Shining a light on the COVID-19 vaccine distribution

Published: January 15, 2021

After a year dominated by the many challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2021 dawned with an optimistic look ahead, as we witnessed the start of the rollout of a coronavirus vaccine.

But as we are still in the earliest stages of this effort, there are still challenges ahead and a great deal of uncertainty.

Joining me to shine some light on this is Anna Nagurney, the John F. Smith Memorial Professor in the Department of Operations and Information Management in the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also the Founding Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks and the Supernetworks Laboratory for Computation and Visualization at UMass Amherst.

I think the fact that we have such a case load crisis now in the United States is clearly affecting the healthcare workers. They have only so much capacity, they’re so busy tending to patients. We have parts of the country, where essentially the hospitals have no available ICU beds, that’s absolutely horrific. So we really need to escalate the vaccination campaigns to protect the populations, to also protect the healthcare workers as much as possible.

Interviewed this episode:

Anna Nagurney

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Anna Nagurney is the Eugene M. Isenberg Chair in Integrative Studies and was appointed to this endowed chaired professorship in the Department of Operations and Information Management in the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on April 14, 2021. Prior to that, she was the John F. Smith Memorial Professor of Operations Management, since 1998. She is also the Founding Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks and the Supernetworks Laboratory for Computation and Visualization at UMass Amherst. She is an Affiliated Faculty Member of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at UMass Amherst. She received her AB, ScB, ScM, and PhD degrees from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She devotes her career to education and research that combines operations research / management science, engineering, and economics. Her focus is the applied and theoretical aspects of network systems, particularly in the areas of transportation and logistics, critical infrastructure, and in economics and finance.