Ronald Howard

Ronald A. Howard is Professor Emeritus of Management Science and Engineering in Stanford University's School of Engineering. He earned bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and an Sc.D. in electrical engineering from MIT in 1958, with a dissertation on dynamic programming. After his doctorate, Howard joined the MIT faculty as associate professor of electrical engineering and industrial management, and associate director of the Operations Research Center. In 1965, he moved to Stanford University, where he helped found the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems, a precursor to the current Department of Management Science and Engineering. He directed teaching and research in decision analysis, served as director of the Decisions and Ethics Center, and continued as professor emeritus after retiring in 2014, teaching for several more years. Howard consulted for organizations on projects spanning investment planning, research strategy, medical decision-making, hurricane seeding, and nuclear waste isolation. He was founding director and chairman of Strategic Decisions Group and president of the Decision Education Foundation, which teaches decision skills to young people.

Howard pioneered decision analysis in Engineering, coining the term in his 1966 paper "Decision Analysis: Applied Decision Theory" and developing foundational tools like the influence diagram and policy iteration for Markov decision processes. His research focused on probabilistic modeling, dynamic programming, Markov processes, improving decision quality, life-and-death decisions, and decision ethics. He authored key books including Dynamic Programming and Markov Processes (1960), Dynamic Probabilistic Systems (volumes 1 and 2, 1971), Readings on the Principles and Applications of Decision Analysis (1984, co-edited with J. E. Matheson), Ethics for the Real World (2008, with Clint Korver), and Foundations of Decision Analysis (2015, with Ali Abbas). Howard mentored over 100 doctoral students and thousands of graduates from diverse fields like law, medicine, and business, lecturing worldwide and developing courses such as The Ethical Analyst. His honors include Fellow of IEEE and INFORMS, the Frank P. Ramsey Medal (1986), the first INFORMS award for teaching OR/MS practice (1998), election to the National Academy of Engineering (1999), and the Dean's Award for Academic Excellence (1999). Through these contributions, Howard transformed decision analysis from an academic pursuit into a practical discipline with broad industry impact.