Academic background

Dr Christine Rutherford is Director of Learning and Teaching and Associate Professor in Supply Chain Management at Heriot Watt University. She completed her PhD in Physical Chemistry at Hull University(UK), her Executive MSc Logistics & Supply Chain Management at Cranfield School of Management (UK), her MSc in Physical Chemistry and her BSc (Hons) in Applied Chemistry at the University of Natal (South Africa).

Professional experience

Prior to joining Heriot-Watt Dr Christine Rutherford spent 7 years teaching at the Cranfield School of Management following a career as a commissioned officer in the Royal Air Force. Since joining Heriot-Watt she has held visiting positions at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS), the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg (TUHH) and BVL University in Bremen. Since 2017 she has worked closely with the Kuehne Foundation to support and advise their Global Logistics Education Programme which aims to increase accessibility and improve the quality of logistics higher education in developing countries. To date she has provided training and support to logistics academics in Kyrgyzstan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Nigeria.

Her research and consultancy work is industry based and focused on solving supply chain and logistics problems, particularly in the areas of supply chain design, demand planning, and inventory management strategy. She takes a predominantly quantitative and analytical approach to designing optimal solutions that are both practical for the organization and theoretically robust. Most recently, for example, she led a 3 year KTP project with the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service (SNBTS) to design a resilient and integrated blood supply chain in Scotland. Her work is published in national and international conference and practitioner journals.