New York–Soumitra Dutta has been appointed as the dean of Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management. His term starts on July 1.

Professor Dutta is the Roland Berger Chaired Professor of Business and Technology, and the founder and academic director of elab, INSEAD’s center of excellence in teaching and research in the digital economy (www.elab.insead.edu).

He adds to a growing list of prominent Indian Americans serving as deans in renowned business schools, according to 80-20 PAC, whose coordinator, Ved Chaudhary, happens to be of Indian descent.

Others are: Nitin Nohria, dean of the Harvard Business School; Sunil Kumar, dean of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business;o Dipak C. Jain, former dean of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management; Jaishankar Ganesh, dean of the Rutgers School of Business, and G. (Anand) Anandalingam, dean of University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

Previously, Dutta served as Dean of Executive Education (2002-2006) and Dean of External Relations (2006-2009) at INSEAD. Before joining INSEAD in 1989, he was employed with Schlumberger in Japan and General Electric in the USA.

Professor Dutta obtained his Ph.D. in computer science and his M.Sc. in business administration from the University of California at Berkeley. He has been a visiting Professor at several international universities including the University of California at Berkeley, Oxford and Cambridge.

His current research is on technology strategy and innovation at both corporate and national policy levels.

He is actively involved in policy development at national and European levels. Currently, he is a member of the Advisory Committee for ICT for the Government of Qatar and has advised other national governments on ICT policy issues. He is the chairman of the European Commission’s Europe Innova panel on Innovation in the ICT sector and a member of the Steering Committee of eBSN, the European Commission's eBusiness Network initiative for SMEs.

His latest books/research monographs are: “The Global Innovation Index: Accelerating Growth and Development” (June 2011), “InnovaLatino: Fostering Innovation in Latin America” (May 2011), “The Global Information Technology Report 2011” (April 2011), “Innovating at the Top” (2009), and “Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom” (2008). He has co-authored ten other books including "The Bright Stuff" (2002), “Embracing the Net” (2001) and “Process Reengineering, Organizational Change and Performance Improvement” (1999). He has won several awards for research and pedagogy including awards for the European Case of the Year from the European Case Clearing House in 1995, 1997, 1998, 2000 and 2002.