Meet the Dean

Madhav Rajan:

This is a school that views scientific research as the backbone of everything that it does, and that's something that resonates very deeply with me. So it's not really why Chicago Booth? It's really that I wanted to be Dean at a school where I would be proud to be a faculty member.

Madhav Rajan:

I'm a lifelong learner, and I think the thing I'm most looking forward to is just learning. Learning about this amazing institution that I have always admired, learning how it works, learning about the faculty, the staff, the students, and the alumni. And as part of that, I hope to spend the first six to eight months just visiting and talking to everybody around. And I'm excited about learning about the school as fast as I can so that I can start making changes happen.

Madhav Rajan:

I would like the community to know just how deeply committed I am to working as hard as I can but in a very thoughtful and mindful manner. On the personal side, I would like the community to know just a little piece of trivia, which is that I actually love trivia. So my claim to fame is that when I was an undergrad in India, I won this national individual quiz competition in my senior year. That was the high point of my life till this appointment, so this has now supplanted my trivia championship as the best thing that's ever happened to me.

Madhav Rajan:

The attributes that I would like to think about are being adaptive, being nimble, being flexible, being willing to adapt to things as they happen. But it's also about running an organization that will attract the best people and retain them. And also an organization where people are happy to come to work every day. I think we need to have an organization that is inclusive, that tolerates viewpoints of all kinds, and that actually supports and encourages diversity. And I would like us to be a leader in that rather than a follower.

Madhav Rajan:

The world is changing, right, as we see it. So I think a vision for Booth has to start with how does Booth adapt to continue to be the leader taking these changes into account? How do we make the kinds of investments in data analytics, data science, and in support for faculty who do these kinds of research? Beyond that, it's about how do we take those findings and have an impact? How do we apply that to fields like healthcare, to education, to energy so that we can take our knowledge of these techniques and data management to have an impact in the real world?

Madhav Rajan:

And I also think any vision has to involve greater collaboration with the university at large. I don't think thinking about business as a field by itself is really the future. It's about thinking of business in combination with other fields like computer science or engineering and so on, and how do we put those together to come up with a great vision for the students of the future.