Roberto Perez-Franco

Roberto Perez-Franco is a research associate at the Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research focuses on developing a better understanding of supply chain strategy, and proposing techniques for its assessment and reformulation. His methodological toolkit is mainly qualitative, and includes action research, grounded theory, case study research and survey research methods.

Since 2006 Roberto has been part of CTL's Supply Chain 2020 Project and has worked on developing, testing and documenting methods to express, evaluate and enhance a firm's supply chain strategy as a conceptual system. The resulting techniques have been applied to several projects in Europe, South and North America, and have been taught as a course on supply chain strategy to dozens of graduate students at MIT and at the Latin American Center for Logistics Innovation (CLI).

Additionally, between 2010 and 2011 Roberto was part of the core research team for CTL's Future Freight Flows Project and was involved in developing multiple future scenarios and facilitating work sessions to derive insights for the long-term planning of logistics infrastructure through scenario thinking.

Roberto was born in Panama in 1976. He received a BSc from the Panama Technological University in 2001, in the field of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, as valedictorian, with an IFARHU Scholarship; a MEng from MIT in 2004, in the field of Logistics and Supply Chain Management, with Fulbright and Barsa Scholarships; and a PhD from MIT in 2010, in the field of Engineering Systems, on the subject of supply chain strategy, with a Senacyt-IFARHU Scholarship and a UPS Doctoral Fellowship.