Wendy Tate, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Supply Chain Management. She teaches strategic sourcing and sustainability to undergraduate, MBA, executive, and Ph.D. students strategic sourcing and sustainability. She is interested in the financial impacts of business decisions across the supply chain.
Tate enjoys research and specializes in translating academic work into classroom learning activities and disseminating her work globally. Her research can be broadly classified under purchasing but focuses primarily on two types of business problems. The first is in services purchasing, including outsourcing and offshoring. This area of research has recently expanded into reshoring. The second area is on environmental business practices and understanding how these initiatives can be diffused across a supply chain and a supply network. She presents at many different venues, including both academic and practitioner-oriented conferences. She has published research in top-tier academic journals, including the Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Supply Chain Management, and California Management Review.
Tate serves as co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management, as an associate editor for three other supply chain journals, and is on the editorial review board or performs ad hoc reviews for multiple other journals. Before receiving her Ph.D., she spent 17 years in corporate planning, supply chain management, purchasing, and operations management within the furniture industry.