Building Resilient and Ethical Supply Chains for a Post-COVID World

An Exploratory Meeting

The Academy is convening an exploratory initiative about increasing the resiliency in supply chains; the discussions will focus on healthcare and food supply chains for a post-COVID world.

Supply chains are often invisible, not just to end-users but even to end-suppliers of goods and services. Supply chain weaknesses, however, are highly visible and have included disruptions in the supply of some of our essential goods, such as medicines, personal protective equipment, and ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to mending the fractures that have been exposed in our current medical supply chain systems, the pandemic has also revealed weaknesses in our country’s food supply networks, in which the human costs of production, distribution, and delivery in unsafe conditions have been disproportionately borne by the most vulnerable participants, now reclassified as “essential workers.”

To address these questions, the Academy will convene an exploratory meeting with a group of interdisciplinary experts who will address the social and ethical dimensions of supply chains and produce useful recommendations for government, industry, and non-profit action. The meeting will explore three themes and identify both the vulnerabilities and challenges as well as possible solutions for each:

healthcare and food security supply chains;
ethical considerations of supply chains; and
national security as it relates to supply chains.

Meeting Leaders

Margaret Levi, Director at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) and Professor of Political Science, Stanford University

Richard Locke, Provost; Schreiber Family Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs, Brown University

Meeting Participants

Lisa Anderson, James T. Shotwell Professor Emerita of International Relations, Columbia University

Benjamin Armstrong, Interim Executive Director and Research Scientist, Industrial Performance Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

John Brown, Independent Co-Chairman, Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation, University of Southern California

R. Alta Charo, Warren P. Knowles Professor of Law and Bioethics, University of Wisconsin Law School, Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin

Joshua Cohen, Professor, Acting Dean, Apple University, Apple, Inc.; UC Berkeley; Boston Review

Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, Assistant professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Vice Provost for Global Initiatives, University of Pennsylvania

Mary E. Gallagher, Amy and Alan Lowenstein Professor in Democracy, Democratization, and Human Rights, University of Michigan, University of Michigan

Sarita Gupta, Director of Future of Work, Ford Foundation, Ford Foundation

Margaret Hamburg, Foreign Secretary, National Academy of Medicine

Ashish K. Jha, Dean of the School of Public Health, Professor of Health Services, Policy, and Practice, Brown University, Brown University

Craig Kennedy, Senior Vice President, Global Supply Chain Management at Merck, Merck & Co., Inc.

Rosamond Naylor, William Wrigley Professor of Earth Systems Science and director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, Stanford Uni, Stanford University

Allison Neale, Vice President of Public Policy, Henry Schein, Henry Schein, Inc.

David W. Oxtoby, President, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Manuel Pastor, Professor of Sociology and American Studies, University of Southern California, Equity Research Institute

Megan Ranney, Warren Alpert Endowed Professor of Emergency Medicine, Associate Dean of Strategy and Innovation, School of Public Health, Brown University

Audrey Sacks, Senior Social Development Specialist, Social Sustainability and Inclusion, World Bank, World Bank

Edward Steinfeld, Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Family Professor of International Studies, Brown University

Heather Tansey, Vice President, Environmental Sustainability, Cargill

Sharon Waxman, President and CEO, Fair Labor Association, Fair Labor Association

Kathryn Wengel, Executive Vice President & Chief Global Supply Chain Officer, Johnson & Johnson, Johnson & Johnson

Academy contact: Islam Qasem, the John E. Bryson Director of Science, Engineering, and Technology Programs and Program Director for Global Security and International Affairs.

Meeting Materials