Patrick T. Harker

Harker served as chair of Wharton’s Operations and Information Management Department. In February 2000, he was appointed dean of the Wharton School and Reliance Professor of Management and Private Enterprise. He was a senior fellow at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center and held a secondary appointment as a professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering at Penn. He also served as director of the school's Fishman-Davidson Center for the Study of the Service Sector. When he was named UPS Transportation Professor of the Private Sector in 1991, Dr. Harker became the youngest faculty member in Wharton’s history awarded an endowed professorship. From 1996–99, he served as editor-in-chief of the premier journal Operations Research.

On March 2, 2015, Harker was named the 11th president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Harker, who had served as a nonbanking Class B director of the Philadelphia Fed for the past three years, succeeded Charles Plosser, who retired effective March 1, 2015.

His op-eds have been published in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The (Delaware) News Journal. In December 2014, his commentary, "Making Sense of Higher Education's Future: An Economics and Operations Perspective," was published in Service Science.

In 2012, Dr. Harker was named a charter fellow of the National Academy of Inventors for his outstanding personal contributions to innovation and for facilitating and nurturing patents, licensing and commercialization for the purpose of economic development for the University and the state of Delaware.

He received the INFORMS Fellows Award in recognition of outstanding lifetime achievement in operations research and the management sciences in 2012. He was recognized "for remarkable leadership at the organizations he leads and for his contributions to the theory of variational inequalities and his editorial services to INFORMS." The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international scientific society with 10,000 members.

In May 2008, Dr. Harker unveiled a sweeping strategic plan, UD’s Path to Prominence, predicated on excellence in undergraduate, graduate and professional education, environmental leadership, global engagement and service to the community. He has established numerous research centers, as well as the Office of Economic Innovation and Partnerships, which stimulates invention and entrepreneurship and translates UD research into economy-driving technologies. To establish Delaware as a health sciences hub, UD has partnered with the region’s leading health care providers in the Delaware Health Sciences Alliance.

Harker's compensation for the 2008–2009 fiscal year was $810,603. His pay for 2009–2010 was $726,307, and his pay for 2010–2011 was $728,329.

Harker was selected as the 26th President of the University of Delaware on December 1, 2006. He took office on July 1, 2007.

Harker was named a Presidential Young Investigator by the National Science Foundation in 1986 and as a White House Fellow by President George H.W. Bush in 1991. In the latter position, he spent 1991-1992 as a Special Assistant to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Harker joined the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1984. From 1994 to 1996, Harker served as a professor and Chair of the Systems Engineering Department in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Before receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, Harker worked as a consulting engineer in Philadelphia and New York City. He was a faculty member of the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1983–1984.

Harker grew up in Gloucester City, New Jersey. He graduated from St. Mary's School in Gloucester City in 1973, and was a scholar athlete at Gloucester Catholic High School.

Patrick Timothy Harker (born November 19, 1958) is the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Harker previously served as the President of University of Delaware. He was the dean of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from 2001 to 2007. He began his presidency of the University of Delaware in 2007 and resigned in 2015.