June 18, 2021
Dear members of the McGill community:
It is my pleasure to announce the appointment of Professor Yolande E. Chan as the next Dean of the Desautels Faculty of Management. Prof. Chan’s five-year, renewable term will begin on August 1, 2021, and end June 30, 2026. The Advisory Committee for the Selection of a Dean of the Desautels Faculty of Management conducted an extensive, international search. The McGill University Board of Governors accepted the Committee’s recommendation during a special Board of Governors meeting held June 17, 2021.
Prof. Chan has been a member of Smith School of Business at Queen’s University since 1991. She is currently the Associate Dean of Research, PhD and MSc Programs at the School, where she is the E. Marie Shantz Professor of Digital Technology. From 2006 to 2011, she was the Director of the School’s Monieson Centre, which facilitates community-engaged collaborative research. From 2013-2016, she served as Queen’s Associate Vice-Principal (Research). Her own research focuses on innovation, knowledge strategy, digital strategy and business-IT alignment. Committed to advancing institutional priorities in the area of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI), Prof. Chan co-chaired a 2017 university-wide review of racism, diversity and inclusion at Queen’s, and serves on the Queen’s University Council on Anti-Racism and Equity and on Smith School’s EDI taskforces.
Prof. Chan is a leader in the global information systems community, serving from 2006 to 2009 as Secretary of the Association for Information Systems, and currently co-chairing the 2021 Americas Conference on Information Systems.
Prof. Chan earned a Ph.D. from Western University’s Ivey Business School, an M.Phil. in Management Studies from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Please join me in congratulating Prof. Chan on her new appointment, and in welcoming her to McGill. I would like to thank Prof. Morty Yalovsky for serving as Interim Dean of the Desautels Faculty of Management since October 2020. Thanks are also due to the members of the Advisory Committee, and to everyone in the community who shared their comments and advice during the search process.
With best regards,
Professor Christopher Manfredi
Provost and Vice-Principal Academic