Kenneth B. Dunn, managing director of Morgan Stanley Investment Management and former Carnegie Mellon faculty member, has been named dean of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA), effective July 1, 2002.

Kenneth Dunn will replace Douglas M. Dunn, who announced his retirement last spring. Douglas Dunn, whose tenure has focused on faculty hiring and support, extending global partnerships, the intro-duction of the nation's first graduate degree in electronic commerce and key capital improvements for the larger GSIA community, has served as dean of the business school since 1996.

Although Kenneth Dunn will not officially begin his new role until next summer, he said he would initiate strategic planning activities and transition management plans, including regular campus meetings with faculty, students, staff, alumni and other constituents, beginning this January.

Kenneth Dunn, 49, has spent the past 14 years building a strong mortgage group and managing about $50 billion in core fixed assets at Morgan Stanley, where he logged one of the best records of any mortgage manager in the country. At various times, he also managed the firm's fixed income trading, technology and insurance groups.

"We are pleased to bring on board a person of such accomplishment in business research and education, as well as in the areas of finance and management," said President Jared L. Cohon. "This appointment is even more significant given Ken's prior association with the business school and his personal commitment to the university.

"We will look to Ken Dunn to continue ‹and enhance‹the growth in GSIA programs, outreach and positioning in the higher education and business communities."

Dunn joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1979 as an assistant professor of industrial administration. In 1982, he received the GSIA Excellence in Teaching Award and in 1987 became a tenured professor of finance and economics.

While at Carnegie Mellon, Dunn participated in several collaborative projects, including work that produced the "Sinking Fund Game," which applied game theory to the pricing of bonds in a way that had not been explored before.

Dunn took a leave of absence from Carnegie Mellon in 1988-89 to become a fixed income portfolio manager specializing in mortgage-backed securities at Miller Anderson & Sherrerd. In 1989, he left the university to become a partner at Miller Anderson, which was later acquired by Morgan Stanley Asset Management. Most recently, Dunn was co-head of Morgan Stanley's U.S. Core Fixed Income and Mortgage teams.

"This is a great appointment by the university because Ken combines a distinguished academic career with demonstrated business accomplishment," said Frank A. Risch (GSIA '66), vice president and treasurer of Exxon Mobil Corp. "He brings vision and leadership skills that will take GSIA to an even higher level of excellence among the country's top business schools."

GSIA was ranked as having the second-best MBA program in the world by corporate recruiters in a survey by The Wall Street Journal last spring. The schools with the top five rated MBA programs were Dartmouth College, Carnegie Mellon, Yale University, the University of Michigan and Northwestern University.

Dunn was recommended by a national search committee, led by chair Michael Trick, associate professor of operations research at GSIA and president of the university's Carnegie Bosch Institute.

"He has worked his way through all kinds of management situations, learned to attract top people and to think strategically, so his experiences make him a perfect candidate for managing a major business school," Trick said.

Dunn said his goal is "to work with GSIA's outstanding faculty to make GSIA the best business school it can be."

"I want to encourage faculty to work together and to nurture junior faculty as I was nurtured in my early teaching years," Dunn said. He said his experiences at Carnegie Mellon turned a "shy academic into a self-confident successful risk taker" and that he would "like to give something back to the school that gave me so much."

Dunn earned his doctor's degree in industrial administration from Purdue University and his master's and bachelor's degrees in business administration from Ohio State University.

Chriss Swaney
(01/09/06)