Sevin Yeltekin, the Rohet Tolani Distinguished Professor of Economics and senior associate dean of education at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, has been appointed the next dean of the Simon Business School. University Provost Rob Clark announced her appointment, which will begin July 1 and will be a five-year term.
“Sevin is an internationally renowned economics scholar and an esteemed innovator in business education, and I am proud to introduce her as Simon’s eighth dean and the school’s first ever woman leader,” said Clark. “She is exceptionally well prepared to lead Simon with both ambition and ability to continue to enhance the school’s prominence nationally and globally, and provide students with outstanding academic and professional experiences.
“I also wish to thank Dean Andrew Ainslie for his outstanding service as dean for six years. His leadership has undoubtedly advanced the Simon Business School in significant and meaningful ways,” said Clark.
Yeltekin’s appointment follows a national search led by Jim Brickley, the Gleason Professor of Business Administration at Simon, to identify a successor to Ainslie, who has led the school since 2014. Since its formal establishment as a graduate school in 1958, Simon has grown to an enrollment of more than 1,200 students across nearly a dozen degree programs and was the first graduate business program in the nation to earn STEM designation for all of the school’s full-time programs. The dean is responsible for the administrative and academic functions of the school, is the leading advocate of its faculty, programs and students to the business community and other external constituencies, and shapes the vision and priorities for the school.
“I’m delighted to welcome Sevin Yeltekin to Rochester knowing that she brings great intellectual energy and strategic vision to this key leadership role,” said University President Sarah Mangelsdorf. “I’m very confident she will take the Simon Business School to new levels of excellence.”
Yeltekin joined the Tepper School in 2005 as assistant professor of economics and was named professor in 2017. She has also been serving as Tepper’s senior associate dean of education since 2017, advancing the academic and student experience for the school’s undergraduate and graduate programs. In the past three years, she has overseen and completed the successful launch of two new specialized master’s programs—Master of Science in Product Management, and Master of Science in Business Analytics. Additionally, she led the business school through its 5-year re-accreditation process, completed the process for MBA and PhD programs to be STEM-designated, and launched a new undergraduate interdisciplinary major, Economics and Politics.
A highly respected macroeconomics scholar, Yeltekin is well-known for her research in the design of sustainable monetary and fiscal policies in environments where policymakers and the public have informational asymmetry. Her research spans fiscal policy design, social insurance design, computational economics and asset pricing implications of macro policy. She co-founded and leads the Blockchain Initiative at Tepper, which brought together all of the school’s research, teaching and thought leadership on blockchain and cryptocurrencies under one umbrella.
She has been a member of the advisory board for the Carnegie Rochester NYU Series on Public Policy since 2012. The series has been a semi-annual event occurring on a rotating basis at each university and encourages the interchange of scientific ideas among analysts with different approaches, and gives greater understanding by academic economists of practitioner’s environments.
“Simon Business School, with its rigorous, analytical and research-driven approach to education is a perfect fit for my background and vision,” said Yeltekin. “Simon delivers the state of the art and foundational skills in all of its programs to help the next generation of leaders create innovative solutions for businesses and society at large. This is a remarkable time to be in business education and in higher education in general. The business and societal challenges and opportunities are unprecedented, and I am looking forward to working with the remarkable scholars, staff and students at Simon to meet these challenges and create a new future for them, for the school and the university.”
Prior to joining the Tepper School, Yeltekin was a member of the faculty at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She has served as an associate editor at four journals: Operations Research, Journal of Monetary Economics, Macroeconomic Dynamics, and Quantitative Economics.
She received her bachelor’s degree in economics and mathematics from Wellesley College, and master’s and PhD degrees in economics from Stanford University.
