Sevin Yeltekin Named New Dean of the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester
Sevin Yeltekin, the Rohet Tolani Distinguished Professor of Economics and senior associate dean of education, will be leaving the Tepper School to become the next dean of the Simon Business School. Yeltekin’s appointment begins July 1, 2020, and will be a five-year term.
“I have had the pleasure of working with Sevin for the past 15 years,” said Bob Dammon, dean of the Tepper School. “Over the years, she has established herself not only as an impactful teacher and scholar but also as an outstanding leader as senior associate dean of education. We will miss her at Tepper but know that she will continue to have a remarkable and long-lasting impact on business education as the new dean at Simon.”
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.
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.
“I am proud of the accomplishments I’ve made over the years at Tepper, both as faculty and senior associate dean, and the decision to leave was difficult," said Yeltekin. “However, Simon Business School, with its rigorous, analytical, and research-driven approach to education is a perfect fit for my background and vision, and I am looking forward to working with the remarkable scholars, staff, and students at Simon to create a new future for them, for the School and the University.”
Yeltekin’s appointment follows a national search to identify a successor to Andrew 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.
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 Ph.D. degrees in economics from Stanford University.