After Dr. Nitin Noharia and Dr. Dipak Jain, tipped to be the new dean at INSEAD, another Indian has made us proud. Dr. Sunil Kumar will take over as the Dean of Chicago Booth School of Business.

After Dr. Nitin Noharia, the dean of Harvard Business School, and Dr. Dipak Jain, tipped to be the new dean at INSEAD, another Indian has made us proud. Dr. Sunil Kumar, currently a senior associate dean at Stanford Business School, will take over as the Dean of the prestigious University of the Chicago Booth School of Business. The announcement was made on July 28, and Prof Kumar will take over as the Dean for five-years from January 1, 2011. Chicago University President Robert Zimmer and Provost Thomas Rosenbaum announced the appointment.

“I am excited to become dean of Chicago Booth,” Dr. Kumar said. “I share the school’s passion for the pursuit of ideas that hold up under careful scrutiny. I look forward to helping strengthen and enhance Booth’s outstanding research environment and its rigorous, discipline-based approach to business education. I am eager to get to know the faculty, students, alumni, and staff of the school, and to engage with the business community in the city of Chicago.”

Dr. Kumar is the Fred H. Merrill Professor of Operations, Information and Technology and an expert in operations research at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He is also the Stanford business school’s senior associate dean for academic affairs. In this role, he oversees the school’s MBA program and also leads the faculty groups in marketing and organizational behavior.

Born in India, Dr Kumar received a Master of Engineering degree in computer science and automation from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Mangalore University in Surathkal.

Dr. Kumar was recently named Professor of the Year at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad.

“Chicago Booth has been consistently recognized among the top business schools in the world, and its faculty, students, and alumni are global intellectual leaders who continue to shape the world of business and its disciplinary underpinnings,” Zimmer and Rosenbaum wrote in a joint email to the Chicago Booth community. “We are delighted that Sunil Kumar has agreed to serve as dean. He brings the right blend of vision, entrepreneurial energy and academic leadership that will build on the contributions of Chicago Booth at a time of tremendous momentum and achievement.”

Dr. Kumar succeeds Edward A. Snyder, who completed nine years as Chicago Booth’s dean on June 30.

Dr. Kumar joined the Stanford faculty in 1996 after receiving his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At Stanford he taught courses in operations management, technology, critical analytical thinking and revenue management. His research interests include performance evaluation and control of manufacturing systems, service operations, and communications networks. Kumar co-developed a widely used factory simulator for teaching operations management. The simulator, “Littlefield Technologies,” has been used in classes at more than 50 business and engineering schools. He has published dozens of scholarly research articles and has served as the editor of the Stochastic Models area of the journal Operations Research.