Department of Management Science and Engineering
Terman Engineering Building, Room 340
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

mep@stanford.edu
(650) 723-3823 (voice)
(650) 736-1945 (fax)

Research Interests
Engineering Risk Analysis, Risk Management and Decision Analysis.

Elisabeth Paté-Cornell is the Burt and Deedee McMurtry Professor in the School of Engineering and has been chair of the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University since its creation in January 2000. From 1978 to 1981, she was assistant professor of Civil Engineering at M.I.T. She has been a faculty member at Stanford in the department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management from 1981 to 1999. Her primary areas of teaching and research are engineering risk analysis and risk management, decision analysis, and engineering economy. Her research, in recent years, has focused on the extension of probabilistic risk analysis models to include organizational factors with application to a wide variety of problems such as the management of the tiles of the space shuttle, offshore platforms during oil and gas production, and anesthesia during surgery. She is currently working on mathematical models that allow management of programmatic risks for the development of safety-critical systems, for instance in the space industry. She has been (and continues to be) a consultant to numerous industries and government organizations.

She is a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, of the National Academy of Engineering and of its Council, and of the California Council on Science and Technology, and formerly a member of the Air Force Science Advisory Board and of the NASA Advisory Council. She is a past president and a fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis. She is currently chair of the Committee on Research of Stanford University.

Paté-Cornell received her Engineer Degree in Computer Science in 1971 from the Institut Polytechnique of Grenoble, France, a master's degree in operations research in 1972 and a PhD in Engineering-Economic Systems in 1978, both from Stanford University.