Image by Rob Gerth
Jennifer Ryan crisscrosses between business and engineering.
Coming out of high school in Massachusetts, Jennifer K. Ryan, the new Frank L. Magee professor and department chair for the DATA department, applied to Lehigh, but she ended up attending Dartmouth to study math and social sciences.
Her research (she has over 6,500 citations on Google Scholar) and teaching interests include inventory and supply chain management. “I’m interested in applying math to study real-world problems related to business, government and society,” says Ryan.
“Since COVID, analytics professionals are taken more seriously by stakeholders in a wide variety of organizations,” says Ryan. “Stakeholders and executives now see that supply chain management is important not only to our daily lives, but to the economy in general. They understand that with the complexity of supply chains, you can’t just use your intuition to figure out what’s going to happen.”
This fall, Ryan is teaching “Analytical Approaches to Supply Chain Management.”
One of the things that makes her unique is her career trajectory which has crisscrossed between teaching and research at both engineering and business colleges. Ryan says that expectations are quite different in teaching versus research but meeting the expectations in these different arenas makes her a better collaborator.
“Lehigh does interdisciplinary well,” says Ryan. “There’s so much potential here to simultaneously build industry and intercollege relationships for research projects while providing more opportunities for students.”
Prior to joining Lehigh Business, Ryan served for nine years as the inaugural department chair for Supply Chain Management and Analytics in the College of Business at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.