Richard Lyons (Dean of Haas School of Business)

Richard K. Lyons
Bank of America Dean Professor of Business Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
Residence	United States
Nationality	American
Institutions	Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley Columbia Business School, Columbia University
Alma mater	UC Berkeley (BS), 1982; MIT (PhD), 1987

Professor of Business

Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley

Richard Kent Lyons is the 14th Dean of the Haas School of Business, U.C. Berkeley. Prior to becoming Dean in July 2008, he served as the Chief Learning Officer at Goldman Sachs in New York City, a position he had held since 2006.

Lyons was born on February 10, 1961 in Palo Alto, CA, USA. Lyons earned his BS in Business with highest honors from U.C. Berkeley in 1982. In 1987 he received his PhD in Economics from MIT. Before working at Goldman Sachs, Lyons served as Acting Dean of the Haas School from 2004 to 2005 and as Executive Associate Dean and Sylvan Coleman Professor of Finance from 2005 to 2006. Before coming to Haas, Lyons also spent six years on the faculty at Columbia Business School. His teaching expertise is in international finance. Lyons is fluent in French and is also an accomplished musician, owning several musical copyrights. He and his wife, Jennifer, have two children.

Lyons’ early research focuses on currency markets, a focus reflected in his recent book “The Microstructure Approach to Exchange Rates” (MIT Press). This novel approach to exchange rates examines the market from a trading-room perspective, e.g., the flow of buy and sell orders and why those orders subsequently affect prices, rather than from the traditional perspective of macroeconomics. This line of work focuses on how dispersed information gets reflected in prices via trading. He has published numerous articles on these and other related topics. Recently, his research has taken a quite different tack, namely, exploring the links between leadership and innovation in organizations.