Business Plans

Lei Lei has been named the new dean of Rutgers Business School–Newark and New Brunswick

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Lei Lei replaces Glenn Shafer as the dean of Rutgers Business School–Newark and New Brunswick.

Photography: 
Fred Stucker

Lei Lei is named the new dean of Rutgers Business School–Newark  and New Brunswick, and Ted Baker is selected as its first  George F. Farris Chair in Entrepreneurship.

Lei Lei has been named the new dean of Rutgers Business School–Newark and New Brunswick (RBS), replacing Glenn Shafer, who had led RBS since 2011. Lei’s accomplishments as an academic leader, scholar, and teacher, and her knowledge of business challenges facing communities locally and globally, influenced the decision to select her, according to a statement from Nancy Cantor, Rutgers University–Newark chancellor; Richard Edwards, Rutgers University–New Brunswick chancellor and executive vice president for academic affairs; and Todd Clear, the provost of Rutgers University–Newark.

Lei—recognized internationally as an expert in operations scheduling, project resource allocation models, logistics performance optimization, and distribution network design—was the founding director of the Rutgers Center for Supply Chain Management, in 2001, and established the Department of Supply Chain Management and Marketing Sciences as the founding chair, in 2008. She received multiple best professor awards at RBS and was nominated for the 2010 U.S. Professor of the Year Award. Lei became a faculty member at Rutgers in 1989.

Meanwhile, Ted Baker has been  selected to be the first occupant of the new George F. Farris Chair in Entrepreneurship at the business school. Baker is the founding executive director of the Entrepreneurship Collaborative at North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management in Raleigh. Baker’s experience and research will benefit Rutgers’ Center for Urban Entrepreneurship and Economic Develop­ment, considered one of the nation’s top entrepreneurship centers.

The business school announced the creation of the George F. Farris Chair in Entrepreneurship in January 2014. Farris, who taught at RBS for 31 years, was the founding director of the Technology Management Research Center. The $3 million endowed faculty position is funded by a $1.5 million gift from the Celia Lipton Farris and Victor W. Farris Foundation, named after Farris’s aunt and uncle. The foundation’s gift was matched by a pledge from an anonymous donor.