Fordham University has named David A. Gautschi, Ph.D., the new dean of its Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA), according to Stephen Freedman, Ph.D., senior vice president/chief academic officer, an appointment that will take effect July 1, 2010. He replaces Robert Himmelberg, Ph.D., who has served as interim dean for the past year.
Gautschi comes to Fordham from the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), in Troy, New York, where he has served since 2005 as dean and professor of marketing and business economics. He is also the acting director of the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship at RPI.
“It would be hard to overstate the importance of David Gautschi’s appointment as dean of GBA,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham University. “Dr. Gautschi comes to us at a time when the Graduate School of Business Administration is poised to scale the heights. The coming years will bring many changes to the business landscape, along with many challenges and opportunities for business educators. Dr. Gautschi’s leadership, his experience, and his wisdom make him the ideal candidate to guide GBA though the next decade.”
Gautschi, who earned a Ph.D. in business administration from the University of California at Berkeley, has extensive experience in business and business education. He co-founded and managed the French firm PRISM, which offered marketing decision support systems and industry-specific market simulation models. Likewise, he was co-founder and co-managing partner at Janus Enterprise International, in Seattle, which provided contract research, management development, market systems analysis and research for clients in the United States, Europe and Asia. He was also firm director of the National eCenter and Management Solutions and Services for the West Sector at Deloitte & Touche LLP, and director of research at CCG Group LLC.
Under Gautschi’s leadership, the Lally School of Management RPI effectively repositioned itself around technological innovation and entrepreneurship, finance and global business in the political economy. There he oversaw an impressive increase in research productivity and worked closely with small faculty teams to create new interdisciplinary programs, including the M.S. in Financial Engineering and Risk Analytics and the M.S. in Technology Commercialization and Entrepreneurship.
At the Lally School he also engaged alumni and the business community in creative new partnerships, including the launch of an innovative roundtable on global business and technology in Wolfsberg, Switzerland, with international academic and business partners.
Gautschi began his academic career at the Graduate School of Business and Public Administration (now the Johnson Graduate School of Management) at Cornell University. He served as associate professor of marketing at the Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires (INSEAD) in Fontainebleau, France, where he designed and directed various executive programs. He has also taught at the Theseus Institute in Sophia Antipolis, France, and at the School of Organization and Management at Yale University.
During his career, Gautschi has taught a broad range of courses at the M.B.A. and Ph.D. levels, in which he draws heavily on his research into the optimization of marketing decisions, choice models, and retailing and marketing systems, as well as his experience in industry and entrepreneurship. He served as associate professor and later professor of marketing and international business at the University of Washington’s School of Business Administration in Seattle, where he founded the school’s Global Information and Telecommunications Forum, and served as its faculty director. In 1997, he was named Kirby Cramer Scholar in Marketing and International Business and directed the Center for International Business Education and Research.
Gautschi will work closely with Donna Rappacioli, Ph.D., dean of the faculty of business and dean of the College of Business Administration. He is strongly committed to exploring the role of the Schools of Business Administration within the University and, in particular, within a Jesuit institution whose commitment to social justice undergirds its highest aspirations.
“Dr. David A. Gautschi is exactly the kind of leader we’d hoped to find for GBA,” Freedman said. “He is not only a highly accomplished educator and administrator, but an entrepreneurial thinker and innovator. In him we gain a breadth of experience and an international perspective that will serve our students and faculty extremely well.”
