The dean shares his vision for the school and explains the need for investments in research and education to confront today’s challenges and seize tomorrow’s opportunities.
- By
- September 30, 2026
- Chicago Minds Campaign
Dean Rajan on the Launch of Chicago Minds
The extraordinary pace of change in business, technology, and education is prompting new ways of thinking and opening opportunities for Chicago Booth faculty and students. Advances in artificial intelligence and a growing desire for cross-disciplinary collaboration in fields such as healthcare have spurred the development of new research centers. At the same time, the school is responding to changing student demand with new specializations and masters programs.
The multiyear Chicago Minds fundraising campaign offers Booth a framework within which to fund these initiatives and build on its reputation as a global destination for business leaders and social science researchers. Launched across the University of Chicago in May, the campaign aims to support faculty and students as they apply the university’s rigorous approach to addressing important societal challenges.
This spring, we spoke with Madhav Rajan, the Steven S. Wymer Dean and Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting at Booth and chief global strategist at the university. He said the campaign builds on existing efforts to engage alumni worldwide in shaping the school’s evolution.
“The impressive thing about being in a great academic institution is that the mission hasn’t changed in nearly 130 years: to produce knowledge that’s going to have impact, and to educate leaders,” he said during an interview in his neatly organized office in Hyde Park’s Charles M. Harper Center. Rajan was in Chicago during a break from traveling to meet alumni around the world.
“We’ve been successful on pretty much every dimension. For us, the campaign is an opportunity to go to the next level at a time when the world is rapidly changing.”
Rajan discussed in detail the main priorities of the Chicago Minds campaign at Booth. One of them, investment in faculty research, is particularly important, he said, because new methods of analysis require significant resources, including large compute power. The campaign will also enable the school to continue to yield the best students from around the world by offering scholarships and expanded learning experiences. And it will empower the university community to tackle global problems that call for innovative solutions.
Off to a Running Start
Rajan highlighted several major contributions that preceded the launch of the Chicago Minds campaign. Three years ago, Ross Stevens, PhD ’96, founder and CEO of Stone Ridge Holdings Group, made a gift of $100 million to the school’s PhD program in honor of its 100th anniversary. This gift to what is now the Stevens Doctoral Program has enhanced the school’s ability to attract the very best doctoral students and doubled research support for data and computing.
In addition to providing support for well-established programs, as Stevens did, alumni play a crucial role in generating momentum for new projects, Rajan said, and their passions can point to opportunities. “We create new initiatives because faculty, staff, students, and alumni have a big interest in them,” he said.
For example, Booth’s Healthcare Initiative, launched in 2020 to bring together business and medical perspectives on healthcare across the university, recently expanded to become the Tolan Center for Healthcare, thanks to $12 million in commitments from University of Chicago trustee Mary Tolan, MBA ’92 (XP-61), and her husband, Edward Grzelakowski. Tolan is founder and managing partner of healthcare private equity firm Chicago Pacific Founders.
Rajan also highlighted two more recent major gifts. In July, Booth announced the first endowed deanship in university history. The deanship is named for donor Steven S. Wymer, MBA ’89, a portfolio manager in Fidelity Investments’ equity and high-income division and a University of Chicago trustee.
Also in July, Booth established the GEP Center for Supply Chain Innovation and Applied Technologies, made possible by a generous commitment from GEP, an AI-native procurement and supply chain firm. The GEP Center advances research and education focused on supply chains and seeks to foster connections among operations management faculty, students, and industry leaders. GEP’s cofounders include Subhash Makhija, MBA ’96; Roopa Gandhi Makhija, MBA ’96; and Jagadish Turimella, MBA ’97.
Fueling Faculty Excellence
Booth’s commitment to rigor and intellectual exchange motivates faculty to push the boundaries of understanding and to develop novel methodologies to address complex issues. Through cutting-edge empirical research and creative insights, Booth faculty have reshaped practices in accounting, entrepreneurship, investing, management, marketing, operations, public policy, and other fields. (Read more about faculty innovation in “Moving Research Forward” below.) In the past 15 years, four faculty members have received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
While the school’s commitment to advancing knowledge remains the same, the infrastructure needed to support faculty research has changed dramatically in recent years, Rajan said. Instead of relying primarily on surveys, interviews, and censuses, researchers in the social sciences increasingly combine these traditional methods with huge, continuously updated digital datasets. These larger datasets require different analytical tools, such as machine learning, as well as cloud-computing resources to store data and perform calculations.
As dean, Rajan said, he has learned more about computer servers than he ever would have expected. In this new age, “Booth will need to spend millions of dollars on computing power to support research faculty,” he said.
Researchers are also moving toward testing their hypotheses by conducting randomized controlled experiments that involve real-world scenarios, Rajan noted, citing an increasing emphasis across social science disciplines on real-world findings. This increases costs as researchers look to recruit and pay experiment participants, whether online or in person.
And social science studies more and more involve teams of paid research professionals, a structure that in the past was more common in biology or chemistry labs. In 2017, when Rajan joined Booth as dean, “we maybe had five of these teams,” he said. “Now we have more than 100.”
“Our model is that we hire the best and give them effectively unlimited resources—but then we evaluate them with a very, very high bar.”
— Madhav Rajan
All of these changes enable breakthroughs that would not have been possible 20 years ago. They’re also expensive. Investments provide the resources to make them happen. The Chicago Minds fundraising campaign aims to support both senior Booth faculty members working at the top of their fields and newer faculty poised to chart new paths.
“Chicago is amazing because we promise junior faculty access to all the resources they will need to be successful,” Rajan said. “Our model is that we hire the best and give them effectively unlimited resources—but then we evaluate them with a very, very high bar.”
Those resources include Booth’s 13 research centers and two initiatives providing focused support in specialized areas including accounting, behavioral science, entrepreneurship, and leadership. A new school-wide collaboration, the Arts and Creative Enterprise Initiative, trains students to lead nonprofit arts organizations and bring creativity into business endeavors. Launched in 2024, the initiative hosts speaker series, workshops, and networking events.
The Family Office Initiative, another new offering, is one of the first comprehensive programs at a major university to focus on the family-office industry and its leaders. “It’s an area where huge amounts of money have gone in over the past couple of years—it’s become a whole asset class by itself—but there has been almost no academic research in how family offices should be run and managed,” Rajan said.
Additional fundraising goals include supporting visiting faculty and endowing positions such as assistant professorships and clinical professorships. In 2024, Booth created its first named clinical professorship with funding from three alumni—John Mazarakis, MBA ’17 (XP-86); Tony Cappell, MBA ’17 (XP-86); and Andreas Bodmeier MBA ’17, PhD ’17—who met as students and founded the investment firm Chicago Atlantic Group. Joseph L. Pagliari is the inaugural John Mazarakis and Chicago Atlantic Clinical Professor of Real Estate.
Support for faculty maintains and enhances Booth’s reputation as a premier research institution. It also helps the school bring in bright students to pursue a Booth education and become part of the next generation of business leaders, Rajan said.
Helping Students Access a Life-Changing Education
Booth consistently ranks among the top business schools in the world. More than one-third of its Full-Time MBA students are international, representing more than 60 countries and acting as a testament to the school’s global appeal.
But geopolitics are complicating the picture for business-school admissions offices, Rajan acknowledged. A pause in interviews for student-visa applicants and a subsequent backlog in visa approvals led to a decline in international enrollment in roughly two-thirds of US full-time MBA programs for fall 2025, according to data collected by Bloomberg Businessweek. And international students who are able to attend Booth require a significantly higher level of scholarships and financial aid.
Another trend amplifying student financial need is that fewer employers today fund enrollment in part-time MBA programs, Rajan added. The Evening MBA Program, which used to be larger than the Full-Time MBA Program, has shrunk by about 60 percent in the past 15 years. While Booth used to give scholarships only to Full-Time MBA students, Part-Time MBA students now also seek financial aid to complete their degrees.
This need extends to students in Booth’s Executive MBA Program as well. In 2025, Konstantin Sokolov, MBA ’05 (XP-74), gave a $100 million gift to what is now the Sokolov Executive MBA Program to address this challenge. Sokolov’s gift impacts the hundreds of Executive MBA students who travel from many countries to campuses in Chicago, Hong Kong, and London. It ensures the continued availability of scholarship and operating funds and makes it possible for Booth to continue to refine its curricular and programmatic offerings in response to developments in the modern business environment.
At the same time that financial need has grown for MBA students, the school’s new specialized masters programs, which welcomed their first students in fall 2024, are opening the Booth experience to a wider range of prospective students. The 10-month Master in Management Program is designed for recent undergraduates seeking to develop their business acumen before they start their careers. The 15-month Asness and Liew Master in Finance Program is a quantitative and analytical program that builds technical skills in asset management, fintech, corporate finance, and investment banking. It was funded through a $60 million gift from Clifford Asness, MBA ’91, PhD ’94, and University of Chicago trustee John M. Liew, AB ’89, MBA 94, PhD ’95, cofounders of AQR, a global investment-management firm based in New York City.
A major goal of the Chicago Minds campaign is keeping the Booth experience attainable for top student talent. Donors are invited to support program naming gifts, curricular innovation, student experiences, and endowed scholarships for students across all programs, including joint degrees. (Learn more about the Booth student profile in “A Look at Today’s Students” below.)
“I’m hopeful that we will have a transformative gift to fund student scholarships, which would make a big difference,” Rajan said. “The set of students that we need to think about giving awards to has become much bigger, and as we compete for students, scholarships have become an important factor. If we want to keep attracting the best, we need to do more.”
A Leader in Data Science and Innovation
Booth’s research centers supply the information that helps researchers test their theories. Part of the way they do this is by providing access to vast data troves.
For example, the James M. Kilts Center for Marketing is home to a rich archive of datasets on consumer spending and advertising, and the Center for Research in Security Prices was founded in 1960 to provide the first comprehensive historical source of US financial-market data. (In 2025, CRSP’s board and the university finalized the center’s sale to Morningstar to move the center out from under a higher education into its next phase in commercial investment.)
“We’ve always been the great empirical school,” Rajan noted. “We had people who applied data to finance before anyone else did. My job is to make sure we’re getting the right faculty in every field who can do data analysis and solve important questions.”
As part of the Chicago Minds campaign, Booth will position itself to become a world leader in providing access to data across disciplines and in applying data analytics to understand and address major issues in fields such as healthcare, finance, and sustainability, Rajan said.
Accomplishing this goal will require enhancing computing and data resources for faculty across Booth, including increasing access to highly prized GPU clusters, groups of specialized computer processors that tackle smaller parts of a large data-analysis task in parallel. These clusters enable researchers to quickly mine massive datasets and complete machine learning or AI-assisted analysis that would be infeasible using standard computers, Rajan explained.
“If we had a faculty full of people focused on theory, I’d have a much easier job,” he added. “But that’s not who we are, given that we’ve been at the forefront of data for a long time, long before it became the cool thing it is today.”
“The key is adaptability and having the resources so that we’re able to stay ahead of the curve as we see things move.”
— Madhav Rajan
The fundraising campaign will also advance the work of the Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence, which launched in 2019 and was endowed by an anonymous donor. What’s invaluable about CAAI is that it enables faculty to use AI to produce new insights in a wide range of academic disciplines while developing a greater understanding of the AI tools themselves, Rajan said.
For example, Booth researchers have used large language models to harness unstructured data, such as shareholder letters or Federal Reserve meeting minutes, for financial modeling. In another instance, they used LLMs to improve the performance of marketing emails by generating and ranking content suggestions. Booth researchers are also studying the effects of LLMs on society through CAAI’s Algorithmic Bias Initiative.
The center recently acquired two large datasets of job postings and rental listings and created companion chatbots to help users analyze the data. Potential research areas may include real-time labor-market dynamics, geographic mobility and affordability, the lasting impact of remote work, and urban economics.
While faculty researchers will augment their work with new data and technology, students also stand to benefit, Rajan said. In 2025, Booth added an academic concentration in Applied AI to bring together technical understanding with strategic business insights. New AI-focused courses include AI Essentials, Machine Learning in Finance, and Starting an AI Company.
Booth and the University of Chicago also launched the Joint MBA/MS in Applied Data Science in 2024 for students who want to lead in data-driven industries. The first cohort graduated in June and will apply their knowledge to fields such as investment banking, enterprise AI adoption, consulting, and sports analytics, among others.
Building the Future
As Booth develops new academic areas and degree programs, it’s also working to revitalize its campuses for the next generation of students. Construction and renovation projects, along with infrastructure and equipment upgrades, will ensure that spaces for learning, conferences, and activities remain useful and relevant.
Through the Chicago Minds campaign, Booth plans to update Harper Center, the school’s 415,000-square-foot global headquarters, which opened in 2004 at a cost of $125 million.
“This building is gorgeous, but it’s 22 years old now, and the classrooms need to be completely updated for technology,” Rajan said.
Gleacher Center in downtown Chicago, which opened in 1994, also requires modernization.
And Booth will be expanding its footprint on the Hyde Park campus in the former Chicago Theological Seminary building to create a dedicated space for the school’s growing programs.
Booth also will rely on the campaign to strengthen its Annual Fund, which is used for flexible, unrestricted spending, Rajan said. The fund supports student scholarships and cocurricular programming, helps hire and retain faculty, and allocates resources to new and existing research centers.
Alumni Generate Opportunities
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“We have been successful because we have great alumni—we would be nothing without them,” Rajan noted. In particular, he points to the historic $300 million gift the school received from David Booth, MBA ’71, in 2008, saying it has been instrumental in positioning the school to attain its current position. “We are where we are because of David Booth’s transformational gift. Without that, we would have had aspirations, but we just wouldn’t have been able to play at this level.”
Rajan said he wants all alumni to feel they can contribute to the Chicago Minds campaign, regardless of their financial capacity. For example, the school plans to maximize the impact of alumni contributions by creating matching pools that will strengthen the power of smaller gifts. Alumni also contribute by mentoring current students, participating in the Distinguished Speaker Series, leading alumni community groups, and judging competitions such as the Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
As dean, Rajan has worked to broaden alumni engagement, hosting events across the United States and around the world. Faculty participate in fireside chats, giving alumni the chance to take part in the kinds of spirited debates they might remember from their student days. The Faculty in Residence series places senior professors at the London and Hong Kong campuses for up to three quarters. These programs give alumni opportunities to reconnect with Booth, learn more about its current projects, and support research, scholarships, and student programs, Rajan explained.
Philanthropic support of Chicago Booth accounts for nearly 40 percent of the school’s revenue. A successful fundraising campaign will enable Booth to foster groundbreaking faculty research, provide financial resources to more students, extend its reputation in data science and analytics, and refresh its campuses to create better learning experiences. But much of what will happen in the next 5 to 10 years will also depend on changes in the business landscape, emerging opportunities, and innovation from faculty members, students, and alumni.
“It will be different in ways I can’t even anticipate,” Rajan said. “The key is adaptability and having the resources so that we’re able to stay ahead of the curve as we see things move.”
Moving Research Forward
Chicago Booth faculty members are leaders in their fields, and the value of their research is widely acknowledged. In 2025, the Financial Times recognized Booth as the top business school in the world for “producing research that has the most impact on management.” Now, as the world evolves, faculty are leveraging technology and collaborating across disciplines to apply their insights in new ways.
“If you haven’t been in touch with Booth research for a while, you’ll see we’re quite varied in what we’re able to do,” says Michael Minnis, deputy dean for faculty and the Fuji Bank and Heller Professor of Accounting. “We’re still top tier in finance and accounting and economics, but we’ve grown in terms of building out operations, marketing, and behavioral science, and now also applied artificial intelligence.”
Recent faculty awards evidence how Booth continues to set the bar for research in finance. Julia Selgrad, assistant professor of finance and a Liew Family Junior Faculty Fellow, won the 2026 Best Paper in Corporate Finance Award from the Society for Financial Studies for research analyzing how monetary policy influences businesses’ investment decisions. Taisiya Sikorskaya, assistant professor of finance and a Fama Faculty Fellow, received the 2025 Fama-DFA Prize for the best paper in the Journal of Financial Economics for a study on arbitrage in the options market.
Faculty members also are using new analytical techniques to reexamine old research questions. “Gene Fama did groundbreaking finance studies with punch cards and a single computer in the basement,” Minnis says, referring to Eugene F. Fama, MBA ’64, PhD ’64, the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance and a 2013 Nobel laureate for his work on efficient markets. Today, Minnis continued, “finance is revisiting its foundational findings with compute power that isn’t remotely similar to what Gene had.”
Booth’s Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence supports faculty in exploring how AI and machine-learning techniques are changing the practice of business, science, and social policy. “Everybody thinks AI is a transformative technology, and we have to be at the leading edge of it,” Minnis says. “Every one of our research groups has somebody investigating the role of AI in the business world. The ability of our new AI group to influence, inform, and engage other faculty members adds a lot of benefits.”
Some Booth faculty members affiliated with CAAI are using their computer science backgrounds to look under the hood of AI models. Others studying finance and accounting are using AI to better understand and predict company stock prices, earnings, and operations.
One challenge of conducting research with AI, Minnis says, is that backtesting—measuring a predictive model against historical data—can be difficult because scholars can’t easily tell whether AI models are incorporating information from more recent training data that would, in effect, be using the future to predict the past.
To eliminate this “look-ahead bias,” Ralph S. J. Koijen, the AQR Capital Management Distinguished Service Professor of Finance and Applied AI and a Fama Faculty Fellow, and Bradford Levy, assistant professor of accounting and applied AI and an Asness Junior Faculty Fellow, recently conducted a live test of several frontier models and AI optimization methods. They found that the best AI systems can explain about 17 percent of same-day stock moves in response to earnings announcements.
Increasingly, Minnis has to strategize about how to allot expensive GPU access among faculty for high-powered computing processes. He says Booth plans to devote some of its computing resources to a self-contained system that will allow faculty to do historical research without concerns about look-ahead bias. Working with the Tolan Center for Healthcare, he also helped Sarah Jabbour, assistant professor of applied AI and the Fishman Faculty Fellow, secure specially isolated GPU clusters for her healthcare research to comply with HIPAA requirements for protecting patients’ health information.
About half of Booth’s research budget goes toward hiring assistants to clean data, code, and prepare information for analysis. The work of these assistants has become more important over time as researchers explore unstructured data such as text that needs additional preparation to become useful.
Another portion of the research budget includes funding studies involving human subjects or companies in the field. Projects that follow this gold standard of research—with randomized and control subjects—can be lengthy and complex.
One research study in progress led by Emanuele Colonnelli, the Joseph L. Gidwitz Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship, and former Booth faculty member Thomas Rauter, now at the University of Zurich, examines the effects of providing accounting services to small businesses in Africa. “A study like that can take $1 million and a fair amount of grant underwriting,” Minnis says. “That’s a great example of someone who took bold action and risk to undertake such a large project.”
A big part of the deputy dean’s job is finding ways to support innovative research aims like these, Minnis says. Through the Chicago Minds fundraising campaign, Booth alumni can enable future projects that have the potential to revolutionize how business is studied and practiced.
“Financial contributions and alumni engagement make this work—period,” Minnis says. “Our alumni enable us and encourage us to take risks. That’s how we’re able to stay on the cutting edge, and it’s the only way that people like me can keep saying yes.”
A Look at Today’s Students
There are more routes to a Booth education today than in the past, which means more students are entering with nontraditional backgrounds and new perspectives. The school is meeting their needs and interests with programs, curricula, and activities, as well as with a growing commitment to making an education financially attainable. This programmatic innovation is made possible with the support of alumni.
No matter when you graduated from Booth, you may be interested to learn about how our students have changed—and how the fundamentals remain the same:
Expanded Programming
Booth is reaching new student populations both within and beyond the university. In 2018, the College launched a specialization in business economics as part of the economics major, with courses taught by Booth faculty members. The program has grown rapidly since its launch. About 25 percent of all College students are economics majors, with about half of them now choosing the business economics track.
Joint-degree programs are also expanding Booth’s student population. Over the past few years, the school has added the Joint MBA/MS in Biomedical Sciences, the Joint MBA/MS in Applied Data Science, and new Applied AI and Healthcare concentrations, appealing to students who are looking to combine business expertise with foundational knowledge in these vital areas.
Serving as a vanguard for AI in higher education, the school recently launched MasterClass Executive, a 12-week certificate program taught in collaboration with MasterClass, an online education platform. More than 700 people joined the program’s first cohort, which pairs instruction from Booth professors with a personalized AI tutor.
Evolving Interests
While many students come to Booth from business roles, others are young professionals who have been working in government, nonprofit organizations, or the arts; still others are fresh out of college. What unites them is an interest in rigorous academics and a desire to study with faculty who significantly advance their disciplines through innovative research and set high expectations for student learning.
Entrepreneurship is still a big draw for students, some of whom want to start their own business or, increasingly, are looking to buy an existing company and run it, says Starr Marcello, AM ’04, MBA ’17, deputy dean for MBA and masters programs, special advisor to the provost, and adjunct associate professor of entrepreneurship. The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation continues to provide accelerator programs, workshops, guest speakers, and other experiences to help students develop their skills. The Polsky Center is also growing its footprint with an innovation hub in San Francisco, Third Coast Foundry, which opened in June.
In addition, social impact remains important for career decisions. It has been an area of significant focus and growth in the Booth curriculum for more than a decade. The Business, Society, and Sustainability concentration now offers in excess of 20 courses, more than half of which were designed in the past five years. “Students are thinking about not only how to do well financially for themselves but also how to do well for society,” Marcello explains. “They have strong curiosity around the overall impact they can have on communities and how a Booth education will help them realize that goal.”
A Diversity of Career Paths
“Consulting is still king,” says Marcello. More than one-third of students in the Full-Time MBA Program join a management consulting firm after completing their degree. But a growing number of graduates are drawn to other fields, including technology and healthcare, she says.
The Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence, the Tolan Center for Healthcare, the GEP Center for Supply Chain Innovation and Applied Technologies, the Arts and Creative Enterprise Initiative, and the Family Office Initiative help support students’ educational and career goals, in addition to advancing academic research.
“We have grown our research and learning centers around areas of interest for faculty and students,” Marcello says. “These new centers and initiatives deepen our sense of community, our connections with one another, and our ability to transform industries.”
The Power of Alumni Engagement
Alumni engagement through the Chicago Minds campaign will strengthen support for students who may have less of a financial cushion to sustain them as they pursue an MBA. “Scholarships will be one of the most critical resources Booth can deploy to recruit the students who are most likely to create an impact and be successful,” says Marcello.
“The reality is that when prospective students choose another school over Booth, the number one reason is something not within our control: location,” she says. “Chicago is an amazing city, but students sometimes gravitate toward schools on the East and West Coasts. We can’t change our location, but resources like scholarships will help us overcome that hurdle.”
In addition to providing financial support, alumni play an important role in introducing the Booth brand to new audiences and sharing with potential applicants the many benefits of a Booth education. “Alumni are a key part of our community,” Marcello says. “They serve as role models, helping prospective and current students see future paths for themselves.”
Alumni support of the Chicago Minds campaign will strengthen ties between generations of Booth students. “The school is only as successful as the people who come through our doors,” Marcello says. “Having the best possible candidates know about Booth and pursue degrees here is fundamental to the school’s future impact.”
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