Dear TSL members,
I wish you a happy and healthy new year. I am looking forward to being your TSL President of 2022!
First, my huge thanks go to our former president Mike Hewitt and all the former and current board members and all individuals engaged in TSL. Thank you for keeping our society alive and interactive when physical interaction is often complicated. I promise to keep TSL as interactive, effective, and valuable as possible with all of you in the coming year.
There are good reasons to look forward to our society’s activities in the upcoming year. Mike Hewitt agreed to keep the monthly TSL webinars running, supported by our special interest groups. Wherever you are on the planet, interesting TSL related research is just one Zoom-click away. Then, we can look forward to many TSL awards, including the first edition of the Stella Dafermos Achievement Award in Transportation Science, which honors the contributions of mid-career individuals. My big thank you goes to Anna Nagurney, who will chair the first prize committee.
After the great success of the two TSL Workshops in 2021 – organized by Niels Agatz and his colleagues in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, as well as by Debjit Roy and his colleagues in Ahmedabad, India, in December – we can already submit our abstract for the Norway-based TSL Workshop in June 2022 on “Transportation and logistics prospects considering digitalization and autonomous technologies.” I hope that I can meet many of you in Norway this summer! Finally, in the background, we are preparing the sessions for the next INFORMS Annual meeting – thank you, Justin Goodson for being this year’s TSL Cluster Chair – and Sandra Eksioglu as the head of the conference organizing committee makes sure that plans for the TSL Conference in 2023 are pushed forward.
At this point, I cannot guarantee to you that all physical meetings will take place as planned. But I can ensure that we are working together with all of you to keep TSL a human society that focuses on the newest research in transportation and logistics – and that connects us all in a fruitful, diverse, enjoyable, and effective way. To keep updated, please follow us on Twitter or read our blog, maintained by our communications chair Catherine Cleophas and our news editor Layla Martin.
And if you have any idea how to disseminate research in these challenging times in a better way – I am always open to hearing your thoughts. Again, thank you for being part of TSL, as a member of the board, as a (vice) chair, international liaison, committee member, or a friend of TSL.
Best,
Jan Ehmke