Faculty Spotlight: Melissa Bowers
Associate Professor Melissa “Missie” Bowers, Ph.D., is in her twenty-third year of service in the UT Knoxville College of Business Administration. The Marietta, Georgia, native earned her undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of Georgia in 1982 and her Ph.D. in management science from Clemson University in August 1989 before beginning her successful career in academics and as a professional consultant. While Bowers’ work includes a wide variety of responsibilities, her teaching and research interests include production planning and scheduling; production/operations management; supply chain optimization; lean manufacturing; lean maintenance, repair, and overhaul; vehicle routing/scheduling; deterministic optimization models; and stochastic processes.
Bowers has recently been involved in launching the Department of Statistics, Operations, and Management Science’s new graduate degree in business analytics. She teaches in the business analytics graduate program, the full-time MBA, Aerospace and Defense MBA, and Professional MBA programs, and in several short courses in the Center for Executive Education. She has served as a production planning and scheduling/operations consultant for the Defense Logistics Agency as well as companies such as Milliken, ALCOA, Phillips Petroleum, Oxford Industries, the U.S. Air Force, UT Medical Center, Cherry Point Naval Air Base, Boeing, and Tanner Companies. She has research articles published in Decision Sciences, European Journal of Operational Research, Interfaces, Production and Inventory Management Journal, and a number of other professional journals.
Bowers and her husband, Stewart, a research and development engineer, have been married for 27 years. They have two sons, Matthew, a freshman at Georgia Tech majoring in engineering, and Andrew, a junior at Farragut High School. Both boys have a love of sports and share math and science as favorite subjects in school. In her free time, Bowers enjoys reading, cooking, working with youth at Concord United Methodist Church, and spending time with her family.