Indian-origin academician Srikant Datar has been named as the Dean of Harvard Business School, succeeding Nitin Nohria and becoming the second consecutive dean hailing from India to lead the prestigious 112-year-old institution. Datar is an alumnus of University of Bombay and Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and is the Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Business Administration besides being the senior associate dean for University Affairs at Harvard Business School (HBS).

He will assume charge from January 1 next year, President Larry Bacow said. He described Datar as an innovative educator, a distinguished scholar, and a deeply experienced academic leader adding that he has recently played an essential role in HBS’s creative response to the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. He has served with distinction in a range of leadership positions over his nearly 25 years at HBS, while also forging novel collaborations with other Harvard Schools, added Bacow.

Datar will become the 11th dean in the business school history. Earlier, he was an assistant professor and then associate professor at the Carnegie Mellon Graduate School of Industrial Administration. He served on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he rose to become the Littlefield Professor of Accounting and Management.

A statement said that since joining the HBS faculty in 1996, Datar has held a series of key positions, as the school’s senior associate dean responsible for faculty recruiting, for faculty development, for executive education, for research, and currently for University affairs. He has served since 2015 as faculty chair of the Harvard Innovation Labs, or i-lab. 

Co-author of several books, he played a key role in launching both the M.S.-M.B.A. in biotechnology and life sciences (with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Medical School) and the M.S.-M.B.A. in engineering sciences (with the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences) joint degree programs.

He currently serves on the boards of companies such as Novartis and T-Mobile US.

Source: PTI