M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, Ph.D.
M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, Ph.D.
Director and Chief Scientific Advisor
Dr. Marie-Elisabeth Paté-Cornell is the Burt and Deedee McMurtry Professor in the School of Engineering, and a Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University (2000-2011). Previously, she was the Professor and Chair of the Stanford Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management and an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at MIT. Her specialty is engineering risk analysis with application to complex systems (seismic risk, space systems, medical procedures and devices, offshore oil platforms, cyber security, etc.). Her earlier research has focused on the optimization of warning systems and the explicit inclusion of human and organizational factors in the analysis of systems’ failure risks. Her more recent work is on the use of game theory in risk analysis with applications that have included counterterrorism and cyber security.
She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering where she chairs the section of Interdisciplinary Engineering and Special Fields, of the French Académie des Technologies, and of the NASA Advisory Council. She is co-chair of the committee of the National Academies (NASEM) on risk analysis methods for nuclear war and nuclear terrorism. She is a Fellow (and past president) of the Society for Risk Analysis and of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science. She is the author of more than one hundred publications, with several best paper awards, and the co-editor of a book on Perspectives on Complex Global Problems (2016). She was a member of the Board of Advisors of the Naval Postgraduate School, which she chaired from 2004 to 2006, and of the Navy War College. Dr. Paté-Cornell was also a member of the President’s (Foreign) Intelligence Advisory Board (2001-2008), of the board of the Aerospace Corporation (2004-2013) of Draper Laboratory (2009-2016), and of InQtel (2006-2017). She was awarded the Frank Ramsey Medal of the Decision Analysis Society, the 2021 IEEE Ramo medal in Systems Engineering and Science, and the 2022 PICMET Award for Leadership in Technology Management. She is a Fellow (and past president) of the Society for Risk Analysis and of the Institute for Management Science and Operations Research, and a Distinguished Vising Scientist of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She is the author of more than one hundred publications, for which she got several best paper awards, and the co-editor of a book on Perspectives on Complex Global Problems (2016). She holds a BS in Mathematics and Physics, Marseille (France), an Engineering degree (Applied Math/CS) from the Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble (France), an MS in Operations Research and a PhD in Engineering-Economic Systems, both from Stanford University.
She and her late husband, Dr. Allin Cornell had two children, Philip Cornell (born 1981) and Ariane Cornell (1984). She is married to Admiral James O. Ellis Jr. (US Navy, Ret.).