Dr. Robert S. Sullivan

Dean,
UCSD Rady School of Management

Robert S. Sullivan, founding dean of UCSD's Rady School of Management, is an internationally acclaimed expert on entrepreneurship, knowledge management, operations and venture financing. In addition to serving as dean, he is the Stanley and Pauline Foster Endowed Chair. Prior to his arrival at UCSD, Dr. Sullivan served as dean of UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School. Under his leadership, Kenan-Flagler rose significantly in the national rankings. He initiated a weekend executive MBA Program that was ranked 5th in the world by Business Week magazine in 2001. He also launched the OneMBA executive MBA program, the first truly global program delivered in partnership with four other top-tier international business schools. From 1995 to 1997, Dr. Sullivan served as director of the University of Texas at Austin's IC2 Institute, a nontraditional international center for research and education on innovation, creativity, capital and commercialization. He held the J. Marion West Chair for Constructive Capitalism in the university's Graduate School of Business. Dr. Sullivan served as dean of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University from 1991 to 1995. During his tenure, the school's rankings rose dramatically. He led a complete reengineering of the school's educational programs, including integrating advanced technology into the field of finance and creating experiential and international distance-learning opportunities for students. From 1976 to 1991, Dr. Sullivan served in a variety of posts at the University of Texas, including the Joe B. Cook professor of management and associate dean for research and academic affairs in the Graduate School of Business. He was co-director of the Center for Technology Venturing, director of the Bureau of Business Research and director of the Manufacturing Systems Engineering Program in the College of Engineering. Dr. Sullivan was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia from 1968 to 1970, where he worked as a lecturer in production management in the College of Business Administration at Haile Selassie I University in Addis Ababa (now Addis Ababa University). Dean Sullivan holds a doctorate in operations management from Pennsylvania State University, a master's degree in production management and quantitative methods from Cornell University and a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Boston College.