Regina Frei

Regina Frei is a Professor of Sustainable and Circular Systems with the Institute for Fashion, Textiles and Technology at the University of the Arts London. Her main interests are sustainable value chains and the Circular Economy, with a special focus on product returns in multichannel retail. She has been awarded 23 research grants worth a total of £1.3M, and she has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers, whereof 28 journal articles.

She was with Surrey Business School from March 2023 to June 2024 as an Associate Professor of Digital Economy and a Fellow of the Institute for Sustainability. From September 2019 to March 2023, Regina was with Southampton Business School as an Associate Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management. She launched and led the MSc Strategic Operations and Supply Chain Management and had it accredited by CIPS UK and CILT UK. Regina also created and continues leading the Product Returns Research Group, and interdisciplinary and industry-oriented team of academics from various universities.

From 2013 to 2019, Regina was a Senior Lecturer in Manufacturing Engineering and Supply Chain Management at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Previously, she was a Postdoc at Cranfield University and Imperial College London. She holds a PhD in Distributed Robotics from Universidade Nova, Lisbon, Portugal, and an MSc in Micro-Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. She wrote her MSc Thesis at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden, and did internships with the International Watch Company (IWC) and Schindler Lifts, both in Switzerland.