New dean: Professor Don Ross has been appointed Waikato Management School’s new dean.
He successfully launched an online suite of postgraduate programmes across Africa and introduced that continent’s first graduate school in quantitative finance and risk management, and now Canadian economist Professor Don Ross is taking the reins as Dean of Waikato Management School.
Ready for a change
Professor Ross is coming from University of Cape Town (UCT) where he’s currently Dean of the Faculty of Commerce and Professor of Economics. He also holds down a part time position as Program Director for Methodology and is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Analysis of Risk at Georgia State University in the USA.
He says the time was right for a change – he was at UCT for nearly two decades.
“Having been with UCT for the past 18 years, and having thoroughly enjoyed my past four and a half years as Dean, I was looking for another university to try my hand at."
A number of successful ventures
Leveraging the international relationships formed through his current roles in Africa and the USA has led Professor Ross to deliver a number of successful ventures. Under his leadership, UCT launched ‘Across Africa’, a premium online suite of graduate and postgraduate programmes and qualifications within the private sector, and the introduction of the externally-funded African Institute for Financial Markets and Risk Management, subjects not taught previously in Africa.
He’s planning to take the ‘Across Africa’ model and roll it out on a global level, supported by a three-university consortium which would include Waikato, UCT and Georgia State, and he’s also looking to grow Waikato Management School's research portfolio.