Prof. Koray Özpolat
Prof. Koray is a professor of Supply Chain Management at URI. He earned his PhD in Business & Management in 2011 at the University of Maryland – College Park. His research interests include humanitarian logistics and disaster relief, scholarship of teaching and learning, emerging business/supply chain technologies, and geopolitics of supply chains.
Prof. Koray's career journey started as an electrical engineer. Having completed his master's degree at Colorado State University in Electrical and Computer Engineering, he returned to Turkey and worked on a network security project for the National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (TUBITAK-UEKAE) and also taught computer programming courses at Istanbul University. His transition to the supply chain management domain started during his employment as a Logistics Systems Analyst at the United Nations in Amman / Jordan serves 5+ million refugees in the Near East. To build a theoretical foundation in this new humanitarian domain, he completed a Graduate Diploma in Purchasing and Supply from a U.K. Institute – CIPS.
During his employment at the United Nations in Jordan, he provided process mapping and programming support to the Procurement and Logistics Division. Upon talking to the beneficiaries and witnessing the agency's terrific impact on generations of refugees, he came to find a deeper meaning and satisfaction in this field. Eventually, he completed his PhD in supply chain management and started researching to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of humanitarian supply chains.
Teaching is another activity Prof. Koray is passionate about. He has taught students across the globe in many countries (USA, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, China, South Korea, France, and Hungary). He takes pride in teaching at a state university and educating many first-generation college students from lower-income families. At URI, he has taught SCA 460 – Global Supply Chain Management as an undergraduate, MBA, and MS levels (all modalities: in-person, hybrid, and online), SCA 255 Introduction to Operations and Supply Chain Management, and BUS 609 – Doctoral Seminar in Supply Chain Management.
Following the teacher-scholar model, he works with business students in the classroom to promote smart compassion by designing public service announcements. In collaboration with government agencies, he also developed decision-support tools to educate the public in making the right donation decisions. Koray is also engaged in scholarship of teaching and learning. He has co-published three pedagogical articles and shared his research on improving student engagement with the academic community.
