As a child, Adriana Rossiter-Hofer often lectured her siblings and friends when they needed help with their schoolwork. “My younger cousins still blame me for playing the teacher and lecturing them during our family vacations with our grandparents,” she says.
“At school, lots of people had a hard time making good grades in math and physics,” she says. “And, for some reason, those were my favorite subjects.” Though Rossiter-Hofer didn’t realize it at the time, she now says that this set her up for a career in teaching.
That she would teach at the University of Arkansas after growing up in the city of Recife in Brazil was not even a thought, she says. Instead, she spent her formative years in the country’s fifth largest metropolitan area, located in northeast Brazil along the Atlantic coast. With its tourists and growing industry, it continues to be a major port and commercial center. Now, as an assistant professor with the Department of Supply Chain Management at the Sam M. Walton College of Business, Rossiter-Hofer takes her students to her home country through the Study Abroad program. During the rest of the year, she teaches international logistics and global supply chain management classes, which cover facets of the supply chain such as transportation, international channels and the commercial aspects of import-export procedures.
With a love for solving problems, Rossiter-Hofer majored in civil engineering at Brazil’s Federal University of Pernambuco in her hometown of Recife. From there, she earned her master’s degree in transportation engineering at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro with emphasis on public transportation and, upon graduation, worked at a consulting firm where she designed highways, toll roads and government logistics plans. This allowed her to collaborate with retailers, manufacturers and third-party logistics providers. “It started to open my eyes to something bigger than transportation,” she says.
Soon, Rossiter-Hofer yearned to work internationally. She was accepted in an exchange program for young professionals through Rotary International. She spent time in Seattle where she visited construction companies, engineering firms and others in her field. The experience moved her so much that she decided that living in the United States was the right thing to do. “It was such a dream come true,” she says.
Rossiter-Hofer became a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland. While there, she met a student from Germany, Christian Hofer, who is now also a supply chain management professor at the Walton College. Wooed by Hofer’s “beautifully and meticulously crafted” PowerPoint presentation, the two fell in love and got married. Now, she has a message to her students: “Work on your presentation skills because you never know. Your future spouse might be in the audience!”
Rossiter-Hofer and her husband have a 4-year-old son, Daniel. Family time is spent traveling globally and doing activities like bicycle riding and enjoying the area’s parks. She says she also loves to work out in the gym doing Pilates, yoga and cycling.
Rossiter-Hofer says when she and her husband earned their doctorates, they had opportunities to work at other universities. Yet, she says they were impressed by Walton College’s supply chain management program and made the move to Northwest Arkansas.
“The university is perfect,” she says. “This is my dream job.”
