Vidya Mani

Biography

Dr. Vidya Mani is a visiting associate professor at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. She also serves as an associate professor of business administration at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia. Mani has deep expertise in global supply chains and is a senior research fellow in the Mexico Program at the Inter-American Dialogue.

Her research focuses on how supply chain imperatives drive operational decisions across key sectors, including automotive, electronics, energy, technology, pharmaceuticals and retail. Her work highlights how businesses within these supply chains respond to specific market constraints and regulations. Her research topics include:
• Examining the impact of trade policies on national competitiveness and the resilience of critical supply chains
• Developing energy-transition pathways for industrialized and less-developed economies
• Evaluating the effectiveness of inspections and penalties in ensuring environmental safety and compliance in the energy sector
• Creating secure supply chains in the electronics sector
• Developing efficient product portfolios and distribution strategies for specialty drugs
• Making targeted assortment and labor decisions for retail stores

Mani teaches an elective on sustainable global value chains in the residential and executive MBA programs at the Darden School of Business. She is also 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.

She collaborates with industry and policymakers to assess the impact of recent legislative efforts and ESG standards on supply chains, and to evaluate the trade-offs associated with local policies, national security and global objectives. In collaboration with the U.S. Department of Defense and the LMI Research Institute, Mani developed a data-driven intelligent response toolkit to mitigate counterfeit risk in the weapons system supply chain.

Mani is a Franklin Fellow at the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Office of International Labor Affairs. She is also a member of the working group tasked with developing sustainability standards for the textile and apparel sector at the Global Reporting Initiative, and serves as an expert advisor to the working group on the critical minerals supply chain for the Ripples of Hope Project at the Miller Center.

Recent Courses

• NCCW 5080 - Managing Operations

Academic Degrees

• PhD University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill
• MMgt Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
• BE The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda