Russell Barton, professor of supply chain and information systems at the Penn State Smeal College of Business and associate director of the Center for the Management of Technological and Organizational Change, is senior associate dean for research and faculty. He began serving on January 1, 2013. As the senior associate dean, he is responsible for the general academic and research strategies of the college as well as strategies associated with international collaborative relationships. He oversees the Ph.D. program, research funding and budgets, faculty development, all academic departments and research centers, and the office of international business. He chairs the executive committee, which is composed of department heads of all academic units in the college.
Russell joined Smeal in 2002 after 11 years in Penn State’s Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, where he taught undergraduate courses in optimization, statistics, and concurrent engineering, and graduate courses in simulation-based design and the design of experiments. He recently completed a two-year assignment as program director for Manufacturing Enterprise Systems and Service Enterprise Systems at the National Science Foundation. He is widely published, with research on the interface between applied statistics and product design and manufacturing. He is currently an associate editor for Operations Research and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications Journal of Management Mathematics. Russell holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in operations research from Cornell University.