From Houston To Miami: Dean Paul Pavlou Named Herbert’s New Leader

After serving as dean of the Bauer College of Business in Houston for five years, Paul Pavlou will assume leadership of the University of Miami’s Herbert Business School on July 1

After a highly successful five-year stint as dean of the University of Houston’s Bauer College of Business, Paul A. Pavlou has been named the new dean of the University of Miami’s Herbert College of Business. Pavlou succeeds Interim Dean Ann M. Olazábal, a lawyer who had led lifelong learning and executive education at Herbert. She served as interim dean since January of 2023 after the departure of Dean John Quelch who had been dean since 2017.

In a search assisted by Isaacson, Miller, the University of Miami cast a wide net in finding Pavlou who will assume his leadership role on July 1. In his new role, Pavlou will lead 163 full-time faculty and 4,200 total students. One of only three U.S. business schools that have gained “triple crown” accreditation status, Herbert is in the nation’s seventh-largest metro market. A passionate hands-on leader with a deep connection to students, Pavlou will be tasked to grow and differentiate the school’s global and international reputation.

Based on his track record at Bauer, he should be well prepared for that challenge. Among other things, he launched several new programs including an online MBA, completely embraced digital learning, doubled the school’s endowment, dramatically improved career outcomes for students, expanded global partnerships from one to 40, and raised more money in fundraising in the past five years than in the previous decade.

AT BAUER, DEAN PAVLOU MADE STUDENT OUTCOMES A FOCUS

During his tenure at Bauer, the school rose 23 spots in the full-time MBA rankings by Poets&Quants, became a Top 50 business school in the Professional MBA program, climbed 21 places to become the #33 top undergraduate program by Poets&Quants, and gained a #1 undergraduate entrepreneurship program by The Princeton Review five years in a row. The Bauer College grew by more than 30% to reach 8,000 students, raised the retention rate to 98%, the six-year graduation rate to 88%, and the placement rate to 97.4% with an average salary of more than $65,000.

Those student outcomes did not come by accident. They were a focus of the dean who first visited Bauer’s career management office three months before he began his official deanship. “”Most people didn’t even know who I was,” he recalls. “I introduced myself as the incoming dean and the question I asked was, ‘I saw (placement) numbers online and I didn’t like them. How can we make them 100% (see interview below)'”

Pavlou, who is known for wearing bold clothing in bright primary colors, poured more resources into career outcomes and also aligned the school’s curriculum with business needs. “I tell employers you are my customer,” he says. “Tell me what you want, and I will go back and produce it.”

DEAN PAVLOU IS ALSO A HIGHLY ACCLAIMED SCHOLAR

As Dean, Pavlou made diversity, equity, and inclusion a strategic priority for Bauer with new initiatives, such as the Center for Economic Inclusion that offers educational, economic, and financial support to residents of the traditionally-disadvantaged Third Ward neighborhood next to the University of Houston. During his tenure, many community outreach programs expanded, including the Stimulating Urban Renewal through Entrepreneurship program that offers free consulting to more than 1,400 diverse entrepreneurs by Bauer business students.

Herbert is also getting in Pavlou a highly acclaimed scholar who had, like many of his students, reinvented himself. Born and raised in Cyprus, he was once a professional basketball player for his country’s national team. He first came to the U.S. as a Fulbright Scholar, leveraging his education to become at first an engineer who wrote code and then moved into academia during the dot-com boom in the 1990s. He received his Ph.D. in information systems and a master’s in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering and in managerial studies from Rice University. His research has been cited over 85,000 times by Google Scholar, and he was recognized among the ‘World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds’ by Thomson Reuters based on an analysis of “Highly Cited” authors for 2002-2012. Pavlou was ranked #1 in the world in publications in the top Information Systems journals in 2010 – 2016.

Prior to Bauer, Pavlou served as senior associate dean for faculty research, doctoral programs, and strategic initiatives at the Fox School of Business at Temple University, where he was co-director of the university-wide Data Science Institute.