Watercourse of study

Starting this fall, Old Dominion University students will have a new interdisciplinary school dedicated to maritime work, logistics and supply chain management — an upgrade from an earlier program offered through the Strome College of Business.

In September 2023, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) approved ODU’s School of Supply Chain, Logistics, and Maritime Operations, building on the university’s bachelor’s degree program in maritime and supply chain management, the only such program offered east of the Mississippi River.

As of March, the new school was still developing courses in partnership with industry experts and was expecting to launch a marketing campaign to make students aware of its offerings, says Ricardo Ungo, an assistant professor at ODU whose research focuses on transportation, supply chain management and maritime cybersecurity. ODU’s maritime program will be interdisciplinary.

Although the new school will bring together classes that were offered at Strome and other parts of the university, it also will support the Maritime Consortium created in 2021 to promote and expand ODU’s maritime-related resources and support workforce and research needs for multiple local industries.

The new school also will offer a wide range of interdisciplinary classes, Ungo says. “The idea is to open up the opportunities for students from different majors across the university to learn about supply chain logistics and maritime operations.”

Mileta M. Tomovic, Mitsubishi-Kasei professor of manufacturing at ODU and interim director of the new school, says he expects some students already enrolled in supply chain and maritime operations courses at Strome to move to the new school in the fall.

The program “will be pulling from a number of different departments at the university to offer the best education that ODU can offer to make it broad, yet targeted, all at the same time,” says Deborah Waters, a Norfolk-based maritime attorney and advisory board chair for ODU’s School of Supply Chain, Logistics, and Maritime Operations.

Having served a decade on the Virginia Port Authority board, Waters sees ODU’s new supply chain and logistics school as a continuation of the state’s investment in the Port of Virginia and connected industries.

In 2014, the port was in financial doldrums, having lost about $120 million over the past five years, but then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe injected about $1.5 billion in state funding to turn around the port, also hiring CEO John Reinhart, who retired in early 2021, having brought the port back to profitability.

Waters says the state’s 2014 investment showed recognition of “the value of the port as a catalyst for commercial activity in the commonwealth and in the region.”

Today, the port is thriving, but a major challenge to maritime employers is growing the industry’s talent pipeline so they can fill tens of thousands of jobs over the coming decades. 

About 40 people serve on the supply chain school’s advisory board, Tomovic says, and many are involved with local, regional and international maritime employers — from Maersk to the Port of Virginia — as well as the U.S. Department of Transportation, the International Longshoremen’s Association and the Virginia Maritime Association.

The members of this group “have been instrumental in pushing forward with this idea of the School of Supply Chain, Logistics, and Maritime Operations,” Tomovic says. “They see that there is a significant demand for qualified personnel.”

In Hampton Roads alone, the Hampton Roads Workforce Council anticipates the need for at least 30,000 new shipbuilding hires just to work on Navy submarines. 

While parents and students are interested in knowing about employment possibilities before committing to a multiyear college program, ODU strives to help students “understand what the job entails and what are the pathways for the future,” Tomovic says. In turn, the school is focused on developing internships and other opportunities with local businesses for students.

One example of a company looking to fill thousands of jobs in the next decade is Newport News Shipbuilding. In mid-March, the company announced it plans to hire 19,000 skilled trade workers within the next decade, as the Huntington Ingalls Inc.subsidiary works to deliver the Navy’s order of nuclear-powered submarines.

“They are good-paying jobs that take skill and education,” Waters says. “They’re one of the companies that not only needs tradesmen like welders and pipefitters, [but] they also need more advanced workforce capability like engineers — they’re screaming for engineers and naval architects and accountants and logistics people.” And these are all jobs that ODU’s new school can prepare students to land in the future.

“Maritime is something that we are perfectly positioned to be involved with,” Tomovic says. “We do have a significant number of companies that are present here, and their support and their involvement with us makes us in a unique position to create this school that is going to meet their needs.”