Christopher W. Craighead is the FedEx Chair of Supply Chain Management in the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Craighead’s primary research interest is strategic supply chain management with a focus on supply chain disruptions, buyer-supplier exchanges and the supply chain-entrepreneurship interface. His research has been published in Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Decision Sciences, Journal of Business Logistics, Journal of Supply Chain Management, Transportation Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management and other journals. He has received several research fellowships, competitive research grants and research awards.

Craighead has extensive teaching experience, delivering several different types of course content to a variety of audiences. He teaches strategic sourcing in the department’s undergraduate program and theoretical and research foundations in its doctoral program, and he has received awards for teaching excellence at four universities. He has served as dissertation chair for seven students in three universities.

Craighead serves as the logistics department editor at Decision Sciences, an associate editor of Journal of Supply Chain Management and a senior editor at Journal of Business Logistics. He has received multiple awards for reviewing and editing excellence, including Best Associate Editor Awards from Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Supply Chain Management and Decision Sciences.

 Effectively bridging academia and industry, Craighead’s research has fueled over 350 executive education programs, which have, in turn, enriched his teaching. At Penn State, he worked as the director of research of the Center for Supply Chain Research, where he served as the principal liaison between faculty and industry partners. By connecting academia and industry, Craighead’s career has culminated in both theoretical and pragmatic impacts. He has been a strong advocate for such a career strategy, co-authoring papers geared toward helping others in the field realize this dual impact.