Interviewee Background

Well, just a little bit about my background. I am a graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur in mechanical engineering. I meandered into systems engineering at the University of Pittsburgh and I finished in the business school and the University of Texas at Austin hired me into the marketing group and I stayed at UT Austin for about 25 years until 2003. When I left UT Austin, I was a Senior Associate Dean and UT is a big school, the business school is almost as large as SMU as a whole. From there, I went to Emory University in Atlanta and I was no stranger to Singapore because I was doing some consulting and executive teaching for Hewlett Packard but I was really not aware of SMU till 2007. In 2007, SMU hosted a conference called The Marketing Science Conference and I attended that conference and I ran into Chin Tiong and I ran into, you know, other people as well. But that was my first association with SMU. Our president at that time, Woody Hunter, had been the former Provost at Emory University so he discovered me; however he discovered me, you'd have to ask him, but between him and Chin Tiong, they recruited me to come down and I came down in December 2007 to see what might be possible. And In July, 2008, I started as Provost at SMU.