Costis Maglaras, an authority on operations research, data analytics, and quantitative finance, is the new dean of Columbia Business School. He succeeds Glenn Hubbard, who led the school for fifteen years.
A member of the business school’s faculty since 1998, Maglaras attended Imperial College London and earned his PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford. His research focuses on the development of computer algorithms that analyze data to help business leaders make better pricing, resource-allocation, and investment decisions. He has consulted for Fortune 500 firms and in 2007 helped found the New York–based company Mismi, Inc., which develops algorithmic trading technologies for US equity markets.
Maglaras oversaw the business school’s PhD program from 2011 to 2017 and led its Decision, Risk, and Operations division from 2015 to 2018. In those roles, he was instrumental in updating the school’s curriculum to include more instruction in data-driven and technology-based decision-making. He pioneered the school’s technology-and-analytics curriculum and also helped create a new master’s degree in business analytics, offered jointly by the business and engineering schools, which prepares students for jobs as data scientists and analysts.
Maglaras’s appointment comes at a pivotal time for the school, which is scheduled to relocate from Uris Hall on the Morningside campus to the Henry R. Kravis Building and the Ronald O. Perelman Center for Business Innovation on the Manhattanville campus by 2022.
“For more than one hundred years, Columbia Business School has been educating future business leaders and changing the practice of business across the world,” says Maglaras. “I am deeply honored to be a part of this continuing journey.”
