https://msande.stanford.edu/about/welcome

Dear MS&E Community,

I am pleased and honored to have accepted the role of Department Chair as of January 1, with my colleague Margaret Brandeau as Associate Chair. I would like to take this opportunity to share some initial thoughts, as we embark on reshaping our Department and the field.

Under the leadership of the outgoing Chair, Peter Glynn, and his Associate Chair, Stephen Barley, as well as the former Chair, Elisabeth Pate-Cornell, the MS&E Department has risen to the top of its field internationally. In particular, in the last few years we have made spectacular young faculty hires, positioning us to capture key intellectual opportunities with broad social impact.

This change comes at a time when the School of Engineering, under the new leadership of Dean Persis S. Drell, is reimagining its future and how we can work across boundaries to have impact.

The uniquely broad and deep intellectual footprint of MS&E includes established excellence in a variety of diverse areas, ranging from computational social sciences to strategy and entrepreneurship studies, from decisions and risk to health policy, from economics and finance to energy systems, and from core analytics and operations research to organizational studies. We are well positioned to play a powerful role in solving the world’s biggest challenges.

We recently launched MS&E-2025, a process to generate a strategic vision for the Department and a transition path to where we want to be in ten years. It will range from identifying emerging intellectual opportunities with long-term practical impact, to reaffirming our commitment to increasing diversity and designing an implementation plan. It will involve the faculty and students, as well as our industry friends and our alumni. I look forward to working with all of you to extract the best ideas and distill a powerful vision.

Thank you so much for your invaluable contributions in the past, and we look forward to your continued participation and support, as we venture into the future!