Shreevardhan Lele Directory Page

Shreevardhan ‘Raya’ Lele is Clinical Professor Emeritus and former Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs (MBA Programs). Lele retired from active service at the Smith School in 2020 after a distinguished 30-year teaching career, of which, the last 23 years were at Smith. Prior to joining Smith, he taught at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.

Lele has taught in Smith’s Full-Time, Part-Time and Executive MBA programs in three distinct areas: (a) ethical leadership and the role of managers in society, (b) the economics of incentives and strategic coordination using game theory, and (c) business analytics using statistics and management science.

He has been recognized by Smith faculty for his excellence in teaching in the form of multiple Krowe Awards and numerous Distinguished Teaching Awards. He has also received several awards from MBA students for his engagement inside and outside the classroom. Lele is a three-time recipient of the Full-Time MBA Program’s highest faculty honor – the S.M.I.T.H. Award.

His current work centers on issues at the intersection of business and society – specifically, the moral agency of managers in selecting values and in developing new practices – and on MBA curriculum development. His previous research was in the areas of data mining and optimal control of stochastic systems. It has been published in several refereed scholarly journals including Operations Research,Production and Operations Management,INFORMS Journal on Computing,European Journal of Operational Research, IIE Transactions and Decision Support Systems. He is a co-recipient of the INFORMS Computing Society Prize (2005) for innovative contributions to the field of data mining.

Lele holds a B.Tech. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and an MA in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Statistics and Management Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

He resides in Vermont.