Elisabeth Paté-Cornell

Biography

Dr. M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1948. She attended public high schools both in Dakar and in La Rochelle, France. Her undergraduate degree is in mathematics and physics (BS, Marseilles, France, 1968), and her first graduate degrees are in applied mathematics and computer science (MS and Engineer Degree, Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble, France, 1970; 1971).

In 1971 she came to study and live in the United States, where she has been a citizen since 1986. She received a Masters degree in Operations Research (OR) in 1972 and a Ph.D. in Engineering-Economic Systems (EES) in 1978, both from Stanford University. She then was an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at MIT, before joining the Stanford faculty in 1981, where she became Professor (in 1991) and then Chair (in 1997) in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM). In 1999, she was named the Burt and Deedee McMurtry Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. She is presently Professor and Chair of the Department of Management Science and Engineering, as well as a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) of the Stanford Institute for International Studies.

Dr. Paté-Cornell oversaw from 1999, the merger of two Stanford departments of the School of Engineering (EES-OR and IEEM) to form a new department of Management Science and Engineering, which she has led since its formation in 2000. She has served for several years as a member of the Stanford Academic Senate, and she is currently the chair of the Stanford Committee on Research.

Dr. Paté-Cornell was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1995, and is currently a member of its Council. She has served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from December 2001 to December 2004. She is currently a member of the Advisory Council of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 2002, and the Board of Trustees of the Aerospace Corporation since December 2004. She chairs the Board of Advisors of the Naval Postgraduate School on which she has served since 1998. She has also served as a member of the Army Science Board, of the NASA Advisory Council and of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. She was elected to the French Académie des Technologies in 2003.

Dr. Paté-Cornell is a world leader in research related to engineering risk analysis, risk management, decision analysis under uncertainty, and more generally, the use of Bayesian probability to process incomplete information. In recent years, her research and that of her Engineering Risk Research Group at Stanford have focused on the inclusion of both technical and organizational factors in probabilistic risk analysis models. These models have been applied to a wide variety of topics, ranging from the risk management of the NASA shuttle tiles to that of offshore oil platforms and medical systems such as anesthesia during surgery. She is currently working on risk management processes for complex projects and programs, with application to space, industrial and medical systems. Since 2001, she has applied risk analytic methods to the study of different types of terrorist attacks on the United States, the assessment of intelligence information and the effectiveness of counter measures.

Dr. Paté-Cornell is a past president (1995) and a fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis, and a fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS). She has been a consultant to industrial firms and government organizations, including, recently, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. She is the author or co-author of more than a hundred papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings. She has received several best-paper awards from professional organizations such as the American Nuclear Society and the Decision Analysis Society of INFORMS (for her work on the shuttle tiles), and peer-reviewed journals such as Military Operations Research in 2002 for a paper on the assessment of terrorist threats. She has been invited to give many keynote addresses and has taught in executive-education programs for several years.

Dr. Paté-Cornell is a U.S. citizen, a member of the Stanford faculty and of the National Academy of Engineering. She and the late Dr. C. Allin Cornell have two children, Phillip born in 1981 and Ariane in 1984.