Patrick T. Harker

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Dr. Patrick T. Harker is the Dean of the Wharton School and Reliance Professor of Management and Private Enterprise. Dean Harker was appointed in February 2001 after serving as both the Interim Dean and Deputy Dean of the school. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center. Prior to his appointment as Interim and Deputy Dean in July 1999, Dr. Harker served as Chairman and Professor of Operations and Information Management at Wharton; he has also served as Director of the school’s Fishman-Davidson Center for the Study of the Service Sector, and is currently a co-principal investigator on a $6 million project from the Sloan Foundation to study productivity and technological impacts in financial services. He will serve as the President of the University of Delaware beginning in July of 2007.

Before receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, Dr. Harker worked as a consulting engineer in Philadelphia and New York. He was a faculty member of the University of California, Santa Barbara, prior to joining Wharton in 1984. Dr. Harker is the youngest faculty member to be awarded an endowed professorship in the history of the Wharton School. From 1994 to 1996, Dr. Harker served as a Professor and Chair of the Systems Engineering Department in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.

The naming of Dr. Harker as a Presidential Young Investigator by the National Science Foundation in 1986 affirmed his reputation as a leading scholar in the areas of service operations, technology management, and operations research. In June 1991, President Bush named Dr. Harker as one of sixteen White House Fellows. In this position, he spent 1991-1992 as a Special Assistant to the Director of the FBI.

In his career, Dr. Harker has published 5 books and over 80 articles. From January 1996 until December 1999, he served as Editor-in-Chief of Operations Research.

On December 1, 2006, it was announced that Harker has been elected as the 26th President of the University of Delaware and will take office on July 1, 2007. Howard E. Cosgrove, chairman of the University's Board of Trustees, said "Patrick T. Harker has an excellent combination of experience and skills to lead the University of Delaware forward." David Roselle, the university's current president, announced that he would be stepping down as of May 1, 2007.