Anand Anandalingam, Dean of Smith School of Business, University of Maryland.
Anand Anandalingam will take the helm at Imperial College © FT

Anand Anandalingam, the dean of the Smith School at the University of Maryland, has been appointed dean of Imperial College Business School.

Prof Anandalingam, who is an expert in electronic markets and telecommunications networks, will take up the post on August 1. He will step down from the Smith School on June 30, marking the end of five years in the job.

Imperial’s decision to appoint Prof Anandalingam follows the recent donation to the school of £20.1m from hedge fund Brevan Howard, one of the largest ever pledged to a UK business school and matching the £20m naming gift from Wafic Saïd to the University of Oxford’s school in 1996.

Sir Keith O’Nions, president and rector of Imperial says that Prof Anandalingam will bring a global perspective and a talent for developing strong relationships with donors and industrial partners.

“He …has the experience of working across disciplines that will support the business school’s focus on academic excellence and help it to flourish within Imperial’s science, technology and medicine-focused environment,” adds Sir Keith.

“As the newest faculty of this great institution and thanks to my excellent predecessors, the business school has done incredibly well in a short space of time. I’m now very excited by the chance to apply my connectivity and experience towards making Imperial even more proud of its business school,” says Prof Anandalingam.

As dean of the Smith School, Prof Anandalingam introduced a range of specialised masters courses, sought to expand the school’s global reach and raised more than $40m from philanthropic donors and corporate supporters. He was interviewed last year by the FT on his work there.

He joined Smith in 2001 after 14 years with the University of Pennsylvania, where he had a dual appointment both as a professor of systems engineering and professor of management science at the Wharton School of Business.

Born in the UK, Prof Anandalingam was raised in Sri Lanka and subsequently took his undergraduate degree at Cambridge and his PhD at Harvard. He worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1981 to 1984 before beginning his academic career at the University of Virginia in 1984.

He has published more than 75 research papers, served as editor of a number of academic journals and is the co-author of Beware the Winner’s Curse, which focuses on the technology and dotcom boom of the 1990s.

At Imperial, he succeeds Prof Dorothy Griffiths, who has served as dean of the school since February 2012 following the dean David Begg’s retirement.

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