Richard Lyons (business professor)

Richard Kent Lyons (born 1961) is an American economist and academic, serving as the Chancellor of University of California, Berkeley. He was the 14th Dean of the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, until 2018. In 2020, he became UC Berkeley's first Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer.

Early life and education
Lyons was born on February 10, 1961, in Palo Alto, California. Lyons earned his B.S. in business with highest honors from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1982. In 1987, he received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Career
Lyons served as Acting Dean of the Haas School from 2004 to 2005, as Executive Associate Dean and Sylvan Coleman Professor of Finance from 2005 to 2006, and as Chief Learning Officer at Goldman Sachs in New York City from 2006 to 2008. Before coming to Haas, Lyons also spent six years on the faculty at Columbia Business School. His teaching expertise is in international finance. Lyons is fluent in French and is also an accomplished musician, owning several musical copyrights. He and his wife, Jennifer, have two children.

Lyons’s early research focuses on currency markets, a focus reflected in his book “The Microstructure Approach to Exchange Rates” (MIT Press).

In 1998 he received U.C. Berkeley’s highest teaching honor, the Distinguished Teaching Award, and has won the Haas School’s Teacher of the Year (Cheit) award six times.

Other professional activities
Lyons's past consulting relationships include the Federal Reserve Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and Citibank. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an Associate Editor of the California Management Review, and, prior to joining Goldman Sachs, served as Chair of the Board of Directors of Matthews Asia Funds, and a member of the Board of Directors of iShares (Barclays Global Investors).