Charles Corbett
Professor
Anderson School of Management
UCLA Anderson School of Management
Gold Hall, Suite B-507
110 Westwood Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095
(310) 825-1651
charles.corbett@anderson.ucla.edu
IoES Faculty Advisor to Graduate Student(s):
Charles Corbett, Ph.D., is professor of Operations Management and Environmental Management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and holds a joint appointment at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.
Throughout his career, Corbett has been drawn to newly emerging research areas in operations management. “Once a domain becomes well-established, it gets the attention of many scholars who are much smarter than I am, so it’s time to move on to unplowed territory.”
A hallmark of Corbett’s research approach is adapting perspectives and methods from other disciplines. Early in his career, Corbett was one of the first researchers to model the conflicting interests of supply chain participants using game theory. He is among the pioneers studying environmental issues in operations and supply chains, which continues to be his main focus. More recently, Corbett is beginning to study operations of small businesses and entrepreneurs, another relatively unexplored area in operations management.
Working with CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) in London, the leading collector of data on firms’ greenhouse gas emissions and climate change strategies, Corbett and colleagues are analyzing the carbon footprint in global supply chains of large firms to identify opportunities for cleaner, more sustainable processes. “Just measuring something like carbon footprint will often lead to improvements,” he says.
Corbett was the founding faculty director of Anderson’s Easton Technology Leadership Program (now the Easton Technology Management Center) and of the award-winning interdisciplinary UCLA Leaders in Sustainability graduate certificate program. He served as associate dean of the MBA program and, from 2009 to 2012, as faculty chairman and deputy dean for academic affairs at UCLA Anderson.
Corbett has worked with teams of MBA students to study emerging areas such as green building, carbon foot printing in global firms and eco-labeling, and with Ph.D. students on many of his research projects. In the classroom, Corbett’s objective is to get students to think about processes, no matter what they do or where they do it — though in 21st-century technology, once-familiar processes, like a physical assembly line, take the “invisible” form of information and ideas.
Education
Ph.D. Production and Operations Management, 1996, INSEAD
Drs. Operations Research, (M.Sc. equivalent) 1992, Erasmus University
Elected Fellow of the Production and Operations Management Society, 2013
Citibank Teaching Award, UCLA, June 2008
EMBA Class of 2006 Outstanding Teaching Award, June 2006
George Robbins Assistant Professor Teaching Award, 2002
AT&T Faculty Fellow of Industrial Ecology, 1998–1999
