Christian Blanco

Christian Blanco is an assistant professor of operations management at the Fisher College of Business. He joined the Management Sciences department after receiving his PhD from the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 2017. Blanco analyzes data to gain insights that will enable firms to develop sustainable and safe supply chains.

“Many firms are now responding to climate change-related risks, but the tools how to effectively manage these risks remain limited,” Blanco says. Blanco and colleagues use data collected by CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) to examine the opportunities that firms pursue to reduce their carbon footprint. “Our research shows that an increasing number of US firms are now measuring and reporting their supply chain carbon footprint, but we find that there are still opportunities for firms to improve and capture a larger portion of their global supply chain carbon emissions.”

Blanco describes their work on risk assessment and safety, “Probabilistic Risk Assessment has been used in the nuclear industry for more than 30 years, yet the scientific evidence of its impact on safety is not well-measured.” Blanco and colleagues collected operational data from nuclear power plants to test this. “We find that the process of quantifying risks itself can lead to improvements in safety performance. It turns out that the notion 'measurement leads to improvement' applies to safety.”

Prior to pursuing his PhD at UCLA, Blanco was part of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab at UC Berkeley. He collaborated with a team of scientists in developing a model called “SWITCH” that identifies the least-cost combination of energy technologies that will provide low-carbon electricity in 11 western states.