Vidya Mani

• Associate Professor of Business Administration, University of Virginia
• Visiting Associate Professor, Cornell University

I am an Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, and a Visiting Associate Professor at SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University. I am also a Senior Research Fellow in the Mexico Program at Inter-American Dialogue.

I have a deep expertise in global supply chains. My research focuses on how supply chain imperatives drive operational decisions across key sectors, including automotive, electronics, energy, tech, pharmaceuticals, and retail. My work highlights how businesses within these supply chains will respond to specific market constraints and regulations. Research topics include examining impact of trade policies on national competitiveness and resilience of critical supply chains, developing energy-transition pathways for industrialized and less-developed economies, evaluating the effectiveness of inspection and penalties towards ensuring environmental safety and compliance for energy sector, effective ways to create a secure supply chain in the electronics sector, developing an efficient product portfolio and distribution strategy for specialty drugs and making targeted assortment and labor decisions for retail stores.

I teach an elective on Sustainable Global Value Chains in the Residential and Executive MBA programs at the Darden School of Business, Operations Analytics, Digital Business and Retail Operations in the MSBA Program at Cornell Tech, and Leveraging Operations for Environmental and Social Sustainability in the PGP Program at the Indian School of Business.

At UVA, I am an Expert Advisor to the working group on Critical Minerals Supply Chain for the Ripples of Hope Project at the Miller Center and the Faculty Lead for the P3 Impact Award Program run by Concordia, the University of Virginia Darden School Institute for Business in Society, and the U.S. Department of State's Office of Global Partnerships.

I collaborate with industry and policymakers to assess the impact of recent legislative efforts and ESG standards on the supply chain and evaluate the trade-offs associated with local policies, national security, and global objectives. In collaboration with the US Department of Defense and the LMI Research Institute, I developed a data-driven intelligent response toolkit to mitigate counterfeit risk in the weapons system supply chain. I am a Franklin Fellow at the Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Office of International Labor Affairs and a member of the working group tasked with developing sustainability standards for the textile and apparel sector at the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and

• –present Associate Professor, University of Virginia
• 2025–present Senior research fellow, Inter-American Dialogue
• 2025–present Visiting associate professor, Cornell University

• 2012 University of North Carolina at Chapel-Hill, PhD in Operations Management
• 2002 SJMSOM, IIT Bombay, MBA

• 2026 Use of Public-Private Partnerships (P3s), Book Chapter in Policy and Ecosystem Support for Social Entrepreneurship, Springer Nature
• 2023 Not a Box of Nuts and Bolts. Distribution Channels for Specialty Drugs, Production and Operations Management
• 2022 Estimating substitution and basket effects in retail stores, Management Science
• 2021 Inventory Prepositioning for UNICEF Plumpy Nut Supply Chain. Book Chapter in Responsible Business Operations: Challenges and Opportunities., Springer Nature
• 2019 How learning from inspections affect environmental outcomes: Evidence from unconventional drilling, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
• 2015 Estimating the impact of understaffing on sales and profitability in retail stores., Production and Operations Management
• 2015 An overview of industry practice and empirical research in retail workforce management - Book Chapter in Retail Supply Chain Management: Quantitative Models and Empirical Studies, Springer Nature
• 2013 The relationship between abnormal inventory growth and future earnings for US public retailers, The relationship between abnormal inventory growth and future earnings for US public retailers

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