass.edu/news/article/nagurney-elected-2019-network-science
https://cors.ca/?q=content/harold-larnder-prize-0#3
https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/