SUPPLY-CHAIN SECURITYTraining Future Supply Chain Leaders

By Toby Gooley

Sit down with Maria Jesus Saenz of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) to discuss her professional achievements and priorities, and you’re likely to come away with two questions: How has she become a thought leader in so many areas — from logistics strategies and supply chain education to human-AI collaboration and digital supply chain transformation, to name just a few? And what is behind her legendary energy and drive?

The answer to both questions is passion — for excellence, for teaching, and for applied research that has a practical, beneficial impact on both businesses and people.

Saenz, who is executive director of MIT’s Supply Chain Management master’s programs and director of the MIT Digital Supply Chain Transformation Lab, did not start out in supply chain management. Her master’s and doctoral degrees, from the University of Zaragoza in her native Spain, are in industrial engineering and manufacturing and design engineering, respectively. But when, as a newly tenured professor more than two decades ago, she was invited to teach a course on logistics, she took a chance and said yes. “I thought, this sounds interesting and impactful on operations,” she recalls. Her doctoral research had focused on how organizations collaborate, “so this was familiar for me, because logistics is about collaboration.”

That assignment proved to be a gateway to the broader field of supply chain management (SCM) — managing the complex, global webs of product design, manufacturing, inventory, warehousing, inbound and outbound logistics, and returns activities that underpin everything we use or consume. Whether in teaching, applied research, or as a strategic advisor for startups, Saenz’s desire to explore new ways to apply her analytical and statistical expertise as well as technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to digital transformation has guided her professional path ever since.