USC Marshall’s Deputy Dean Gareth James, E. Morgan Stanley Chair in Business Administration and professor of data sciences and operations, will become the new dean for Emory University’s Goizueta Business School beginning July 1, 2022.
“I will never be able to thank Gareth enough for his invaluable help in my transition to Marshall,” said Marshall Dean Geoff Garrett, who began his deanship in July 2020. “I am far from alone in admiring and depending on him for his rare combination of analytic acuity, attention to detail and strategic thinking; for his understanding of and love for all things Marshall, our culture and people; and for his decency, integrity, fairness and, of course, his desiccated wit. I have no doubt that Emory is getting a tremendous dean and that the hole he will leave here is enormous.”
James has spent his entire academic career so far at Marshall. He began in 1998 as an assistant professor of data sciences and operations fresh from earning his Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford. He rose steadily through the ranks, becoming a full professor in 2009, and was named to the E. Morgan Stanley Chair in Business Administration in 2014.
He served as vice dean for faculty and academic affairs from 2013 to 2017, when he oversaw a dramatic expansion of the number and caliber of faculty. He helped co-found Marshall’s Institute for Outlier Research in Business (iORB) and served as its director from 2017 to 2019.
The true test of his leadership abilities came when he was made interim dean from 2019 until Dean Garrett arrived at Marshall in July 2020. By this time, of course, he had overseen the wholesale move online as the COVID-19 pandemic mandated lockdowns.
Recognizing his deep relationship with the Marshall community and his leadership abilities, Dean Garrett asked James to become his deputy dean, essentially the chief operations officer for day-to-day management of faculty and staff.
During his duties as interim and deputy dean, James insisted on continuing to teach his MBA classes.
“It was an extremely hard decision to leave after 24 amazing years at Marshall,” said James. “This announcement was bittersweet for me. I will miss 600 amazing Marshall colleagues, many of whom are close friends. But I believe that Goizueta is a great school that has the potential to get even stronger. The opportunity to be part of that journey was too hard to resist.”
A Statistician’s Method
In addition to his administrative duties, James has continued to publish and burnish his reputation as a leading scholar of methodological statistics.
He has won two Dean’s Research Awards and is an elected fellow of both the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. According to Google Scholar, his research has been cited nearly 20,000 times, with an H-index of 30. Just since the pandemic began, James has published research in six top-tier journals, along with the second edition of his highly successful co-authored textbook, An Introduction to Statistical Learning: with Applications in R.
James delighted in the role of teacher as well as scholar. In addition to the Evan C. Thompson Faculty Teaching and Learning Innovation Award, he has been awarded the Golden Apple for best instructor in the full-time MBA program three times. He is known for being a rigorous mentor to his Ph.D. students, often helping them publish in leading journals, and he has been recognized for mentoring with awards from both Marshall and the University. In 2021, he was awarded the Provost’s Mentoring Award.
