Biographical Information
Professor Patrick T. Harker
Dr. Patrick T. Harker is the 26th President of the University of Delaware, a position that he assumed on July 1, 2007. The official website for Dr. Harker in his role as President can be found at www.udel.edu/president .
Concurrent with his appoint as President, Dr. Harker was appointed as a Professor of Business Administration at the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics and a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering in UD's College of Engineering.
Prior to his appointment at UD, Dr. Patrick T. Harker was the Dean of the Wharton School and the Reliance Professor of Management and Private Enterprise. Dr. Harker was appointed as Dean on February 8, 2000 after serving as both the Interim Dean and Deputy Dean of the school. Dr. Harker was also a Senior Fellow at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center and held a secondary appointment as a Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering at Penn. Prior to his appointment as Interim and Deputy Dean in July 1999, Dr. Harker served as Chairman and Professor of Operation and Information Management at the Wharton School.
Dr. Harker currently serves as a Trustee of the Goldman Sachs Trust and the Goldman Sachs Variable Insurance Trust and as a founding member of the Board of Advisors for Decision Lens, Inc.. Previously, Dr. Harker served as a member of the as well as serving as a member of the Board of Managers of the Goldman Sachs Hedge Fund Partners Registered Fund LLC. the Advisory Board of Juniper Bank, and chaired the Scientific Advisory Board of Traffic.com, Inc.
In terms of nonprofit leadership, Dr. Harker is a founding member of the Board of Directors of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management and is a member of the Board of Christiana Care Health System as well as the board of Easter Seals of Delaware; he also served as a Member of the Diocesan Finance Council for the Diocese of Camden, NJ,.
Dr. Harker received his B.S.E. and M.S.E. in Civil Engineering in 1981, and an M.A. in Economics and a Ph.D. in Civil and Urban Engineering (Transportation Planning and Economics) from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983.
Prior to graduation from Penn, Dr. Harker worked as a consulting engineer in Philadelphia and New York. He was a member of the faculty of the University of California-Santa Barbara prior to joining the Wharton School in 1984. Dr. Harker is the youngest faculty member to be awarded an endowed professorship in the history of the Wharton School. In January 1994, Dr. Harker was named Chair of the Department of Systems Engineering Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science and held this position until December 1996; he was appointed as Chair of the Operations and Information Management Department at Wharton in July 1997.
The naming of Dr. Harker as a Presidential Young Investigator by the National Science Foundation in 1986 affirmed his reputation as a leading scholar in the areas of service and technology management and operations research. In his twenty-six year career, he has published or edited nine books and over 100 professional articles. Most recently, Dr. Harker is engaged in the analysis of the operations and economics of the service sector. Dr. Harker served as Director of the Fishman-Davidson Center for the Study of the Service Sector at Wharton from 1989 to 1994, and as a co-principal investigator on a $6 million project from the Sloan Foundation to study productivity and technological impacts in financial services.
In June 1991, President Bush named Dr. Harker as a White House Fellow, one of sixteen chosen in the country. In this position, he spent 1991-92 as a Special Assistant to the Director of the F.B.I. , as well as participating in a variety of off-the-record discussions and trips with national leaders. In January 1996, he was named Editor-in Chief of Operations Research, the premiere journal of the field, a position he held until December 1999.
Dr. Harker is married to the former Emily Grace Saaty and is the father of three children: Thomas Patrick, Michael Francis, and Meghan Emma.
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Patrick T. Harker
harker@udel.edu
Created June 15, 2007
Last modified February 23, 2009
