H. Donald Ratliff

Executive Director – Supply Chain & Logistics Institute
Regents’ Professor – School of Industrial & Systems Engineering
Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332
don.ratliff@isye.gatech.edu
404-894-2307

Dr. Ratliff is a supply chain and logistics expert with more than 30 years of experience as an educator, researcher, consultant, and technology business executive. As Executive Director of the Supply Chain & Logistics Institute at Georgia Tech, he provides leadership for the largest research program in the world devoted to the study of supply chains and logistics. As co-founder and President of the software company CAPS Logistics, he helped to pioneer the development of interactive software tools to design supply chain networks and optimize logistics processes. He has worked with a wide range of companies and government organizations to recognize and evaluate opportunities for supply chain synchronization and logistics optimization, to develop strategies for exploiting these opportunities, and to develop the processes and technologies necessary to execute on these strategies. Dr. Ratliff’s research into new logistics concepts and optimization algorithms has resulted in the publication of more than fifty refereed journal articles. He has given more than a hundred invited presentations at national and international meetings. He serves on a variety of boards where he helps to develop strategies for designing, building and bringing to market new logistics technologies and services.

Dr. Ratliff is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the Johns Hopkins University. He has held a number of editorial positions including being Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Operations Research. He has supervised the thesis research for more than twenty Ph.D. students, many of which currently hold faculty appointments in major universities. He has been selected to play a leadership role in five national professional meetings in Operations Research. He was awarded the 1991 “Outstanding Research Award” of the Institute of Industrial Engineers for his work in logistics and is a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers and a Fellow of INFORMS. Dr. Ratliff was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his work in developing network optimization methodology for use in the design and operation of logistics systems. More than 200 companies and government agencies have implemented concepts developed by him and his colleagues.