Rana Glasgal '87 M.Eng. '92 Is Elected to the Cornell Board of Trustees

The following article updates and expands a previously posted story. 

As a Master of Engineering student, Rana Glasgal worked on a project to predict the demand for agricultural engineering bulletins produced by a service located on the Cornell campus.  Now she is one of two candidates recently elected by alumni to join the Cornell Board of Trustees, which "is vested with 'supreme control' over the university, including all of its colleges and other units."  Among other responsibilities, the Board elects Cornell's president, approves an annual plan for financial operation, and establishes degrees to be awarded. 

Since 1997 Glasgal has served in the administration of Stanford University, as budget analyst and director of institutional research, and now as associate vice provost for institutional research and decision support.  "Institutional research involves gathering statistics about students, faculty, courses, finances and research and conducting complex studies of student life, faculty life, and historical trends and forecasting," Glasgal, who lives in Palo Alto, CA, has written.  "Decision support involves taking complex data structures and making them simple and easy to access" through a data warehouse. Glasgal writes that her background in ORIE "was an excellent preparation for both aspects of my job."  

According to her Cornell Board of Trustees candidate page, Glasgal is particularly concerned with hiring the best and brightest to replace the unprecedented numbers of Cornell faculty who will retire over the next 5-10 years; maintaining and expanding Cornell's "renowned culture of teaching and learning" (and monitoring outcomes of this core mission); and in enabling students of great merit to attend Cornell regardless of their ability to pay. 

Glasgal said that "one thing I've noticed is that this election has sparked many of my classmates to re-connect with me via LinkedIn, Facebook, or just old-fashioned email, and that has been a wonderful and unexpected side effect of being part of the election."  

Prior to working at Stanford, Ms. Glasgal was a consultant with Decision Focus Incorporated (DFI) in Mountain View, California. DFI employed management science techniques such as optimization, statistics, and forecasting to help make decisions for clients in the utility, transportation, and hospitality businesses.  "This job was another example of how operations research skills were combined with computing skills to produce ongoing solutions for clients," she said. 

Gregory Galvin, M.S. '82, Ph.D. '84, MBA '93, was also elected to the Board of Trustees.  Galvin is a frequent speaker in the Enterprise Engineering Colloquium sponsored by the Cornell Engineering Alumni Association and run jointly by ORIE and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering for Master of Engineering students and the public.  He lives in Ithaca and is president and CEO of Kionix, a microelectromechanical technology company he founded in 1993.   Kionix, now a subsidiary of ROHM Ltd.,  manufactures accelerometers used in smartphones, laptops, game controllers, and other products.

On July 1, Glasgal and Galvin will join ORIE alums currently serving on the Board Sherri K. Stuewer '73, MS '75 and Mike Zak '75. ORIE alums who served on the Board previously include Harvey Kinzelberg '67, Jeffrey Parker '65, M.Eng. '66, MBA '70 and Jeffrey Berg '79, M.Eng. '80, MBA '81.   Berg was also an alumni-elected member of the Board. 

The Board of Trustees has 64 members.  Each year 2 alumni trustees are elected to serve four year terms.  The Board also has four ex-officio members; two members elected by the faculty, two by the students and one by the employees of the university; and members  elected by the Board.