PHILADELPHIA --- Patrick T. Harker, a distinguished member of the faculty of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania for more than 15 years, has been named dean of the school, according to an announcement today (Feb. 8) by University President Judith Rodin.

The appointment will become effective upon confirmation by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania on Feb. 18, 2000.

Dr. Harker, who is the UPS Transportation Professor of the Private Sector and professor of operations and information management at Wharton, has served as interim dean of the Wharton School since July 1, 1999. He has a secondary appointment in the department of systems engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Penn and is a senior fellow of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center.

"Pat Harker is recognized as one of the brightest young minds in America," Dr. Rodin said. "His is an extraordinary record of accomplishment and leadership, as a teacher, researcher, consultant to government and industry and as a university citizen.

"We are pleased that our search, which has been one of the most exhaustive and thorough ever conducted at Penn, has led us back to a distinguished member of the Penn family, and we believe America's premier business school will have the benefit of his superb leadership for many years to come."

Dr. Harker has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his teaching, including the 1998 David W. Hauck Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Undergraduate Division at Wharton. He also was the recipient of the 1992 Miller-Sherrerd MBA Core Teaching Award at Wharton.

He was the Laurent Picard Distinguished Lecturer (1998) at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He also was the CORE Lecturer (1993)) at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics at the Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium.

Dr. Harker was the recipient of a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1986-91.

His research interests have focused on service operations management and economics; information systems, with particular emphasis on business-to-business electronic commerce; financial service operations and technology; and operations research methodology, with emphasis on mathematical programming.

His research has been funded by the federal government, foundations and the corporate sector, including the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Burlington Northern Railroad, Union Pacific Railroad, the AT&T Program in Telecommunications Technology and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Dr. Harker holds U.S. Copyright No. 441-941 (with Dejan Jovanovic) for Scheduler Analyzer II: SCAN II, which was issued on Oct. 15, 1990; and U.S. Patent No. 5,177.684 (with Dejan Jovanovic) for A Method for Analyzing and Generating Optimal Transportation Schedules for Vehicles such as Trains and Controlling the Movement of Vehicles in Response Thereto, which was issued Jan. 5, 1993; Australian Patent No. 644664, which was issued April 22, 1994; and Canadian Patent Application 2,046,984-6, which was filed July 12, 1991.

He has been a consultant to numerous corporations, including Furash, Inc., Union Pacific Railroad, Software A&E, Inc., Zeta-Tech, Associates, Chena Software laboratory, Maxima, Inc., as well as to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Dr. Harker is the author of nine books, monographs and edited volumes, including "Performance of Financial Institutions," with S.A. Zenios, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, as well as book chapters, cases, book and software reviews, refereed and other publications.

He is editor-in-chief of the journal Operations Research (1996-present), and he is a member of the editorial boards of Computational Optimization and Applications, the Journal of Service Research, Transportation Research and International Studies in the Service Economy.

Dr. Harker is a member of the American Economic Association, the International Federation of Operations Research/Management Science, the Mathematical Programming Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Dr. Harker joined the Wharton faculty as the Stephen M. Peck Term Assistant Professor of Decision Sciences in 1984, was appointed associate professor of decision sciences in 1987 and UPS Transportation Professor of the Private Sector in 1991.

He was a visiting scholar in the department of operations research at Stanford University (1989) and a member of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1983-84).

Dr. Harker was one of 16 men and women throughout the country named as a White House Fellow by President George W. Bush in 1991-92, serving as a special assistant to the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, responsible for the director's technology issues.

He served as coordinator of both Wharton's Decision Sciences Ph.D. Program (1986-88) and its Operations and Information Management Ph.D. Program (1993-94).

Dr. Harker was director of the Fishman-Davidson Center for the Study of the Service Sector at Wharton (1989-94).

He was chair of the department of operations and information management at Wharton (1997-99) prior to his appointment as interim dean.

Dr. Harker received both bachelor's and master's degrees in civil and urban engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1981. He received a master's degree in economic and a Ph.D. degree in civil engineering from Penn in 1983.