James Dyer

Dr. James S. Dyer holds the Fondren Centennial Chair in Business in the McCombs School of Business.. He served as chair of the Department of Information, Risk, and Operations Management for nine years (1988-97). During the spring semester of 1999 he was the Philip J. Rust Visiting Professor of Business at the Darden Business School at the University of Virginia where he taught courses in decision and risk analysis. Dr. Dyer’s research interests include the valuation of risky investment decisions and risk management.

The College of Business Administration Foundation Advisory Council chose Dr. Dyer as the recipient of its Award for Outstanding Research Contributions in 1999, and he was awarded the McCombs Career Award for Outstanding Research Contributions in 2013. He is the former Chair of the Decision Analysis Society of the Operations Research Society of America (now INFORMS). This group has a membership of over 1000 academics and practitioners in the field of decision analysis. He received the Frank P. Ramsey Award for outstanding career achievements from the Decision Analysis Society of INFORMS in 2002 and was named a Fellow of INFORMS in 2006, an honor shared by only two other McCombs faculty members.

Dr. Dyer has consulted with a number of companies regarding the application of decision and risk analysis tools to a variety of practical problems, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, the RAND Corporation, AEP, IBM, PEMEX, Unocal, Schlumberger, Shell and the Department of Energy. He has offered short courses on decision and risk analysis for Royal Dutch Shell, Petrobras and SINOPEC and for companies in the United States, Colombia, Ivory Coast, Angola, Italy, Kazakhstan, Great Britain, Norway, Mexico, Kuala Lumpur and China. He was awarded the Fawn and Vijay Mahajan Teaching Award for Excellence in Executive Education in 2011.

Dr. Dyer’s publications include three books and more than sixty articles on risk analysis and investment science. His recent articles focus on decision making in a variety of areas, including an analysis of alternatives for the disposition of weapon-grade plutonium in the United States and Russia, selecting strategies to ensure biodiversity in Nambia, developing interfaces for decision making in an electronic commerce environment and methods for forecasting oil and gas prices.