“In my research on Sustainable Supply Chains, I treat sustainability explicitly within the supply chain design and operations, without neglecting the economic aspects. This approach is very important, because the economic aspect of sustainability is essential to choices made by companies about the structure of their operations as well as policy decisions of governments.”

Tarkan Tan is an associate professor in the School of Industrial Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology TU/e. His research interests include inventory theory, capacity management, spare parts management, and supply chain management with a particular focus on sustainability.

Sustainability is an ever developing field: The process of making a supply chain truly sustainable can never have a well-defined endpoint. Instead, a more sustainable supply chain is one that is better at identifying current and future environmental and social impacts, and finding ways to mitigate those. Tarkan is currently working on problems such as where to exert sustainability efforts within the whole supply chain, behavioral aspects in sustainable demand planning, food waste minimization, and technology choices for transportation. He plans to continue working on the field of sustainable supply chains and strengthen this area within the TU/e. 

Tarkan Tan received his Ph.D. from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey (2002). He spent one year at Columbia University, New York, as a Fulbright scholar. He joined TU/e as a post-doc researcher in 2003 and started working as an assistant professor the same year in the Operations, Planning, Accounting, and Control group. He is the director of the Operations Management and Logistics MSc program since April 2014. He has spent academic terms at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of Sydney Business School as a visiting scholar. He serves at the boards of BETA Research School and the European Supply Chain Forum.

Tarkan serves as an associate editor for Mathematical Methods of Operations Research and has served as a guest editor for the International Journal of Production Economics. He has published articles in academic journals such as Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, IIE Transactions, and Transportation Science, and recently co-edited a book entitled “Sustainable Supply Chains: A Research-based Textbook on Operations and Strategy”.

• Executive Master of Operations and Supply Chain Management program of TIAS School for Business and Society, Tilburg.

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