Ilker Baybars (MSIA 1972, Ph.D. 1979)

Ilker Baybars was one of the longest-serving and most impactful academic leaders at Carnegie Mellon University. The George Leland Bach Professor of Operations Management and Tepper School of Business deputy dean emeritus also served in numerous other roles: dean and CEO of CMU’s Qatar Campus, acting president of the Carnegie Bosch Institute for Applied International Studies, director of the Tepper School’s MBA Program, and head of the Undergraduate Business Administration Program.

Baybars founded the highly successful Part-Time Flex MBA program and the FlexMode MBA program, laying the groundwork for the Part-Time Online Hybrid MBA program. His research interests included assembly line balancing, facility planning and design, telecommunications networks, heuristic algorithms, and graph theoretic modeling, and he published in the leading management journals. Baybars additionally taught quantitative methods, operations research, and production management courses.

Baybars received his undergraduate degree from Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey (1969), spent a year instructing, then earned his master’s (1972) and Ph.D. (1979) from the Tepper School, joining the faculty in 1978.

In honor of his significant leadership and service, alumni, friends, and colleagues established the Class of 1984 Ilker Baybars Endowed Fellowship in 2019.

He was also awarded the 1997 Outstanding Achievement Award of the Tepper School for Leadership and was the first recipient of the Emil Limbach Teaching Award for Excellence in the Classroom from the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy in 1981.