Economics Professor Laura D’Andrea Tyson will serve as interim dean of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business starting July 1st, Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ announced yesterday. Tyson, who joined the Haas faculty in 1990, succeeds Dean Richard Lyons, who is stepping down after 11 years in the role.
Tyson is no stranger to the role of dean, having served at Haas’s helm from 1998 to 2001 and as dean of London Business School from 2002 to 2006. She will serve as interim dean while the chancellor’s office continues to seek a permanent replacement for Lyons, which it hopes to have in place this fall.
“We are so fortunate that somebody as able and uniquely qualified for this role as Professor Tyson is willing to step in and help the school during this leadership transition,” Christ said in a statement. “When Laura was dean of Berkeley Haas, she initiated many important programs that laid the foundation for the school’s financial and reputational strengths today. Haas couldn’t be in better hands.”
After stepping down at the end of this month, Dean Lyons plans to take a sabbatical before returning to a full-time Haas faculty position in 2019. Speaking to Clear Admit late last year, he shared that he is looking forward to spending his sabbatical year devoted to time with family and to research and writing, including potentially around blockchain and cryptocurrency.
A renowned economics and public policy scholar, Tyson is an expert on trade and competitiveness who served as chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1995 and director of the White House National Economic Council from 1995 to 1996—the first woman to serve in either position.
In 2013, she launched the Haas School’s Institute for Business and Social Impact, which houses the Centers for Responsible Business (CRB), Social Sector Leadership (CSSL), and Equity, Gender & Leadership (EGaL). She serves as the institute’s faculty director and also chairs the Board of Trustees at the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley. She has also focused some of her policy attention on the links between women’s rights and national economic performance, including as co-chair of the Global Future Council on Education, Gender and Work and as a stewardship board member of the System Initiative on Education, Gender, and Work.
In assuming the interim dean’s role, she praised her predeccesor. “The Berkeley Haas community recognizes and appreciates the enormous contributions that Dean Lyons has made during his deanship,” she said in a statement. “I am honored by the opportunity to serve our community during the transition to the new dean.”
Haas is one of several leading business schools in the midst of a leadership transition this year. Long-time UCLA Anderson School of Management Dean Judy Olian will also leave her post at the end of this month to take over as president of Quinnipiac University on July 1st. And Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management Dean Sally Blount, who has led that school since 2010, will leave her post on September 1st. Anderson Economics Professor Alfred Osborne Jr. will serve as interim dean while that school continues a search for a permanent dean. Kellogg has yet to name a successor for Blount.
To learn more about Hass Interim Dean Laura Tyson, click here.
