Sunil Kumar, the senior associate dean for academic affairs at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB), was named dean of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business on Wednesday. Kumar, a member of the Stanford faculty since 1996, will begin his five-year term at the start of 2011.

“I look forward to helping strengthen and enhance Booth’s outstanding research environment and its rigorous, discipline-based approach to business education,” he said to the University of Chicago’s News Office.

While at Stanford, the 1998 Finmeccanica Faculty Scholarship recipient taught M.B.A. and Ph.D. classes in the pperations, information and technology area.

Kumar has served as an editor for the journal Operations Research, and has written dozens of research articles. Much of his research involves the analysis of mathematical models to provide a course of action for improving business performance. Kumar also helped develop “Littlefield Technologies,” a simulator for teaching operations management that has been used at over 50 business and engineering schools.

Garth Saloner, dean of the GSB, emphasized the positive role that Kumar played during his time on the Farm.

“Sunil has been a major contributor to our work on revising our curriculum over the past few years,” Saloner wrote in an e-mail to the Daily. “He was involved in the early work on it and was able to see the final refinements made.”

“While we will miss him, we wish him everything of the best in his new position,” he added.

— Joseph Beyda