of Note
Raiffa Honored for Life’s Work in Decision Analysis
HBS professor emeritus Howard Raiffa, a pioneer in the field of decision analysis,is the recipient of this year’s Thomas C. Schelling Award. The award is given annually by Harvard’s Kennedy School to an individual whose intellectual work has had a transformative effect on public policy.
A mathematician by training, Raiffa was an originator of the decision tree and did extensive research on negotiations and choice-making in complex and ambiguous situations. Raiffa was an adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and helped create an East-West think tank aimed at reducing Cold War tensions.
Business Plan Contest Winners
The 12th annual HBS Business Plan Contest winner in the social enterprise track was Diagnostics-For-All (DFA), a nonprofit launched to develop a disposable, low-cost, paper-based “lab-on-a-chip” for use in diagnosing liver, kidney, and metabolic diseases in the world’s resource-poor areas. The seven-person DFA team, invited to ring the NYSE’s opening bell in honor of its achievement, included Jon Puz and Gilbert Tang (both MBA ’08), Krishna Yeshwant (HBS ’09), and colleagues from Harvard and MIT. The Harvard team members were drawn from a multidisciplinary course on commercializing science and technology taught by HBS professors Vicki Sato and Lee Fleming. DFA also won MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, the first nonprofit to do so; it is also the first team to win both the Harvard and the MIT awards.
In the traditional (for-profit) track, Tal Riesenfeld (MBA ’08) was the HBS representative on a five-person team that put together EyeViewDigital.com, an up-and-running firm that enables communications between businesses and customers through cutting-edge video technology.
Kenny Appointed Chief Marketing Officer
Brian Kenny, who has nearly twenty years of experience in marketing and communications at universities and firms such as Monitor, Genuity, and Arthur D. Little, has been named chief marketing and communications officer at HBS, a newly created position. Describing Kenny as a skilled, seasoned professional, Dean Jay Light said, “Brian will help us explain to the world why HBS holds such a unique and influential place in management and leadership education.”
HBS Opens Shanghai Office with Harvard China Fund
Harvard University has opened a new office in Shanghai that will serve both HBS and the Harvard China Fund (HCF). The HCF was launched in 2006 as a University-wide “academic venture fund” to enhance Harvard’s teaching and research in and about China. The office will also facilitate interviews and programs for prospective and current students, create closer ties between Chinese universities and Harvard, and deepen connections to Harvard alumni in the region. For HBS, the office will house a researcher affiliated with the School’s Asia-Pacific Research Center.
WSA Launches Scholarship Fund
The HBS Women’s Student Association (WSA) has announced plans to establish a new scholarship fund and has revived its popular first-year exam review sessions, an idea first suggested by the newly formed Alumnae Advisory Board.
The WSA scholarship is only the second sponsored by an HBS student club. Fundraising will begin this fall with the goal of awarding up to $20,000 annually on a need basis to an outstanding woman entering her second year. At its first meeting last year, the WSA board, composed of fifteen alumnae ranging from the Class of 1968 to the Class of 2007, expressed surprise that the once-popular review sessions had been discontinued. After securing faculty approval, the WSA last December restarted the sessions, which are designed and led by women students and open to all first-year MBAs.
To learn more about the WSA scholarship, contact Donella Rapier (MBA ’92) at drapier@pih.org, or Melissa Hayes (MBA ’07) at mhayes@mba2007.hbs.edu.
