To: The Stern Community

From: NYU President Andrew Hamilton and Provost Katherine E. Fleming

Date: Wednesday, December 20, 2017

We are pleased to share with you the news that, following an expansive international search, we are naming Rangarajan “Raghu” Sundaram the Dean of the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, effective January 1, 2018.

Many of you already know Raghu, who joined Stern’s faculty a little more than two decades ago. He 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. He is widely respected for the quality of his scholarship and teaching, admired for the wise and innovative leadership he exerts, valued for his collegiality, and prized as a dedicated citizen of the Stern and NYU communities.

Stern has an excellent reputation as a business school. Its faculty are widely sought for their leadership in their fields, and its graduates go on to fill the top ranks of firms in finance and consulting and more recently technology, fashion and luxury, and media and entertainment, among other areas of business.  

The pool of candidates for the deanship was large and extremely talented. The Search Committee, so ably led by Batia Wiesenfeld, Management and Organizations Department chair and the Andre J.L. Koo Professor of Management, recommended from this pool a group of excellent and highly promising finalists.

Ultimately, we determined that the right person to succeed Peter Henry as dean was here in our midst all along: Raghu Sundaram. The Committee and NYU leadership were deeply impressed by his record of innovation – the establishment of the Creative Destruction Lab; the launch of new, specialized one-year MBA programs and development of new specialized masters programs joint with other schools at NYU; 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. We all also took note of his record of service to Stern and the University, including a two-year stint as the chair of the Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty Senators Council, and membership on NYU’s Presidential Search Committee.

In a field of distinguished candidates for Stern’s deanship, Raghu stood out.

Raghu’s scholarly interests include agency problems, executive compensation, corporate finance, derivatives pricing, and 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).

Raghu 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, Ahemedabad 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; the Langone part-time MBA; 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. 

We thank the Search Committee for their hard work and discernment. They took on this task in addition to their regular duties and put in many hours of hard work, and in the end, they have brought us a superb candidate.

Finally, we also want to take this occasion to honor Stern’s current, outgoing dean, Peter Henry. During his deanship, Peter built upon Stern’s existing strengths and believed that Stern could be to the technology sector what it has been to Wall Street since its founding, advocating and fundraising for many program innovations. In fact, Stern shattered all past fundraising records, raising more than $285 million, including more than $160 million for scholarships. Passionate about increasing access to education, Peter secured the first full-need scholarships for undergraduates (now more than fifty). Under his deanship the number of Nobelists at Stern tripled. As he returns to the faculty, we thank him for excellent service and many accomplishments.

Please join us in congratulating Raghu on this well-deserved honor, thanking him for taking on this assignment, and wishing him well as the new dean of Stern.