Supply chain professionals who travel to San Diego for the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals' Annual Conference this month will be able to congratulate Dr. Martin Graham Christopher in person. Christopher, a professor of marketing and logistics at the Cranfield School of Management at Cranfield University in the United Kingdom, will receive the council's 2005 Distinguished Service Award at the conference. He is the 40th person to receive the award since it was first handed out in 1965 as a tribute to John Drury Sheahan, a pioneering logistics consultant.

Service to the industry can't be measured in number of pages filled, of course, but during his 35-year career, Christopher has contributed 74 papers to learned journals, written and published 41 books or monographs, issued four major research reports and delivered approximately 80 public presentations. The focus of his work has been on the interface between marketing and logistics, and the impact of industry globalization on logistics.

His first book, Total Distribution, was published in 1971, and it set the direction for the development of a range of executive and degree programs at Bradford University and Cranfield University. He is the co-editor of the International Journal of Logistics Management and has been involved in editorial activities since 1968, when he was appointed executive editor of the British Journal of Marketing.

Christopher is currently the chair of Cranfield University's Centre for Logistics and Transportation, which has become a global center of excellence for advanced logistics and supply chain management research and teaching.

He is a visiting faculty member at the University of North Florida and at the universities of British Columbia in Canada and New South Wales in Australia. Christopher regularly teaches at the Management Centre Europe in Brussels and in various locations throughout Australia.