Indian-American appointed dean of Cornell University’s Graduate School of Management

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Vishal Gaur, the Emerson Professor of Manufacturing Management and professor of operations, technology and information management, has been named the Anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Dean Andrew Karolyi of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, announced May 5, 2023.

Gaur will take over starting July 1, according to a news item on Cornell Chronicle, and he will also serve as a member of Karolyi’s College Leadership Team.

“Vishal has demonstrated his outstanding commitment to the Johnson School time and again, as a distinguished scholar, as an award-winning educator and especially as an effective leader,” Karolyi is quoted saying in the Chronicle. “I couldn’t be more pleased that he’ll lead the school into its next phase.”

Founded in 1946, the Johnson School now enrolls nearly 1,600 students in MBA, executive MBA and advanced degree programs in management, accounting, business analytics and more, the University noted. Programs are offered in Ithaca, the New York City metropolitan area, Beijing and more than 20 additional cities across North and South America.

On the Cornell faculty since 2007, Gaur said he was excited to take over in the new position as the Johnson School is a leader in graduate business education and scholarship.

“Our degree programs focus on skills relevant to society and draw on our interdisciplinary academic scholarship,” he said. Previously, as associate dean for MBA programs from 2014-19, Gaur is credited with launching the Digital Technology Immersion, in which MBA candidates and students earning their M.P.S. in data science or applied statistics develop skills in coding, databases and advanced analytics and learn to leverage them to tackle challenges faced by leading companies, the Chronicle noted.

Gaur also created the Master of Science in Business Analytics program offered through eCornell, which provides working professionals the opportunity to learn about data analytics tools essential to analyzing and optimizing business decisions.

He has received several awards in the past, including the Wickham Skinner Early Career Research Accomplishments Award from the Production and Operations Management Society in 2006. He created a method for benchmarking inventory turnover performance of firms, and his current projects involve the reduction of food waste and supply chain risk.

In 2022, he received the Class of 1992 Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching, and in 2020 he was recognied with the Stephen Russell Distinguished Teaching Award. He is a three-time winner of the Johnson School’s Core Faculty Award.

He currently teaches the Semester in Strategic Operations MBA immersion course, where students go on site visits and work on client projects in topics such as industry 4.0, traceability, and sales and operations planning.

Gaur did his Ph.D. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (2001), earned his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (1995) and BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (1993).