Patrick T. Harker Named Dean of the Wharton School
(Announced February 8, 2000)
Patrick T. Harker, a distinguished member of the faculty of the Wharton
School at the University of Pennsylvania for more than 15 years, has been
named dean of the school, according to an announcement today (Feb. 8) by
University President Judith Rodin. The appointment will become effective
upon confirmation by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania on
Feb. 18, 2000.
Dr. Harker, who is the UPS Transportation Professor of the Private
Sector and professor of operations and information management at Wharton,
has served as interim dean of the Wharton School since July 1, 1999. He
has a secondary appointment in the department of systems engineering in
the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Penn and is a senior fellow
of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center.
"Pat Harker is recognized as one of the brightest young minds
in America," Dr. Rodin said. "His is an extraordinary record
of accomplishment and leadership, as a teacher, researcher, consultant
to government and industry and as a university citizen.
"We are pleased that our search, which has been one of the most
exhaustive and thorough ever conducted at Penn, has led us back to a distinguished
member of the Penn family, and we believe America's premier business school
will have the benefit of his superb leadership for many years to come."
Dr. Harker has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors for
his teaching, including the 1998 David W. Hauck Award for Outstanding Teaching
in the Undergraduate Division at Wharton. He also was the recipient of
the 1992 Miller-Sherrerd MBA Core Teaching Award at Wharton. He was the
Laurent Picard Distinguished Lecturer (1998) at McGill University, Montreal,
Quebec, Canada. He also was the CORE Lecturer (1993)) at the Center for
Operations Research and Econometrics at the Universite Catholique de Louvain,
Belgium.
Dr. Harker was the recipient of a National Science Foundation Presidential
Young Investigator Award in 1986-91. His research interests have focused
on service operations management and economics; information systems, with
particular emphasis on business-to-business electronic commerce; financial
service operations and technology; and operations research methodology,
with emphasis on mathematical programming. His research has been funded
by the federal government, foundations and the corporate sector, including
the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Burlington
Northern Railroad, Union Pacific Railroad, the AT&T Program in Telecommunications
Technology and the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Dr. Harker holds U.S. Copyright No. 441-941 (with Dejan Jovanovic)
for Scheduler Analyzer II: SCAN II, which was issued on Oct. 15,
1990; and U.S. Patent No. 5,177.684 (with Dejan Jovanovic) for A Method
for Analyzing and Generating Optimal Transportation Schedules for Vehicles
such as Trains and Controlling the Movement of Vehicles in Response Thereto,
which was issued Jan. 5, 1993; Australian Patent No. 644664, which was
issued April 22, 1994; and Canadian Patent Application 2,046,984-6, which
was filed July 12, 1991.
He has been a consultant to numerous corporations, including Furash,
Inc., Union Pacific Railroad, Software A&E, Inc., Zeta-Tech, Associates,
Chena Software laboratory, Maxima, Inc., as well as to the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Department of Energy.
Dr. Harker is the author of nine books, monographs and edited volumes,
including "Performance of Financial Institutions," with
S.A. Zenios, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, as well
as book chapters, cases, book and software reviews, refereed and other
publications. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Operations Research
(1996-present), and he is a member of the editorial boards of Computational
Optimization and Applications, the Journal of Service Research,
Transportation Research and International Studies in the Service Economy.
Dr. Harker is a member of the American Economic Association, the International
Federation of Operations Research/Management Science, the Mathematical
Programming Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
Dr. Harker joined the Wharton faculty as the Stephen M. Peck Term Assistant
Professor of Decision Sciences in 1984, was appointed associate professor
of decision sciences in 1987 and UPS Transportation Professor of the Private
Sector in 1991. He was a visiting scholar in the department of operations
research at Stanford University (1989) and a member of the faculty at the
University of California, Santa Barbara (1983-84). Dr. Harker was one
of 16 men and women throughout the country named as a White House Fellow
by President George W. Bush in 1991-92, serving as a special assistant
to the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, responsible for
the director's technology issues.
He served as coordinator of both Wharton's Decision Sciences Ph.D.
Program (1986-88) and its Operations and Information Management Ph.D.
Program (1993-94). Dr. Harker was director of the Fishman-Davidson Center
for the Study of the Service Sector at Wharton (1989-94). He was chair
of the department of operations and information management at Wharton (1997-99)
prior to his appointment as interim dean.
Dr. Harker received both bachelor's and master's degrees in civil and
urban engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1981. He received
a master's degree in economic and a Ph.D. degree in civil engineering from
Penn in 1983. |