The Blackmon Moody Outstanding Professor Award is one of the most prestigious awards given by the University of Alabama. According to UA’s website, the award “recognizes singular, exceptional, or timely work in the form of: research, product, program, or published material.” This year, the award was given to Dr. Burcu Keskin. She is a professor of operations management at the Culverhouse College of Business. She specializes in supply chain networks and the disruption of illicit supply chains such as the wildlife trade and human trafficking.
Through her research, she has assisted law enforcement to disrupt or eliminate the effectiveness of human trafficking networks. Dr. Keskin explained the support she received from local authorities in starting her research. “It was in my back of my mind eating me away like what can I do, what can I do…,” she said. “I went to the West Alabama Human Trafficking Task Force Chief at the time. I'm like, what can I do? Tell me some of your problems, maybe we can find a solution together. He actually talked to me like for a couple of hours.”
Dr. Keskin mentioned the work of her, and her colleagues, often involves collecting about 100,000 daily online posts to review for possible human trafficking violations. Dr. Keskin says, “Because there is a hundred thousand of them, it is not necessarily possible for law enforcement to look at each one of them and say, yes, this is real, no, this looks like a scam. One of our biggest contributions to them is actually collecting all that data…try to separate scams…”
The annual award is one of the most prestigious awards given at the Capstone. More on the award can be found here.
