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Rangarajan Sundaram is the new Dean of NYU's Stern School of Business

Professor Sundaram has studied at the University of Madras, the Institute of Management Ahmedabad, and Cornell University

BY BrainGain Magazine Staff Writer | 27-12-2017

Professor Rangarajan “Raghu” Sundaram

NYU President Andrew Hamilton and Provost Katherine Fleming have announced the appointment of Rangarajan “Raghu” Sundaram as Dean of the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, one of the leading business schools in the United States. The Stern School is among the foremost providers of talent in finance and consulting, and more recently technology, fashion and luxury, and media and entertainment, among other areas of business. Professor Sundaram will take up his new duties from January 1, 2018.

Professor Sundaram, who joined Stern’s faculty a little more than two decades ago, is the Edward I. Altman Professor of Credit and Debt Markets and Professor of Finance, and has been Vice Dean of MBA Programs since 2016.

President Hamilton said, “Stern’s reputation is such that it had an outstanding group of candidates for the dean’s post. But in the end, the Search Committee found the best candidate here in our own midst. And rightly so. Raghu Sundaram has a strong, highly regarded record of leadership and innovation, scholarship and teaching, and collegiality and service to both Stern and the University. In a field of distinguished candidates for Stern’s deanship, Raghu stood out.”

Professor Sundaram’s scholarly interests include agency problems, executive compensation, corporate finance, derivatives pricing, credit risk, and credit derivatives. He has published extensively in these areas as well as in mathematical economics, decision theory, and game theory, with articles appearing in such journals as Econometrica, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Business, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Finance, and Review of Financial Studies. He is also the author of A First Course in Optimization Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Derivatives: Principles and Practice (McGraw-Hill, 2010).

Professor Sundaram has been the recipient of research grants from the National Science Foundation and other organizations. He has won the Jensen Prize, was a finalist for the Brattle Prize, and was the recipient of the Stern School’s inaugural Distinguished Teaching Award.

He received his BA in economics from the University of Madras in 1982, and received his MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad in 1984. He received his MA in economics from Cornell University in 1987, and his PhD in economics from Cornell in 1988. He joined the faculty of the University of Rochester in 1988, and remained there until 1996, when he joined Stern’s faculty.

In 2016, he was selected by Dean Peter Henry to join Stern’s leadership team as Vice Dean for MBA Programs, overseeing the school’s full-time MBA program; the Langone part-time MBA program; multiple dual degrees, including seven offered in partnership with the University; the Executive MBA program; the MS in Accounting program; and Advanced Professional Certificate programs. Among his accomplishments as Vice Dean were the establishment of the Creative Destruction Lab; the launch of new, specialized one-year MBA programs; his outreach to industry, securing the support of business leaders from companies such as Amazon, Jigsaw, Microsoft, IBM, PayPal, and others to join the School’s newly created Tech MBA Advisory Board; the extension of the New York City-based Executive MBA program to downtown Washington, D.C., where it is now the highest ranked EMBA in that market; and Stern’s entry into online education, including launching the first in a series of online certificate programs, among others. He succeeds Peter Henry, who held the deanship since January 2010.