Friday, November 2, 2012

Photos from Dr. Benneyan's Talk Today and Our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Magna Cum Laude Award Celebration

I would like to, first, thank INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences)  for its great Speakers Program (but, then again, I am a bit biased since I have been Chair of the Speakers Program for the past two years).

Today, we had the honor of hearing Dr. James Benneyan speak on Healthcare Systems Engineering and the talk focused on many of the problems with the healthcare system in the US and the associated costs and possible remedies, from the micro to the macro scale.

Dr. Benneyan is a speaker in the INFORMS Speaker Program.

He emphasized the importance of systems and systems engineering and in working on problems in the real world. He also spoke about what such well-known OR/MS methodologies as queuing, inventory theory, location theory, optimization and simulation as well as supply chain management can contribute to helping to solve the many problems.

Dr. Benneyan is a UMass Amherst PhD alum and is an award-winning researcher and faculty member at Northeastern University who runs major research programs in healthcare systems which combine research, applications, as well as education.

I took pages of notes.

Below are photos taken from the lunch through the discussion, which continued long after his presentation. The audience consisted of undergrad, MBA students, Master's students, PhD students from the Isenberg School of Management and from Engineering as well as faculty.

We also celebrated the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter receipt of the magna cum laude award at the recent INFORMS Phoenix conference. This is the 6th national award that our chapter has received in the past 6 years. As the chapter's Faculty Advisor, I could not be happier! The students and the chapter officers do an outstanding job of planning activities, including Dr. Benneyan's talk today.