Renzo Akkerman is an associate professor in Operations Research and Logistics at Wageningen University. Earlier, he was a professor in Operations Management and Technology at the Technical University of Munich and an associate professor in Operations Management at the Technical University of Denmark. He is currently one of the coordinators of the European Operations Research Society (EURO) Working Group on Sustainable Supply Chains as well as the Chair of the Board of the Dutch-Flemish Beta Research School for Operations Management and Logistics.

Renzo is mostly known for his research on operations and supply chain management in food supply chains. In addition to that, he studies the design and planning of the logistics networks required to make a circular economy work. This for instance includes the supply chains required for the valorization of industrial waste streams and by-products, but also the logistics required to manage waste streams in urban environments.

“The transition to a more circular economy is not only about technological solutions, but equally about the design and operation of the supply chains around these technologies.”