Andrew Ainslie is the 7th dean of the University of Rochester's Simon Business School.
Biography Andrew Ainslie became the seventh dean of the University of Rochester’s Simon Business School in 2014. He is responsible for the administrative and academic functions of the School and is the leading advocate of its faculty, programs, and students to the business community and other external constituencies. During the past two years, Ainslie has developed a Strategic Plan called Simon 2020, with the goal of being ranked among the top 25 business schools by the 2020–21 academic year, while drawing less than five percent from the School’s endowment. He has streamlined the operations of the School, focusing on reducing the program offerings to sharpen the focus of the Admissions, Faculty, Career Placement, and Administrative Staff. In 2016, Full-Time MBA applications were up over 20 percent.
A critical area of improvement has been to enhance the way the School engages with its students and to boost their satisfaction. The newly created Office of Student Engagement and the development of co-curricular EDGE programming is already showing significant return on investment. Other recent changes include heightened emphasis on experiential learning, revamped new-student orientation, and classroom renovations and technology upgrades. In addition, the School received an anonymous $20 million gift commitment in 2016, the largest in its history, exceeding its $85 million fundraising goal for The Meliora Challenge: The Campaign for the University of Rochester.
Before joining Simon Business School, Ainslie served as senior associate dean for the full-time MBA program at the UCLA Anderson School of Management from 2010–2014. While at UCLA, he led admissions, student services, and career placement. During that time, the school increased admissions more than 60 percent, grew placements over 20 percent, and revised its curriculum to better meet market demands and student needs.
Ainslie was also an associate professor of marketing at UCLA Anderson and was previously assistant professor of marketing from 2000–2005. Previously, he was assistant professor of marketing at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management from 1997–2000.
Before beginning his academic career, Ainslie had a 10-year career in business, including as an electrical engineer for AECI (South Africa), sales and marketing for Hewlett Packard (South Africa), corporate finance with Standard Merchant Bank, and marketing and development for Compustat.
Research Dean Ainslie’s major research interests are in economic and statistical models of consumer behavior and in direct marketing. In particular, he is focused on developing variance components models for a variety of environments. Topics he has investigated include: new products and movie diffusion, model performance, and consumer behavior uncovered through choice modeling. Most recently, he is studying the effect of store characteristics on consumer purchasing behavior.
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Awards and Fellowships
Education Ainslie received a B.Sc. in electrical engineering from the University of Cape Town in 1983 and an MBA in marketing from Cape Town in 1990. He received a PhD in marketing and statistics from Chicago Booth in 1998.
Message from the Dean