WVU researcher links the chains
Molly Hughes, assistant professor in the WVU John Chambers College of Business and Economics, is an expert on the sustainability of global supply chains and how they’re shaped by public policy. (WVU Photo/Maddy Watson)
When Molly Hughes looks at supply chains — those vast webs of factories, transportation networks, warehouses and retailers that connect the raw source materials of any product to its eventual end user — she sees human beings.
“A lot of supply chain experts lean toward an operational view: how to engineer and optimize supply chains,” Hughes said. “My perspective is different. I look at the policies affecting supply chains, but I also look at the individual actors in play and how the relationships between them tie back into social welfare.”
An assistant professor at the West Virginia University John Chambers College of Business and Economics, Hughes studies risks to supply chains, as well as risks posed by supply chains, with a perspective informed by seven years in the pharmaceuticals industry.
Her introduction to Big Pharma came during the height of the opioid epidemic, giving her a sometimes uncomfortably close view of how communities were affected by drug companies’ decisions and aspects of their supply chains.
As public backlash mounted, “It seemed like pure chaos,” Hughes remembered. “We were asking how we could even start to get our arms around this. But then we began to see a back-and-forth between industry and policymakers — opportunities to collaborate, as well as spaces where the relationship was more contentious.
“At that point, there was a blame game going on, but we were already building toward the next question: How are we going to fix this problem? I became interested in understanding the institutions and the decisions that were made — tracking whether the DEA was trying to be a friend or a foe to industry, for example.”
Molly Hughes, assistant professor, WVU John Chambers College of Business and Economics (WVU Photo/Maddy Watson)
Hughes worked in branded pharmaceuticals, then moved to generics just as the national conversation around drug pricing ramped up.
“Generic and branded drugs are interchangeable to consumers,” she explained, “but from a business standpoint, they’re different products with different supply chains, so seeing the pricing dynamics and how they’re brought to market was fascinating.”
Ultimately, Hughes’ skepticism that policies aimed at pharma would have the intended effect impelled her to return to her alma mater, The Ohio State University, to embark on a doctoral dissertation that allowed her to dig into those questions.
As an Ohio State undergraduate, Hughes had taken a supply chain class with scholar John Saldanha. By the time she returned to Ohio for her doctorate, Saldanha was teaching at WVU, but their reconnection at a 2022 conference kickstarted a chain of events that led to Hughes joining Saldanha on the faculty of the WVU Supply Chain Management program in 2023.
“West Virginia is beautiful, and it’s great to be close to my hometown of Cincinnati, but the big reason I came to teach here is how passionate John is about our work and our students. We took 12 students to India last year to study supply chains there, and it was such a cool experience. We see the U.S. moving away from China and India becoming a strong contender for future relationships, so we’re creating ties between WVU and some Indian institutions,” Hughes said.
She’s now collaborating with Saldanha to explore how a shift from air to ocean freight could change supply chains.
“There’s a huge push, especially from pharma, to start using ocean freight because carbon dioxide emissions are so much lower. But ocean freight presents different problems. Ships run into bridges, dockworkers strike, there’s a security crisis in the Red Sea, and above all, it takes much longer to move things on a boat than on a plane. We’re examining how a whole industry is figuring out how to use this mode of transportation.”
With a new federal administration, Hughes is eager to see how policymaking adapts.
“The U.S. has put a huge emphasis on bringing back manufacturing of everything from pharmaceuticals to batteries, balancing sustainability with availability, so policies could go in a lot of different directions right now,” she said. “The difference between policy and politics is really interesting to me — being able to find the mesh.”
Hughes recently completed a massive review of the scholarly literature around supply chains and public policy, publishing her analysis in the Journal of Business Logistics. Although the term “supply chain management” wasn’t even coined until the 1980s, she combed through papers dating back to the 1930s, scrutinizing the relationships between government regulation and supply chain resiliency.
Her research confirmed that “it all comes back to individuals and relationship management,” she said.
“Take pharmaceuticals, people tend to either villainize Big Pharma or defend it to its core. But the industry is individual people making individual choices the best they can to try to get their work done.”
Recalling her conversation with members of the Pfizer team that got out the COVID-19 vaccine, Hughes emphasized how they created an entirely new approach to manufacturing and distributing that cryogenically cold, deep-frozen drug.
“The lessons Pfizer learned about manufacturing and managing risks while under pressure to meet the challenges of the pandemic could now help firms manage other risk-sensitive channels. In cell and gene therapy drug supply chains, for example, scientists use the cells from a cancer patient to create a treatment specific to that person,” Hughes said.
“Making that treatment and then getting it back to the original patient is a crazy feat — not only of science, but of business management and supply chain logistics, too.”
-WVU-
mm/3/3/25
MEDIA CONTACT: Micaela Morrissette
Research Writer
WVU Research Communications
304-709-6667; Micaela.Morrissette@mail.wvu.edu