Ronald A. Howard, Chairman
Professor Howard directs teaching and research in the Decision Analysis Program of the Department of Management Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, Stanford University. He is also the director of the department’s Decisions and Ethics Center, which examines the efficacy and ethics of social arrangements. Professor Howard defined the profession of decision analysis in 1964 and has since supervised several doctoral theses in decision analysis every year. His experience includes dozens of decision analysis projects in virtually all fields, from investment planning to research strategy and from hurricane seeding to nuclear waste isolation. He has been a consultant to several companies and was a founding director and chairman of Strategic Decisions Group, a strategy consulting firm that serves Global 1000 companies. Professor Howard is also Professor by Courtesy in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Howard received a BS, an MS, an EE, and an ScD in electrical engineering and a BS in economics from MIT.

Carl S. Spetzler, Vice Chairman
Dr. Spetzler serves as executive director of the Decision Education Foundation. He is one of the founders of DEF and is dedicated to making the benefits of better decision education accessible to everyone. He was a founder of Strategic Decisions Group and continues to serve as SDG’s chief executive officer. Dr. Spetzler specializes in strategy development, business innovation, and strategic change management, and he advises top management and boards in improving corporate governance. He is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) and frequently speaks on strategy, innovation, and quality in decision making. He is the 2004 recipient of the Ramsey medal, the highest award given by the Decision Analysis Society of INFORMS. He is a trustee of Illinois Institute of Technology where he received a BSChE, MBA, and PhD in economics.

Eric Brooks
Mr. Brooks is a founder of Susquehanna International Group LLP, a global sales and trading firm. As managing director at Susquehanna, Mr. Brooks oversaw various areas including technology, quantitative research, and statistical arbitrage. Mr. Brooks spent over 20 years in the derivatives industry. He was a member of, and traded on, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange from 1981 to 1987. His particular area of interest is the furtherance of K–12 education and educationally based programs. To that end, he serves as a member of the Board of Trustees at Mastery Charter Schools in Philadelphia and as a member of the Board of Trustees for the Legislative Education Action Drive.

Annie Duke
Ms. Duke is widely known as one of the world’s best poker players. She is also a published author, a producer, and an entrepreneur. She attended Columbia University, where she majored in English and psychology and was awarded an NSF fellowship to study psycholinguistics, a field within cognitive psychology, at the University of Pennsylvania. After five years of graduate work, she left the university and began to pursue professional poker as a career. In addition to competitive events, she currently serves as a consultant for the online poker site UltimateBet.com, and she has founded her own production company with actor Joe Reitman. Ms. Duke joined the DEF board of directors because of her belief in the importance of decision skills for young people and her continuing interest in education.

J.F. Foran
Mr. Foran is a DEF founder and currently serves on its Executive Committee. He was a founder of Strategic Decisions Group, where he held several management positions. At SDG, he specialized in corporate strategy, corporate restructurings, and asset valuation. Mr. Foran is a consulting professor at Stanford University in the Department of Management Science and Engineering, where he teaches courses in corporate decision making. Mr. Foran is also a member of the Decision and Ethics Center at Stanford. He is active in Save the Children, serving as a trustee and a member its Executive Committee, chairman of its Compensation Committee, and a member of the Advisory Council for U.S. Programs. Currently, he serves as an advisor to two investment funds that specialize in the development of intellectual property in the life sciences market. He is a director of several Silicon Valley software companies. Mr. Foran holds a BA from Middlebury College and an MBA from the Wharton School.

David Heckerman
Dr. Heckerman is the founder and manager of the Machine Learning and Applied Statistics Group at Microsoft Research. Early in his career, Dr. Heckerman led the development of expert systems to help improve decision making in the medical community. Since joining Microsoft in 1992, Dr. Heckerman has been creating software that leverages the power of decision analysis, including the Answer Wizard in Office®, troubleshooters in Windows®, knowledge management software in Sharepoint Portal Server, and data-mining tools in SQL Server and Commerce Server. Throughout his career, both in medicine and at Microsoft, Dr. Heckerman has witnessed the benefits of good decision making and is dedicated to bringing decision education to everyone. Dr. Heckerman received a BS and MS in physics from UCLA and an MD and PhD in medical informatics from Stanford University. He is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Eric Horvitz
Dr. Horvitz is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, where he manages the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group. His interests include principles and applications of decision analysis for building insights and enhancing actions in technical, policy, and personal arenas. His research has centered on the challenges of developing computational systems that can assist people with making better decisions or that perform autonomous decisions under uncertainty. Dr. Horvitz has worked on decision problems in several domains, including consumer software, aerospace, and health care. Dr. Horvitz received a PhD and MD from Stanford University, focusing his doctoral work on time-critical decision making. He is president-elect and fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), associate editor of the Decisions, Uncertainty, and Computation section of the Journal of the ACM, and serves on the editorial board of the Decision Analysis Journal.

Tom Keelin
Dr. Keelin has served as lead instructor for teaching the teachers of at-risk high schoolers how to help their students develop good decision skills. Dr. Keelin is Managing Partner of Keelin Reeds Partners (KR), a management consulting firm that helps small innovative companies achieve their potential. He is also a former director of Strategic Decisions Group. At SDG, he served in several management roles, including worldwide managing director; managing director of SDG London; practice area leader for the strategy, life sciences, and utility practice areas; and human resources officer. Teaming with colleagues at SDG and Stanford, he co-developed the principles of decision quality, on which he has testified in regulatory hearings, which are used routinely by KR and SDG consultants to help clients and which form a cornerstone of the Decision Education Foundation's efforts to help young people improve their lives through better decision making. Dr. Keelin received a PhD and an MS in engineering-economic systems and a BA in economics from Stanford University.

James Matheson
Dr. Matheson is chairman and chief financial officer of SmartOrg, Inc. He is a recognized leader in the development and application of decision analysis and serves as a consulting professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He co-authored the widely used text The Smart Organization: Creating Value through Strategic R&D, published by Harvard Business School Press. In recognition of his career, Dr. Matheson was awarded the Ramsey Medal, the highest honor in the field of decision analysis. Dr. Matheson received a BS in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and an MS and a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Paul Schoemaker
Dr. Schoemaker is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Decision Strategies International, Inc. (www.thinkdsi.com), a consulting and training firm specializing in strategic management, executive development, and multimedia software. Dr. Schoemaker also serves as research director of the Mack Center for Technological Innovation at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches decision making and strategy. For more than 12 years he was a professor in the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago, specializing in strategy and decision sciences. He has also been a visiting professor with Cedep at Insead (France) and the London Business School and has worked with more than 100 organizations worldwide. Dr. Schoemaker has written more than 90 academic and applied papers and co-authored several books, including Decision Traps (Simon & Schuster 1990), Decision Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Wharton On Managing Emerging Technologies (Wiley, 2000), Winning Decisions (Doubleday, 2001), Profiting from Uncertainty (Free Press, 2002), and Peripheral Vision (Harvard Business School Press, 2006). His publications have received several awards and have appeared in numerous languages. His 1995 article “Scenario Planning” is the second most reprinted publication in the 41-year history of the Sloan Management Review, and he was recently ranked among the most highly cited scholars in business and economics (www.ISIhighlycited.com).