Aleda Roth is the Burlington Industries Distinguished Professor in Supply Chain Management in Clemson University’s College of Business and Behavioral Science. Prior to Clemson, Aleda held the W.P. Carey Endowed Chair in Supply Chain Management at Arizona State University and the Mary Farley Ames Lee Distinguished Professor (endowed chair) at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and was an Associate Professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at Boston University. She received her doctorate in production and operations management from The Ohio State University and also her Bachelor of Science in psychology. She also holds a Master of Science in Public Health (MSPH) in biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before her doctorate, Aleda worked for more than 10 years in health care, where she held senior research and top management positions as a Chief Statistician, Epidemiologist/Senior Research Associate and Principal Investigator, and for seven years, as Director of the American Nurses Association Statistics Department. At ANA, she directed national survey research and sampling studies; her reports informed national and state government policies; and she served on Congressionally appointed committees for the US Department of Health and Human Services. Over her career, she has received over $2.75 million in external research funding.
Aleda is an internationally recognized empirical scholar and thought leader in manufacturing and service operations strategy. Her research is motivated by theoretical and practical explanations of how businesses can best deploy their operations, global supply chains, and technology strategies for an effective triple bottom line: competitive advantage, sustainability and public well-being. Aleda is currently addressing business performance and policy impacts of emerging paradigms. She is currently devising new business models to integrate effectively wellness into hospitality and health care services, mitigate quality risks in global food supply chains, as well as strategies and policies for improving U.S. health care systems and global humanitarian recovery services. At Clemson, she initiated the Global Food Supply Chain Quality Risk Project; and continues as key partner on Global Country Manufacturing Competitiveness Index Project with the Council on Competitiveness and Deloitte Consulting. Aleda has published extensively. With over 200 publications, her work ranks in the top 1% of POM scholars in the U.S.; in the top 2%, published in the Journal of Operations Management; and 7th worldwide in service management research. Attesting to the high impact of her work, she received over 85 research and teaching awards since her doctorate in 1986. Most recently, she was honored at INFORMS with the 2014 Award for the Advancement of Women in Operation Research and Management Sciences; and in 2013 she was installed as a Texas A&M Institute for Advanced Study (TIAS) Eminent Scholar. In 2012, her co-authored paper, “Unraveling the Food Supply Chain: Strategic Insights from China and the 2007 Recalls” in Journal of Supply Chain Management (JSCM) was recognized as one of the top 50 management, business and economic published articles in 2008 globally (out of 1500 articles that year); and her 1994 paper, “A Taxonomy of Manufacturing Strategies,” was listed in the top 10 percent of all Management Science papers published over 50 years according to citations in 2004. Aleda is uniquely distinguished by being named a lifetime Fellow in all three of her professional associations (Production and Operations Management Society (POMS), Manufacturing and Service Operations (M&SOM) and Decision Sciences; and she received an UK Advanced Institute of Management Research Fellowship Awards from British Economic and Social Research Council in conjunction with London Business School. She was honored with two Lifetime Achievement Awards—(POMS College of Service Management and Academy of Management OM Division).
Aleda is a Department Editor of POM, an Associate Editor for JSCM and Decision Sciences and serves on the advisory boards of JOM and Service Science. She has also held editorial leadership positions as a Department Editor for Management Science and Co-editor-in-Chief for M&SOM. She is a member of the Supply Chain Thought Leaders Roundtable; and was the first woman selected to be the President of the Production and Operations Management Society. She currently serves as subject matter expert for the National Science Foundation, the Executive Advisory Committee of the U.S. Manufacturing Competitiveness Initiative of the Council of Competitiveness in Washington DC, and since 1991, as an industry-sponsored member of the Conference Board’s Business Performance Excellence Council. She has consulted with corporate senior executives at Nestlé Corporate, Glaxo-Welcome R&D Services, GE Corporate Office of Technology, Baxter Healthcare, Nortel, Equifax, IBM, Bank Administration Institute, Skandia, Allied Signal, Smith & Nephew UK, Texas Instruments, Hoechst-Celanese, J&J, Deloitte, Accenture, E&Y, Price Waterhouse Coopers, National Center for Manufacturing Sciences, and others. Consistent with her management background and many consulting experiences, Aleda is passionate about bringing highly relevant and rigorous research to the field and developing pedagogical innovations—both in the MBA and doctoral classes. She has had the privilege of serving on 35 doctoral committees. Of these, she chaired the dissertation of 25—and attesting to the impact of their work, each of her graduating Ph.D. students received at least one dissertation-related and/or best paper award. She has taught numerous courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels at her home universities and was a visiting professor in China, Singapore, Taiwan, Germany, Portugal, and Venezuela.