Ronald A. Howard

Ronald A. Howard

Ronald Arthur Howard (born August 27, 1934) has been a professor at Stanford University since 1965. In 1966 he defined the profession of decision analysis, and since then has been developing the field as professor in the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems (now the Department of Management Science and Engineering) in the School of Engineering at Stanford.

Howard directs teaching and research in decision analysis at Stanford, and is the Director of the Decisions and Ethics Center, which examines the efficacy and ethics of social arrangements. He was a founding Director and Chairman of Strategic Decisions Group. Current research interests are improving the quality of decisions, life-and-death decision making, and the creation of a coercion-free society.

In 1986 he received the Operations Research Society of America's Frank P. Ramsey Medal "for distinguished contributions in decision analysis". In 1998 he received from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) the first award for the teaching of operations research/management science practice. In 1999 INFORMS invited him to give the Omega Rho Distinguished Plenary Lecture at the Cincinnati National Meeting. In the same year he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and received the Dean's Award for Academic Excellence.

Howard earned his Sc.D. in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1958 and was an associate professor there until he joined Stanford. He pioneered the policy iteration method for solving Markov decision problems, and this method is sometimes called the 'Howard policy-improvement algorithm' in his honor (Sargent, 1987, p. 47). He was also instrumental in the development of the Influence diagram for the graphical analysis of decision situations.