Doug Thomas

Education: B.S., Cornell University; M.S., Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology

Doug Thomas is the Academic Director of the Sands Institute for Lifelong Learning and the Henry E. McWane Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School of Business. Prior to joining Darden, he was a professor of supply chain management in the Smeal College of Business at Penn State, where he was the faculty director of the MBA program from 2011 to 2014. He is a co-founder and chief scientist for Plan2Execute, a firm that provides supply chain software and consulting solutions in warehouse management, transportation management and advanced production and inventory planning. Thomas received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Georgia Institute of Technology in industrial engineering and holds a B.S. in operations research from Cornell University. Prior to returning to graduate school, he worked for C-Way Systems, a software company specializing in manufacturing scheduling. In addition to his years on the faculty at Penn State, Thomas has had the pleasure of serving as a visiting faculty member at INSEAD (in Fontainebleau, France), the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University and the Darden School at the University of Virginia.

Thomas currently teaches courses in the areas of supply chain management and quantitative modeling in Darden's MBA, Executive MBA and Ph.D. programs. A frequent faculty leader in executive development programs, he has led numerous Executive Education sessions in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, including programs at Penn State, INSEAD and Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as custom programs for Accenture, DuPont, ExxonMobil, IBM, Ingersoll-Rand, Mars, Office Depot, Parker-Hannifin, Pfizer, Schlumberger and the U.S. Marine Corps. He has testified as an expert witness and consulted for several large organizations on supply chain strategy including Accenture, CSL Behring, Dell, ExxonMobil and Lockheed Martin Aerospace Corporation. He is a co-author of Inventory and Production Management in Supply Chains, CRC Press.

His research interests include coordinating production and inventory planning across the extended enterprise and connecting decision models to logistics performance measurement. His work has appeared in several academic and practitioner journals in the areas of logistics and operations management, including Management Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management and Production and Operations Management. He serves as a senior editor for Production and Operations Management. He is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences, as well as the Production and Operations Management Society.