Daugherty Logistics Doctoral symposium allows students to engage with established academics and industry professionals, discussing research, career development and sharing knowledge.

Auburn University’s Harbert College of Business recently played host to 42 universities for a nationally recognized symposium on sharing best practices and insights for doctoral students, faculty and industry professionals interested in networking and how best to promote their in-depth research.

It is the second time Auburn was chosen to host the Daugherty Logistics Doctoral symposium, which is aimed at doctoral students in the field of logistics and supply chain management, although the 2025 program also included shared expertise for doctoral candidates and faculty applicable in most any field.

The annual symposium rotates among leading business schools and was founded by academic champion Patricia J. Daugherty at the University of Oklahoma in 2005. Representatives arrived in Auburn from across the country, including the University of Tennessee, which will host the event next year; and from several universities such as Colorado State and Iowa State that are, like Auburn, land-grant institutions charged with providing a wide range of accessible research opportunities dedicated to various fields.

“I’m here because I want to network and get to know who are my colleagues in the future,” said Bri-Jae Scarlander, a doctoral student from Ohio State University. “I am on an expedited path; I’m Air Force, which means I have three years to do this, and then I go back to active duty. So, these relationships that I’m creating here are super important to me.”

Ultimately, Scarlander wants to return to academia and become a professor, and she has an interest in logistics. Coming to Auburn and networking will prove valuable, she said.

“I want to have people I can call upon and say, ‘hey, remember me and the things we worked on together? Yeah, I’m coming back on the market. How would you like to have me on your team?’” she said.

Showing national leadership

The Daugherty symposium includes panel discussions, paper development workshops, tours and presentations, in addition to several networking opportunities.

Past host universities other than Auburn include Arizona State, Colorado State, Iowa State, Michigan State, Ohio State, Pennsylvania State, Texas Christian, Alabama, Arkansas, Maryland, North Texas, Oklahoma and Tennessee. The host schools underwrite the activities to keep costs low. Faculty and students only need to pay for travel and lodging.

“The symposium presents both personal and a professional chance to collaborate and build relationships, and just catch up on things,” said its namesake, Daugherty, who attended the Auburn event. “It happens once a year, this is the 20^th one, and we initially started because there was nothing like this.

“It was immediately popular,” she said. “I created it when I was at Oklahoma and wanted to put our doctoral students out there where people could see them. And as a department chair, I wanted to see other students that had graduated that we might be hiring. I wanted to get a chance to see them in a different venue. But it became even more important for the faculty. They see this as professional socialization.”

She sees the measure of the program’s future growth being gauged in results, not numbers.

“We have nearly 150 people here, faculty and students. What I want to see is that it’s maintained, and that we keep the enthusiasm and the commitment to it,” Daugherty said. “There are people who say, ‘this is the one conference that I never miss.’”

She was here for the previous Auburn-hosted symposium, and with a special connection. “Glenn Richey was a former student of mine,” she said with a smile, referring to Richey, who serves as a Harbert Eminent Scholar in supply chain management.

He and Shashank Rao, Harbert’s Jim W. Thompson Professor in supply chain management, hosted the event.

“They did a great job then, and they’re doing a great job now,” Daugherty said of Auburn playing host.

Why it matters

There are multiple benefits, for young doctoral students in particular, Rao said.

“It is important to gain a perspective and understanding of what the field is looking for, beyond just the confines of what one’s institution can teach,” he said. “Plus, it allows them to meet the important researchers and personalities in the field, people who are likely to continue influencing the field for decades.

“For faculty, it allows one to remain in the bleeding edge of new issues, techniques, and topics by seeing what young people are working on these days.”

Hosting the event, especially for a second time in its short history, is a significant reflection on Auburn University and its Harbert College of Business, Richey said.

“I’m amazed at how much the Harbert gift, guided by Dean Bill Hardgrave, ramped up our research focus and helped us hire new faculty while building on what Drs. Brian Gibson and Joe Hanna started more than 25 years ago,” Richey said. “When I joined in 2015, the PhD program was already solid but very small.

“We decided to host the Daugherty symposium because we knew it would help us expand the program. Honestly, we got lucky to be picked as the host about eight years ago. Now, I’m proud to say we have hired and retained some of the best logistics and supply chain management researchers in the world.

“We also have a full cohort of PhD students. We are one of the world’s best logistics and supply chain think tanks. Being picked a second time says a lot.”

The ‘so what’ factor

Several of the symposium’s sessions included conversation on where to place more focus in trying to get hard-earned research findings more attention and readership in the wider research community and in respected journals.

One important question to ask of your work is, “so what?” said Brian Gibson, Harbert’s executive director of the Center for Supply Chain Innovation and one of several Auburn faculty members serving as a symposium panelist.

He and other speakers said that researchers too often focus in their writings only about the meat and potatoes of their work, and not the sauce.

Many papers Gibson has seen are well written and well researched, but emphasis on the impact of the work is summed up “in maybe two paragraphs,” he said. “You have to ask the question, ‘so what?’ And you have to answer that question. And if we answer the question, it makes the paper so much stronger.”

Regarding wider publication of research work and getting notice of it, Gibson and other panelists suggested researchers work with their university communications teams, and to figure out who the appropriate editors and senior leaders are with the publications appropriate for the field of interest.

“Sometimes they’ll do the heavy lifting, and they’ll interview you,” he said. “Put more time into getting it out there... That’s a tremendous extension of your research, and that’s going to have an impact.”

###

Learn more about Auburn’s supply chain management program in the Harbert College of Business.