Michael J. Dwyer
Michael J. Dwyer is a Ph.D. candidate in Supply Chain Management at the Debbie and Jerry Ivy College of Business, Iowa State University. Beginning Fall 2026, he will join Texas A&M International University as an Assistant Professor of Transportation and International Logistics.
His work is guided by a virtuous cycle: research informs what we teach, students apply those insights in real-world contexts, those applications surface new problems worth exploring, and those problems create new opportunities for scholarship. This cycle keeps his research agenda grounded while strengthening student learning and improving system-level outcomes.
Michael's research is driven by a core question: how do operational systems shape the people inside them? From early ethnographic work with humanitarian NGOs in Guatemala to his doctoral research on crowdsourced logistics platforms, his work examines how design decisions in complex logistics systems influence the behavior, experience, and outcomes of the people who participate in them. His dissertation, Participation and Platform Design in Crowdsourced Logistics, focuses this question on the gig workers who power last-mile delivery and ride-hailing networks.
His work spans behavioral experiments, agent-based simulation, qualitative methods, and econometric modeling.
Michael believes good teaching starts with making complex material accessible, engaging, and practically useful. Supply chain's broad reach makes it a natural platform for connecting course concepts to students' lived experiences, and he tailors content to their majors, career goals, and the companies they want to work for. His aim is simple: courses that matter for students with content and takeaways they can apply.
In the classroom, he focuses on helping students develop structured, applied understanding of complex systems in an environment predicated on mutual respect.
Prior to his doctoral studies, Michael built over fifteen years of professional experience across military, corporate, and nonprofit sectors. He served as a Staff Sergeant and F-15 crew chief in the U.S. Air Force, managed operational and financial risk in insurance and finance, and conducted ethnographic and humanitarian supply chain research with NGOs operating in resource-constrained environments in Guatemala. He is bilingual in English and Spanish. He holds an M.B.A. from the University of West Florida and a B.A. in Philosophy from James Madison University.
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