Researcher

Rob Handfield is the Bank of America University Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management at North Carolina State University, and Executive Director of the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative. Handfield is Editor-in-Chief of the online Logistics journal, Consulting Editor of the Journal of Operations Management, one of the leading supply chain management journals in the field, and the author of several books on supply chain management, including “FLOW: How the Best Supply Chains Thrive” (2022), “Supply Chain Immunity” (2023), “The LIVING Supply Chain: The Evolving Imperative of Operating in Real Time” (2017), and “Introduction to Supply Chain Management” (1999, 25,000 copies sold, and translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean).

His current research involves work on understanding how to restructure the public health response system, based on his pro bono work with the Joint Acquisition Task Force during the COVID pandemic in March – October, 2020. He has been supported by multiple grants exceeding $10M, including the United States Department of Agriculture to study market forecasts for bio-based products ($200,000), a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to create an Ethical Apparel Index ($1.2M over three years), a $500K grant to study the use of serious gaming in supply chain resilience wargames, and has received multiple NSF grants for studies in supply chain management.