08 November 2010 | | categories: informs, orms, school | blog archive
I’ve met several interesting people at INFORMS 2010. I’ve even met (and reconnected with) some that are connected to me.
For instance, yesterday I met Chung-Yee Lee. Dr. Lee was the PhD advisor of one of my MS advisors, Surya Liman. He told me that he is my grandfather; I’m not sure if that’s entirely correct as I don’t know if academic genealogy applies to master’s degree holders (and I didn’t finish my thesis - my MS is non-thesis - so maybe I’m his step-grandson or something). Regardless, it was nice to meet him and I’m looking forward to his keynote talk tomorrow.
Then at last night’s reception, I ran into John Kobza, my other MS advisor, and Tim Matis, who’s a professor at Texas Tech that wasn’t there when I was. Dr. Kobza joined us for dinner tonight. It was nice catching up with him and he gave me some good insights into questions I had regarding an OR career.
This morning, as we were leaving a session, my boss spotted Saravanan Venkatachalam. Saravanan worked in our group from 2005 to 2007 or so. He and I worked closely on some projects and we were co-authors on an INFORMS presentation in 2005, but I’d never met him in person. He’s now at Texas A&M, where he’s about to start the PhD program in Industrial Engineering.