DePaul Management Professor Named Fulbright Scholar

Nezih Altay, a professor of management who teaches operations management at the Driehaus College of Business, has been named a Fulbright Scholar at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland. Beginning in April 2021, Altay will spend six months as the visiting Fulbright-Hanken Distinguished Chair in Business and Economics researching the logistics of aid delivery in conflict zones.

In his appointment, Altay will deliver lectures on emerging issues in supply chain management and social responsibility and will lead the doctoral seminar, Societal Logistics. Altay will develop his research with the HumLog Institute, an initiative dedicated to humanitarian logistic research.

“Receiving this Fulbright award will allow me to immerse myself completely in humanitarian logistics research,” Altay says. “The HumLog Institute in Finland is the only center in Europe fully dedicated to this topic.”

Altay is lauded for being one of the first U.S. academics to recognize the importance of applying supply chain theory and research to disaster relief. In 2019, Altay received the Research and Academic Contributions Award from the American Logistics Aid Network, an association that provides supply chain assistance to disaster relief organizations. The award recognizes Altay’s 2006 research paper, “OR/MS Research in Disaster Operations Management”, which he co-authored with former director of emergency operations for Virginia Department of Health, Walter G. Green. The paper became one of the most cited in its field.

Altay also created the graduate course, Humanitarian Supply Chains. The course is offered as an elective to DePaul business students and is a core course in the Refugee and Forced Migration Studies master’s program in DePaul’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.