Chris Zobel

Biography

Christopher W. Zobel is the R.B. Pamplin Professor of Business Information Technology in the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech.  He earned a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia, an M.S. in Mathematics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a B.A. in Mathematics from Colgate University.  He teaches Decision Support Systems and Database Management, and is a past winner of the Business Information Technology Teaching Excellence Award, the MBA Outstanding Faculty Award, and the Award for Outstanding Faculty in Doctoral Education. 
 
Dr. Zobel's primary research interests include disaster operations management, humanitarian supply chains, and supply chain resilience, as well as sustainability and environmental decision making. He has published over 80 articles in archival journals and academic conference proceedings, and his work can be found in journal outlets such as the Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, Risk Analysis, and the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management, among others.  Dr. Zobel is on the editorial review board for the Journal of Operations Management and is one of the co-editors of Advances in Managing Humanitarian Operations, which is part of Springer's International Series in Operations Research & Management Science.
 
Dr. Zobel has been a Co-PI on a number of interdisciplinary NSF grants that, in total, received more than $7M in funding, and he is currently serving as one of the leaders of Virginia Tech's interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Disaster Resilience and Risk Management.  He was a 2015 Fulbright Scholar to Karlsruhe, Germany, and is an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Coastal Studies and the Global Change Center. He is on the Board of the POMS College for Humanitarian Operations and Crisis Management (HOCM), and he is also serving as the Conference Chair for the 18th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2021). Dr. Zobel is an active member of ISCRAM, the Decision Sciences Institute (DSI), the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), and the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS).