Former head of Stanford’s economics department Jonathan Levin will serve as the new dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based school announced on Monday.
Levin will be responsible for leading the business school, which has close ties to Silicon Valley and is known as a pipeline for tech talent. About 1,000 students and 272 faculty members are part of the business school, which offers a two-year MBA, a one-year master’s degree, PhD programs and non-degree certificates. FORBES estimates that five years after graduating, Stanford MBAs earn about $255,000 per year, more than any other MBA graduates in the world.
Levin, 43, is known as an expert in industrial organization and will begin his new role on Sept. 1. His research has focused in part on the economics of organizations and consumer finance.
“Jonathan is an outstanding teacher, a skilled and innovative administrator and a brilliant scholar who has deep understanding of both the academic enterprise and the workings of industry and government,” Stanford Provost John Etchemendy said in a statement on Monday. “Importantly, he brings a vision for the future of management education that is rooted in his extensive scholarship on the evolving needs of a global business community. I have every confidence he will continue the school’s strong trajectory.”
Levin is replacing the current dean Garth Saloner, who is stepping down at the end of this academic year in light of a lawsuit linked to a romantic relationship with a faculty member. Saloner, a South African-born economist, was the subject of a wrongful termination suit by a former Stanford professor whose wife was having an affair with Saloner.
Levin was awarded the American Economic Association’s John Bates Clark Medal in 2011, which recognized him for academic contributions as an economist under the age of 40. He is a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was formerly Guggenheim fellow. He earned bachelor’s degrees in math and English at Stanford in 1994, a master’s in economics from Oxford in 1996 and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000. He became a full-time professor in 2008 and has won department and school-wide awards for his teaching at Stanford. Outside of academia, he has consulted for several Fortune 500 companies, as well as for the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Communications Commission.
“The GSB is devoted to transforming lives by preparing future leaders to change organizations and change the world,” Levin said in a statement. “It will be an honor to join such a committed, dedicated faculty and to support their mission of applying both academic rigor and real-world relevance to their research. Deepening our understanding of management and bringing that knowledge into the classroom couldn’t be more exciting.”
Levin has been steeped in in economics since he was a child. His father, Richard Levin, is an economist and served as president of Yale University between 1993 and 2013.
