The Harvard Business School (HBS), Harvard University on May 4 named Nitin Nohria as the 10th Dean of the 102-year old business school. Nohria is the Richard P Chapman Professor of Business Administration and has been teaching at HBS since 1988. He is slated to take charge of the school on July 1, 2010, said the school’s media release.

“A scholar of leadership and organizational change, Nohria has previously been the School’s senior associate dean for faculty development and chair of its organizational behavior unit,” it added.

Nohria has served in a series of senior roles at HBS over the years. He has been the chair of the organizational behavior unit from 1998 to 2002, director of the division of research in 2003 to 2004, and senior associate dean for faculty development from 2006 to 2009. He became co-chair of the HBS Leadership Initiative in July 2009, and sits on the executive committee of the University’s interfaculty initiative on advanced leadership. Additionally, he has taught across the Business School’s MBA, doctoral, and executive education programs.

Nohria has co-written or co-edited 16 books, and is author of more than 50 articles and dozens of teaching cases and notes, says the HBS website. His most recent book, “Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice” (2010, co-edited with Rakesh Khurana), reflects a colloquium he organized as part of the HBS centennial in 2008 to stimulate serious scholarly research on leadership. More about him on his HBS website profile and his work on Google Scholar.

Nitin Nohria has his origins in India, where he completed his BTech in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay’s batch of 1984. Thereafter, he earned a PhD in Management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.

Indians have previously occupied top positions in US business schools. Notable among them are Dipak Jain, who served as the Dean of the Kellogg School of Management between 2001 and 2009 and Anjani Jain, who currently serves as Vice Dean at The Wharton School.