Appointment of Ronald Braeutigam as Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education
Dear Colleague:
I am very pleased to announce that Ronald Braeutigam has agreed to join my office as Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education, effective September 1. Braeutigam succeeds Stephen Fisher, who has ably served in this position since it was established in 1997.
The Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education is an enormously important position, and I feel fortunate to be able to look forward to Braeutigam’s contribution in that role during the coming years. He will bring to the position a clear commitment to engage creatively central issues regarding undergraduate education along with the administrative experience necessary to translate vision into reality.
Holder since 1990 of the Harvey Kapnick Professorship of Business Institutions in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Braeutigam joined the faculty of Department of Economics in 1975. Over his three decades as a member of the Northwestern community he has demonstrated his deep commitment to matters relating to undergraduate education. In recognition of his achievements in this area, in 1997 he was designated as a Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence, the University’s highest award for distinguished undergraduate teaching.
In addition to his impressive record of teaching and scholarship, Braeutigam will bring a range of administrative experience which uniquely equips him to assume leadership within the University on matters relating to undergraduate education. He currently serves as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies and Advising in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. In that position he has overseen the WCAS College Advising System, including freshman advising and freshman seminars, as well as the twelve College Advisers who provide guidance to sophomores, juniors, and seniors. In the past two years the Office of Undergraduate Studies and Advising has also expanded funding for undergraduate research, increased the number of honors and prizes recognizing outstanding students, and continued to work with faculty to improve the curriculum in the more than 40 majors and 40 minors in WCAS. Prior to joining the administration of the College in 2004, Braeutigam served for nine years as Director of the College’s Business Institutions Program, a period during which the number of graduates tripled, making the program the largest academic minor on campus. Nearly 500 current students, drawn from all six undergraduate schools, have declared their intent to earn the minor.
Braeutigam's teaching and research interests have focused on microeconomics, industrial organization, and public policy, with special interest in the economics of regulation and regulatory reform in the telephone, transportation, and energy sectors. His most recent book, coauthored with David Besanko (Kellogg School of Management), is Microeconomics (Wiley, 2005). The book grew directly from his highly successful efforts to redefine the method of teaching undergraduate microeconomic theory at Northwestern. His initiatives in this area have resulted in extraordinary CTEC evaluations, immensely popular courses, and numerous teaching awards including the McCormick Professorship and the 1991 Excellence in Teaching Award from the Northwestern University Alumni Association. Widely adopted in the United States and abroad, this textbook in intermediate microeconomics is currently used in courses at institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, and Columbia .
Earlier books include The Regulation Game (with Bruce Owen of Stanford University ) and Price Level Regulation for Diversified Public Utilities (with Jordan J. Hillman, Northwestern University School of Law).
Braeutigam received a Bachelor of Science in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Tulsa and then attended Stanford University , where he received an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. minor in Engineering-Economic Systems and a Ph.D. in Economics. He has taught at Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology, and he has also held an appointment as a Senior Research Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin ( Science Center Berlin ). He has served as a research economist in The White House Office of Telecommunications Policy, and as an economic consultant to Congress, several government agencies, the World Bank, and various firms and industry groups in the private sector. He has been appointed to the editorial boards of several leading journals in economics, and, from 1997-99, he served as President of the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics.
I look forward to working with Braeutigam and other members of the University community in further enhancing undergraduate education at Northwestern.
Sincerely,
Lawrence B. Dumas
Provost