Christopher Mejía Argueta is a Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. He develops applied research on retailing operations and food supply chains for multiple stakeholders, including consumer packaged goods manufacturers, carriers, and retailers in the Food and Retail Operations Lab (FaROL). His research focuses on improving the efficiency and flexibility of operations in multiple stakeholders, designing route-to-market and logistics strategies to address changing purchasing patterns, coupling these dynamic consumer profiles with the retail landscape, and reducing undesired socioeconomic and health problems related to income disparity, social backwardness, food malnutrition, food waste by proposing sustainable policies, business models to help vulnerable population segments.
Dr. Chris Mejía is also the Director of the MIT Supply Chain and Global Logistics Excellence (SCALE) Network for Latin America. This initiative, conducted by the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics in the region, aims to lead impactful research and education projects for all companies, the public sector, and society together with top Latin American universities and the support of the Center for Latin-American Logistics Innovation (CLI). In addition, Dr. Chris Mejía serves as the Director of the MIT Graduate Certificate in Logistics & Supply Chain Management (GCLOG), an elite program from the MIT SCALE Network geared towards outstanding graduate students from Latin America.
He holds a M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering focusing on supply chain management and multicriteria optimization, and a PhD in Industrial Engineering focusing on Humanitarian Operations. Dr. Mejía got both degrees with summa cum laude honors (best grade, top 1% students) in both classes at Monterrey Tech, Mexico. In 2013, Dr. Mejía was the academic leader at CLI, where he developed dozens of projects with industry and other academic partners related to disaster response, green logistics, packaging, and last-mile distribution in emerging markets. Before joining MIT CTL, Dr. Mejía Argueta was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Eindhoven University of Technology (TUe), the Netherlands, where he investigated retailing operations for emerging markets and formulated estimation models to analyze the prevalence of nanostores in emerging markets. He is author and editor of the books: 1) Reaching 50 Million Nanostores: Retail Distribution in Emerging Megacities, 2) Supply Chain Management and Logistics in Latin America: A multi-country perspective and 3) Supply Chain Management and Logistics in Emerging Markets.
He has over 15 years of experience, and his work in over 16 countries worldwide has focused on improving the efficiency of operations across the supply chains. He is a co-editor of various special issues in recognized journals and an author of scientific papers published in top journals. He has developed dozens of industry projects focused on the reality of emerging markets regarding transportation, logistics, retailing, and supply chain management.
