Ramayya Krishnan

A faculty member at CMU since 1988, Krishnan was appointed Dean when the Heinz College was created in 2008. He was reappointed upon the completion of his first term as Dean in 2014.

Krishnan was educated at the Indian Institute of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin. He has a Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, a Master’s degree in industrial engineering and operations research, and a PhD in Management Science and Information Systems. Krishnan’s research interests focus on consumer and social behavior in digitally instrumented environments. His work has addressed technical, policy and business problems that arise in these contexts and he has published extensively on these topics. He has served as Department Editor for Information Systems at Management Science, the premier journal of the Operations Research and Management Science Community. Krishnan is an INFORMS Fellow, a former member of the Global Agenda Council on Data Driven Development of the World Economic Forum, and a former President of the INFORMS Information Systems Society and the INFORMS Computing Society. He is the recipient of the prestigious Y. Nayuduamma award in 2015 for his contributions to telecommunications management and business technology. He is recipient in 2017 of the Distinguished Alumnus award from the Indian Institute of Technology (Madras).

Krishnan’s government service include his current work on the IT and Services Advisory Board chaired by Gov. Tom Wolf of the State of Pennsylvania. He has served as an Information Technology and Data Science expert member of multiple US State Department Delegations and briefed ICT ministers of ASEAN in October 2014 on big data technology and policy.

Krishnan’s work on helping create innovative organizations include his service for six years beginning in 2002 as advisor to the Dean of a new School of Information Systems created by the Government of Singapore within Singapore Management University. Drawing on a partnership with Carnegie Mellon, the work helped the school recruit faculty, develop innovative curricula and meta curricula and establish best practices for governance of the School.

Krishnan’s leadership experience include the founding of the information systems and management program at Carnegie Mellon, and his term as the First Dean of the Heinz College, a unique college that is home to both the Public Policy School and Information Systems School at Carnegie Mellon. This unique co-location of information technology, public policy and management brings together a multi-disciplinary faculty consisting of engineers, social scientists and information technologists dedicated to educating “men and women of intelligent action.” Faculty and students address important issues at the nexus of information technology, policy and management that arise in domains such as information privacy, evidence-based health care delivery, and urban consumer behavior. The College’s global footprint in the US (Pittsburgh and Washington D.C.), in Singapore and in Adelaide, Australia enable these issues to be addressed from a global point of view using international testbeds and via bi-continental educational programs. INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences, the leading organization of scholars and practitioners of analytics, recognized the Heinz College in 2016 with the UPS George D. Smith Prize for educational excellence. It is the only education institution that is home to both the Von Neumann Theory Prize and the UPS George D. Smith Prize from INFORMS.

Krishnan led the establishment of funded research centers focused on data driven decision making in key societal domains including transportation (http://traffic21.heinz.cmu.edu/), smart cities (https://metro21.cmu.edu/), and living analytics (http://larc.heinz.cmu.edu), and Risk and Regulatory Services Innovation. He has participated in the World Economic Forum, the CES, and a summary of his ideaslab presentation is at http://goo.gl/IqkMKR. A recent interview on Big Data with NDTV is at http://goo.gl/WyxEi3

He has also led a successful fund raising campaign that continues to transform the learning spaces, classrooms, faculty and staff offices and lab spaces in Hamburg Hall, the home of the Heinz College on the CMU campus.

Education

PhD, Management Science and Information Systems, University of Texas at Austin