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Photo by Reed Hutchinson |
Before coming to UCLA, Judy Olian was a successful fund-raiser at Penn State's Smeal College of Business Administration. |
New dean sets ambitious agenda
BY Anne Burke
Today Staff writer
For the first time in the school’s 70-year history, a woman has taken the helm of the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
But Judy Olian, who comes to UCLA from the Smeal College of Business Administration at Pennsylvania State University, says she’s never pushed her gender as part of a political agenda.
“What I tell every person — whether it’s a man or woman — is excel at something you’re passionate about, and the rewards and recognition will follow,” said Olian, a Californian of only 10 days when she sat down with UCLA Today recently.
The Australia-born Olian also stands out as the only woman dean among BusinessWeek’s top 20 U.S. business schools. Among deans at top-ranked international business schools, the only other woman is Laura Tyson at the London School of Business.
Olian plans to build on the UCLA Anderson School’s accomplishments as a research center that influences new business practices and trends. She will pay particular attention to the school’s contributions to the global marketplace, “given our very advantaged position here on the edge of the continent.”
Also on her agenda will be looking at new ways to harness information technologies to help time-strapped graduate students achieve their educational goals.
“We also have to grapple with the public funding model that affects us all,” Olian added. “What are some of the alternative ways of not just sustaining excellence, but enhancing excellence within our current and new funding models?”
Fund-raising is one of Olian’s strong suits. At Smeal, she helped raise $68 million for a new facility that opened in 2005. She also led renewals of the undergraduate M.B.A. and Ph.D. programs and helped launch several innovative programs, among them an auctions market lab, an e-commerce incubator lab and a student-run investment fund.
Olian holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her undergraduate degree, in psychology, is from Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
During her tenure at Smeal, Olian wrote a weekly column on business that was distributed nationally by Knight Ridder and Scripps Howard News Service. She also hosted a monthly television show on a local public TV station.
Olian’s household includes husband Peter Liberti, two dogs and a cat. The couple enjoys the theater and arts, and “of course we’re looking forward to getting into the California lifestyle,” she added. |
