Elisabeth Pate-Cornell

Paté-Cornell is an expert in engineering risk analysis and management and more generally, the use of Bayesian probability to process incomplete information. Her research and that of her Engineering Risk Research Group have focused on the inclusion of technical and management factors in probabilistic risk analysis models with applications to the NASA shuttle tiles, offshore oil platforms and medical systems. Since 2001, she has combined risk analysis and game analysis to assess intelligence information and risks of terrorist attacks.

Paté-Cornell held her first position as an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at MIT, and then Professor in the Stanford Department of Industrial Engineering and Department of Management Science and Engineering, from 1991 on. She was the Chair of the department from 1997 to 2011. In 1999, she was named Burt and Deedee McMurtry Professor in the Stanford School of Engineering. She is also a senior fellow of the Stanford Institute for International Studies.

She and the late Professor C. Allin Cornell have two children Philip (1981) and Ariane (1984). She is currently married to Admiral James O. Ellis (USN ret.).

Paté-Cornell, born in Dakar, Senegal, earned her Bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Aix-Marseille University in 1968, and her Master's and Engineering degrees in applied mathematics and computer science from the Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble, (France, 1970;1971), a Master's degree in Operations Research from Stanford in 1972 and a Ph.D. in Engineering-Economic Systems, also from Stanford, in 1978.

Marie-Elisabeth Lucienne Paté-Cornell, (born in 1948), is a Stanford University Professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and was the Founding Chair of the Department.