Kicking off the new year with our 2023 INFORMS President!

Ashley Kilgore:

Welcome to a brand new year of Resoundingly Human podcasts. Whether this is your first episode or you are a longtime listener, thank you for joining us and I hope you’ll subscribe for even more great content, highlighting the incredible contributions of INFORMS members.

To kick off our first episode of the new year, joining me is the 2023 INFORMS President Laura Albert, professor and department chair of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

Laura, thank you so much for joining me.

Laura Albert:

It’s a pleasure to be here.

Ashley Kilgore:

I’d love to start off by hearing how your relationship with INFORMS began.

Laura Albert:

It began a long time ago, actually. I’ve been a member for more than half my life, and it all began in my first year as a PhD student. My advisor at the time, Sheldon Jacobson, sat me down and told me that I should sign up for professional memberships and INFORMS was going to be really valuable to me. The student membership at the time was about $30 and it seemed like a lot of money for a graduate student.

But he really told me about how much professional organizations, and particularly INFORMS, would give to me over my career and he was right. Here I am. I’ve been a continuous member ever since and INFORMS has been my professional home.

Ashley Kilgore:

Now you’re our incoming INFORMS President. Thank you, Sheldon. I’d love to revisit some of the initiatives and goals you outlined in your candidate statement which appeared in RMS Today magazine and online. You mentioned that as we continue to come out the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic, that there are both challenges and opportunities. Could you share a little more insight on this?

Laura Albert:

Absolutely. Challenges that I envisioned, and first of all I agreed to run at the depths of a pandemic. We had been virtual for so long. It was hard to really imagine what 2023 would look like when I agreed to run.

I did have a vision forward, of course it was a flexible vision, but as time has passed, I realized that what I had envisioned was becoming more concrete, and the challenges were that there were so many disruptions to our lives. Like at the time, most of us were teaching virtually. There was this huge infrastructure to support what we do in new ways, but it was also challenging and time-consuming.

There was also disruptions to meetings, our meetings were virtual. There was also a lack of childcare for example. I saw a lot of challenges for our community that we would want to overcome.

The opportunities was all about how much the world needs OR. It was so obvious then, I think it’s even more obvious now. We have a connected world that has made it through a lot of disruptions, and operations research really is the solution. The problems that have emerged involve supply chains, logistics due to labor shortages, and of course decision-making under uncertainty. We have the tools to make a more resilient future.

What’s also been interesting is that every industry and government operation, including the ones I do research in, they’ve been finding and looking for new solutions. They’re willing to do things maybe that they hadn’t been willing to do before, and that’s a real opportunity for us to study how to make good design, solve good design problems that also have an impact on the bottom line in operations. I think there’s still a lot of work for us to do.

Ashley Kilgore:

Another topic you highlighted was the important relationship between membership and meetings. I’d love to have you elaborate on that a little.

Laura Albert:

I was a little surprised that 2022 was going to be a return to in-person meetings. It took a while, and when I was running, it was clear that there was going to be some disruption in that space. I attended both the in-person analytics meeting and annual meeting this past year. They were wonderful. It was so nice to exchange ideas and build my networks, collaborate, work with new people.

It’s clear that our meetings when they’re in person are catalysts for innovation. We had all those problems emerge, but what we also need is that innovation to emerge, that we often get through meetings.

Having said that, I think there’s also a need to innovate what we do in meetings because we’ve seen everywhere that post-pandemic, and I realize the pandemic still kind of here, that we’re not really going back. It’s really like a more of a bold step forward.

I really give the 2022 annual meeting organizing committee a lot of credit for their willingness to experiment with the format. There was a new Wednesday format this past year that involved advocacy events among other types of events. I think that experimentation will help us get the most we can out of our meetings in the future. I welcome experimentation, including maybe some virtual meetings that we can have in the future.

Ashley Kilgore:

Something that I’ve also discussed in interviews with previous presidents is INFORMS’ strong commitment to supporting and furthering DEI in the INFORMS membership. Are there additional steps or progress you’re hoping to make here?

Laura Albert:

I have to say there are already a lot of exciting efforts underway in the DEI space, thanks to the leadership of many INFORMS members and the board. A main goal that I have is to keep that momentum going by building on that progress this coming year.

I’m going to mention a few of those big wins. The DEI Ambassadors Program, the introduction of an unconscious bias video this past year, the first ever LGBTQ reception at the annual meeting, and the Military Veterans Interest Forum and its reception at the annual meeting.

I think these are great examples of how INFORMS has become more inclusive. Look for version 2.0 in 2023. I definitely don’t want to get in the way of all that great progress.

One effort that’s underway that I want to bring to a listener’s attention, and that is a DEI Ambassadors project that seeks to collect more demographic data about our members. We all know that better data helps drive better decisions. I’m hoping everyone can help update their information on the INFORMS.org website so that we can make more informed decisions in 2023.

Ashley Kilgore:

Thank you for that plug on that project. Another topic you touched on that I, for one, was very excited to see and for me, something I learned about and covered in a podcast early this year about shark attacks, is the idea of wicked problems, which are basically our world’s biggest challenges and the power of ORMS to help address these. Could you share some of the ideas you have to better position INFORMS and its members to contribute to addressing these wicked problems?

Laura Albert:

First of all, I really liked that shark attack episode. That was nicely done. I’d also like to take a step back and just mention how much I appreciate and admire our community for always being willing to tackle wicked problems. I think that’s great that that’s part of the OR DNA, and it goes way back to our beginnings during World War II. Of course, those were very mission-driven problems. The use of OR to help the war effort during World War II.

But they were also wicked in the sense that it was really complicated that they were doing this work for the first time. There’s a lot of competing information, the lack of data. Soon after that, if you look at early applications of OR, it involved a lot of willingness to tackle really messy social problems. I think that’s really cool.

Going back to your question, I really see meetings and advocacy helping us to continue to tackle those wicked problems today. We just talked about meetings, they really help us exchange ideas and information that help us take that next step, by maybe seeing connections that help us make some inroads on challenging problems, especially those that are multidisciplinary.

Advocacy is another great way where we can showcase our achievements and moving the needle on some of those wicked problems. It also helps us learn more about some real problems that policymakers face that generally have a wicked component to them.

Ashley Kilgore:

We’ve talked a lot about your goals and your role with INFORMS. I’d love to have you share a bit about the work and research you’re involved with outside of INFORMS.

Laura Albert:

Well, now that you’ve asked me about my research, I’m tempted to talk to you for hours about it because I enjoy it so much. But I’ll try to keep it brief, even though that’s hard. I’m doing some research in a few areas. I’m going to talk about three.

One is policing in the opioid epidemic, and in that research, I’m trying to study how to use scarce resources to help communities get healthier through diversion, collaboration with community programs and social services, and also crisis care response. Some of the tools I’m using include causal inference, policy evaluation, queuing theory.

What’s exciting to this is, it is a pretty wicked problem. I’m moving beyond just trying to optimize response times to thinking about much broader goals for a good police response to important community problems.

A second area that I’m working in is cybersecurity planning, and the idea here is that I want to help build our understanding of how to construct cost effective defenses over time. So looking at not just how to choose security mitigations but actually deploy them.

I’m also trying to study cyber-informed engineering, which is also like a planning problem where I’m looking at developing models to support cyber physical systems, especially in the power systems, like how do you bake in security upfront?

Third, I’m studying ambulance modeling and problems in public safety. This has been an exciting area recently. I’ve researched in this area for a long time. Recently, changes in Federal requirements allow for new patient treatment pathways, which expands the decision context currently considered by many ambulance departments. This introduces some extra complexity that they’re often not able to really address effectively.

We hypothesize that by looking at the fleet mix, and maybe non-transport vehicles, that this will be an opportunity to take a big step forward in managing these new patient treatment pathways.

Ashley Kilgore:

Now, what in particular about your work gets you excited to get out of bed in the morning and ready to tackle new challenges?

Laura Albert:

I thrive when I have many challenges and I have a lot to do. I laugh because my mom always says I needed a good challenge and now I have more than I can count. But between my academic research department duties and INFORMS presidents, I get out of bed every morning excited about seeing what I have to do next. For me, I’m having more fun than ever.

Ashley Kilgore:

Now, in addition to all that, you’re also the author of the blog, Punk Rock Operations Research, which is just such a cool name. I’d love to hear how you got started blogging and what sort of content you share.

Laura Albert:

I started my first tenure track position at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2006, which was totally the heyday of blogging. At the time, I was in a university without a lot of operations research majors and I wanted to encourage more students to major in operations research and maybe to do research with me.

I was already drawn to the idea of blogging and daily writing, and I was a huge fan of the science blogs out there, especially Mike Trick’s OR blog. I decided to start a blog and just see where it went.

I wanted a snappy name and something that people would remember, and I toyed with some names and came up with Punk Rock Operations Research, and I knew it was the right blog name as soon as I thought of it. I know there’s a lot of types of punk out there, but there’s a streak in punk that’s really interested in making our world a better place and is very critical of power systems and whatnot. There’s also a strong do-it-yourself ethic in punk, which really seems to jive with academic research. That’s my answer for the name.

Ashley Kilgore:

It’s perfect. Something a little different that I’ve done during my inaugural interview with the last few presidents of INFORMS that I’d love to do with you is a lightning round of fun fast questions to give our listeners the chance to get to know you even better. Are you game to do this?

Laura Albert:

I’m game.

Ashley Kilgore:

Excellent. Okay, here we go. Do you have any pets?

Laura Albert:

I have one cat named Lucky.

Ashley Kilgore:

What show are you binging now? Or maybe just finished binging?

Laura Albert:

I am binging Dead to Me right now.

Ashley Kilgore:

I’ll be sure to check that out. Do you have a favorite snack food?

Laura Albert:

Well, as a Wisconsin resident, I should probably answer cheese curds to that, but they are a favorite, but not one that I often indulge in. I will say probably peanuts, especially those blister roasted ones that you can get from Virginia. Those are probably my most common indulgence as a snack.

Ashley Kilgore:

We have the cheese curds here too, and they are, they’re pretty good, in moderation.

Laura Albert:

Exactly.

Ashley Kilgore:

I totally understood that the tendency towards those. If you could have a conversation with anyone in history, who would it be?

Laura Albert:

When I was applying to college in one of my admissions essays for an honors program, I said that I wanted to meet Isaac Newton and have a conversation with him. I thought of that immediately when you asked this question, and that might still be a good response. But I think today, my answer would be different. I would say my paternal grandfather. He was the only grandparent I didn’t get to know. He passed away when I was an infant.

Ashley Kilgore:

Can you share one fun fact about you that others might not know?

Laura Albert:

Yes. I am, on the side, so I’m like an INFORMS member and professor by day, but by night I’m a police commissioner in Middleton, Wisconsin. I’m actually the President of the Police Commission right now. It’s kind of fun because I’m not a police officer.

In Wisconsin, we have a civilian oversight of police departments, and as a civilian in my city, I get to oversee the police department as a police commissioner.

Ashley Kilgore:

That’s terrific. What of your accomplishments, big or small are you the most proud of?

Laura Albert:

Definitely raising my three kids. I still have a ways to go. My oldest went away to college just this past fall, and it was a time for me to reflect on all the things that are going right and I’m glad I took that time.

Ashley Kilgore:

Finally, what advice would you share with your younger self?

Laura Albert:

This is funny because I recently wrote a blog post on this. I had 10 pieces of advice, you’re asking for just one. Well, my 10 pieces of advice were actually advice that I gave to my oldest daughter when she went away to college, and they were slightly tailored to her but also to me. It was a little bit like traveling back in time.

I will read you one of those items from the list, and that piece of advice is that you’re not going to get everything right the first time. Things that are often hard before they’re easy and to be kind to yourself and to use setbacks as learning opportunities.

That really resonated with me because I’ve struggled with imposter syndrome most of my life, and based on how I was socialized, I often took setbacks as a sign that I really wasn’t going to make it or I wasn’t good enough. I wish my younger self saw that differently.

Ashley Kilgore:

Laura, thank you again so much for joining me and introducing yourself to our listeners, and giving us a look at what’s to come in the year ahead. As a final thought, can you share what you are most looking forward to as the 2023 INFORMS president?

Laura Albert:

I can’t pick just one thing, but I will mention two things briefly. One is helping brand our discipline through a tagline, and through strengthening our relevance to artificial intelligence. More to come on those topics in 2023.

Ashley Kilgore:

Want to learn more? Visit resoundinglyhuman.com for additional information on this week’s episode and guest. The podcast is also available for download or streaming from Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify. Wherever you listen, if you enjoy Resoundingly Human, please be sure to leave a review to help spread the word about the podcast. Until next time, I’m Ashley Kilgore, and this is Resoundingly Human.