Dr. Cory Searcy

At 17, Cory Searcy’s academic future was all mapped out. He graduated high school and was about to enter a history program at university. But all that changed when his father invited him to spend a day with his workplace’s head engineer. “Turned out, I liked all the machines,” he says with a laugh.

Eventually, Searcy was drawn to industrial engineering, as well as issues and systems related to corporate sustainability and responsibility. His current research focuses on the environmental and social impact of industry. Resource use and greenhouse gas emissions are areas of concern, as are industrial working conditions, including those that contributed to the 2013 garment factory collapse in Bangladesh.

Today, Searcy applies his sustainability lens mainly to supply chains – the complex international sequences involved in the production and distribution of a commodity. It’s where he can make the greatest impact on the work environment worldwide, long before a Canadian buys that T-shirt or cellphone. “I tell my students, any issue you’re passionate about – human rights, the environment, food security, anything – has an engineering side. And you can create solutions.”