Madhav Rajan, former senior associate dean at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where he holds the Robert K. Jaedicke Chair in Accounting, has been appointed the next dean of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Daniel Diermeier announced the appointment, which will begin July 1, 2017.
Rajan served as senior associate dean for academic affairs at the Stanford GSB from 2010 to 2016. That role included leadership of Stanford’s MBA program, with oversight of admissions, curriculum, the student experience and career management. He launched new joint-degree programs with Stanford’s engineering school and rolled out initiatives for tighter integration with the rest of the university.
“We sought the most outstanding candidate whose values, ambition and abilities fully comport with the distinctiveness of Chicago Booth as one of methodological rigor in its research and education, and through that commitment one of high impact on the world,” Zimmer and Diermeier wrote in announcing the appointment. “We are confident that Madhav will be an outstanding leader for Chicago Booth in the coming years.”
“The values I have in research and education are deeply valued at Chicago Booth,” Rajan said. “People come here to do rigorous, empirically based research and analysis, which provides the basis for a transformative student experience and an extremely effective MBA curriculum. We have an exciting opportunity to take Booth’s deep strengths and leverage them here and around the world. I am thrilled to have the chance to be dean at what is unquestionably the greatest academic business school.”
Rajan’s primary research interest is the economics-based analysis of management accounting issues, especially as they relate to the choice of internal control and performance systems in firms. He served as editor of The Accounting Review from 2002 to 2008 and is co-author of Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis, the leading cost accounting textbook used around the world.
In 2000, Rajan won the David W. Hauck Award, the highest undergraduate teaching award at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. This April he will receive the Robert T. Davis Award for lifetime service and achievement, the highest faculty recognition awarded by the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Rajan completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of Madras, India. He holds a PhD and two master’s degrees from Carnegie Mellon University. Before going to Stanford in 2001, Rajan held faculty positions at the Wharton School. He held a visiting professorship at Chicago Booth in 2007-08.
Rajan succeeds former Dean Sunil Kumar, who was named provost of Johns Hopkins University in July 2016. His appointment follows a national search, informed by a Booth faculty committee chaired by Reid Hastie, the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science at Booth.
In a note to the Chicago Booth community, Zimmer and Diermeier thanked Douglas Skinner, the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting, who served as interim dean. They noted his vital leadership on the Francis and Rose Yuen Center in Hong Kong, which is scheduled to open in 2018.
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
