Rutgers Business School-Newark and New Brunswick has appointed Dr. Lei Lei as dean of the school. Dr. Lei will begin her role in the position Jan. 1, 2015. Lei follows Glenn Shafer who has led RBS as dean since 2011.
A combination of Dr. Lei’s accomplishments as an academic leader, her acuity as a scholar and teacher, deeply engaged with business challenges facing communities locally and globally, were among the key qualities that led to her selection.
In a statement to the Rutgers community, Nancy Cantor, Rutgers University–Newark chancellor; Richard Edwards, executive vice president for academic affairs and Rutgers University–New Brunswick chancellor; and Todd Clear, Rutgers University–Newark provost said that, “Lei highly values our faculty of top-notch researchers and practitioners, dedicated staff, and many strong programs initiated and cultivated by previous leaders of RBS. She is very proud of our breathtakingly diverse, high-quality, and vibrant students, supportive alumni, and strong partnerships with the business community.”
Some of Dr. Lei’s accomplishments at Rutgers include becoming the founding director of the Rutgers Center for Supply Chain Management in 2001 and establishing the Department of Supply Chain Management and Marketing Sciences in 2008 as founding chair. Lei also helped to bring Rutgers Supply Chain Management academic programs to national and international prominence.
She is recognized internationally as an expert in operations scheduling, project resource allocation models, logistics performance optimization, and distribution network design. She has also received multiple best professor awards at RBS and was nominated for the 2010 U.S. Professor of the Year Award.
Lei has been a faculty member at Rutgers since received her Ph.D. in industrial engineering from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1989. She has served as an associate editor for academic journals such as IIE Transactions, Naval Research Logistics, Journal of Supply Chain Management and was a co-guest editor for Annals of Operations Research three times. She has also received the Meritorious Service Award from the Editorial Board of Operations Research in 1997.