Patrick T. Harker

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Patrick T. Harker is the President of the University of Delaware. On December 1, 2006, it was announced that Harker had been elected as the 26th President of the University of Delaware and would 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."

Previously, he was the Dean of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Reliance Professor of Management and Private Enterprise. Harker was appointed in February 2001 after serving as both the interim dean and the 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, 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 2007.

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

Harker was named a Presidential Young Investigator by the National Science Foundation in 1986 and as a White House Fellow by President Bush in 1991. In the latter position, he spent 1991-1992 as a Special Assistant to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

During his career, Harker has published five books and over 80 articles. From January 1996 until December 1999, he served as editor-in-chief of Operations Research.