Johns Hopkins Appoints Sunil Kumar As New Provost

According to a post on The Hub, the Johns Hopkins University news blog, the school has hired Sunil Kumar, dean of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a widely published expert on operations management and research, as the 15th provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Johns Hopkins University.

Kumar will officially become a member of the university’s faculty on September 1, 2016. He has spent the past five years as dean at Chicago Booth. Before that, he was professor and senior associate dean for academic affairs at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Kumar succeeds Robert C. Lieberman, who announced in February that he would step down as provost to return full-time to research and teaching. Kumar was appointed by the executive committee of the Johns Hopkins board of trustees on the recommendation of President Ronald J. Daniels, who released the following statement about Kumar:

“Sunil is a proven academic leader with uncompromising standards for excellence, great integrity, and a deep-seated commitment to collaboration. He is a scholar and leader passionate about higher education, committed to values that align with the priorities of the Johns Hopkins Ten by Twenty‘ strategic vision, and well-suited to be a steward and champion of this extraordinary institution.”

As provost, Kumar will work with the president and deans on university-wide interdisciplinary collaboration, academic policy, and key priorities including diversity and student aid.

Kumar told The Hub:

“I’m honored to join and serve the Johns Hopkins community. I have long admired the university, its outstanding faculty, and its excellent academic programs. I’m excited to work with President Daniels and the deans to implement the path forward laid out in the Ten by Twenty.

Born in India, Kumar received a Masters of Engineering degree in computer science and automation from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and a Bachelors of Engineering degree from Mangalore University in Surathkal. He earned a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Kumar is also a respected scholar and academic researcher. His published work includes performance evaluation and control of manufacturing systems, service operations, and communications networks. Kumar has served as the editor of the Stochastic Models area of the journal Operations Research. He co-developed a widely used factory simulator for teaching operations management. The simulator, “Littlefield Technologies,” has been used in classes at more than 50 business and engineering schools. He also served as an operations consultant to several companies.

regions: Baltimore

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