John Bell is the head of the Department of Supply Chain Management at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Haslam College of Business. Before joining UT’s faculty in 2010, Bell was a career maintenance and logistics officer in the United States Air Force.
His teaching and research interests are in logistics and supply chain management, vehicle routing, facility location selection, hazardous material transportation, and supply chain strategy and risk. His publications have appeared in the Journal of Business Logistics, Transportation Journal, OMEGA, Computer & Operations Research, and Advanced Engineering Informatics. He is a frequent presenter at national and international meetings of the DSI, POMS, INFORMS, and other professional societies.
Bell has won several awards for his management, teaching, and research efforts during his academic and military careers. In 1993, he was the General Leo Marquez Award winner as the outstanding maintenance manager in the United States Air Forces Europe. Later, in 1998, he received the Louis Polk Award from the National Defense Industrial Association for his research on countering parts obsolescence in aircraft manufacturing supply chains. In addition, he was a Distinguished Graduate of the Master of Science Logistics Management program at AFIT. He was selected for the Edwin Aldrin Award as the top leader in his class in 1998.
Following two years of conducting research for the Pentagon, he was competitively selected for a US Air Force scholarship to pursue his doctorate education at Auburn University. Following his graduation from Auburn in 2003, he spent three years on the faculty at AFIT, where he became the Division Chief for the Logistics Management program and was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. In addition to several teaching awards, Bell’s research work has won Best Article published in the Air Force Journal of Logistics in 2000, and the Alpha Iota Delta Best Paper Award at the 2010 Western Decision Sciences Institute Conference.
Bell has received competitive research grants above $100K from the United States Air Force to research logistics facility location selection and has held memberships and positions in the following societies: CSCMP, DSI, POMS, INFORMS, AST&L, and SOLE.