Mukesh Kumar is a University lecturer at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. He is based at the Institute for Manufacturing and leading research on industrial resilience.

His research interest for the field of risk management and manufacturing came from early career in the financial industry where he was responsible for corporate evaluation of investment decisions made by manufacturing companies. In 2005 he commenced PhD studies in IfM Cambridge, in the area of manufacturing investment decision making from risk and network resilience perspectives to leverage and extend my specialist knowledge in this area. After completion of PhD, Sealed Air Corporation funded an industrial project to operationalise PhD research outcomes into a manufacturing investment risk evaluation tool, specifically focusing on plant location decisions and technology selection. He secured departmental funds to extend work on risk, resilience and sustainability, which were emergent fields in the area of manufacturing and supply network research. This promising line of research enabled him to then secure further grant from Three Guineas Trust in 2013 to explore “climate change implications for global food supply chains” in collaboration with IfM, 4CMR and British Antarctic Survey. Since then his research has included food product safety management from developed and developing country perspectives, risk evaluation in pharmaceutical supply, and environment sustainability assessment in global supply networks in four sectors - food, pharmaceuticals, automotive and aerospace. His research continues to focus on sustainability and resilience but closely related to the emerging manufacturing paradigm of “Distributed Manufacturing”.

Research Interests

• Understanding of Industrial chain resilience and sustainability
• Issues of food supply chains linked with food security
• Differences between emerging and mature industrial systems
• Distributed Manufacturing

PhD Opportunity

If you want to pursue a PhD particularly associated with above mentioned research interests then feel free to contact me. Please ensure that you fit the University of Cambridge PhD requirements, about which information can be found here.

Current Projects

• “UK-India Food Supply Chains: Sustainability and Food Security” in collaboration with ABV-IIITM Gwalior, funded by UKIERI
• “Engineering Driven Sustainable Supply Network” with IIT Ropar and IIM Lucknow, funded by the EPSRC and DST
• “Risk and Resilience of Global Supply Networks and Future Industrial Systems”, funded by CIM
• RE-configuring MEDIcines End-to-end Supply, AMSCI project

Research Collaborations

Indian Institute of Management Lucknow (India), Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research (UK), British Antarctic Survey (UK), Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (Germany), Turku School of Economics (Finland), Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

Publications

Please click here to view a full list of publications.

20th International Manufacturing Symposium - Architecting the digital supply chain - the implications of digitalisation for global manufacturing