Ronald Howard, a seminal figure in the field of decision analysis and its ethical application, and a mentor to Stanford students for 53 years, has died

Ronald Howard, a professor emeritus of management science and engineering at Stanford University, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a pioneer in the field of decision analysis, died Oct. 6, 2024. He was 90 years old.

Born Aug. 27, 1934, in Brooklyn, New York, Howard was a first-generation American whose parents emigrated from Northern Ireland. Helped by a scholarship from Grumman Aerospace Corporation, formerly known as the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation, he attended MIT, earning bachelor’s degrees in economics and electrical engineering and a master’s degree in electrical engineering. His studies included courses in the decision theory field and in ethics, which contributed to his developing interest in the context in which decisions are made.

Howard received his ScD in electrical engineering in 1958 from MIT, then remained at the university for the next six years as associate professor of electrical engineering, associate professor of industrial management, and associate director of the university’s operations research center. He later accepted an invitation from former MIT mentor and Stanford engineering professor William Linvill to spend a year at Stanford. Howard never left, joining the faculty in 1965.

At Stanford, Howard developed conceptual, systematic, and practical approaches to help people and companies make difficult decisions in the face of uncertainty and complex preferences. He served as the director of the Decisions and Ethics Center at Stanford, and was instrumental in helping form the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems, a precursor to the Department of Management Science and Engineering. Among his many accomplishments were algorithmic breakthroughs for solving decision problems, analytic models that laid the foundation for probabilistic modeling, and his involvement in creating the Influence Diagram, a tool to help analyze complex decisions.

“Ron did a lot of the foundational work in the theory and practice of decision-making, including major contributions to an area called dynamic programming, which today reappears in other forms, particularly in reinforcement learning, which now is a huge part of AI,” says colleague Peter Glynn, the Thomas W. Ford Professor in the School of Engineering and professor, by courtesy, of electrical engineering. “He was also someone who was interested not just in foundational work, but in work that had applications in society.”

Friend and colleague Ross Shachter, associate professor of management science and engineering at Stanford, agreed.

“He was a pioneer in the field of taking the decision theory that had been developed in the first half of the 1900s and figuring out how to apply it to business problems,” he says. “You may say that the roots of decision analysis are in economics or mathematics, but he was really bringing those ideas into engineering.”

Howard developed and taught the core of the decision analysis curriculum at Stanford. His classes frequently included students from disciplines including law, medicine, and business. One of his most popular courses was developed after he was asked by a private client to skew the results of a decision analysis project.

“I realized I was like a martial arts teacher who had taught students how to kill with bare hands but had not given them the basis for when to use their knowledge,” he told a Stanford interviewer in 2014. “I developed a course called The Ethical Analyst to make sure my students were ethically sensitive in using what they learned.”

Howard was a founding director and chairman of Strategic Decisions Group, and consulted for a wide range of organizations, including SRI International and Arthur D. Little. His assignments spanned a diverse field of applications, from investment planning and research strategy to medical decision-making, hurricane seeding, and nuclear waste isolation. He taught decision analysis courses for private clients and lectured in decision analysis at universities around the world.

Howard was also a founding board member and president of the Decision Education Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on teaching the core principles of decision-making science to young people – primarily high school students – and their teachers. He participated in establishing the organization’s Ronald A. Howard endowment in 2021.

He was the author of five books, including foundational texts in his field. They include Dynamic Programming and Markov Processes; Dynamic Probabilistic Systems (vols. 1 and 2); Foundations of Decision Analysis, with Ali Abbas; and Ethics for the Real World, with Clint Korver.

Howard was also the recipient of numerous awards and honors. They include the 1986 Frank P. Ramsey Medal “for distinguished contributions in decision analysis” presented by the Operations Research Society of America, and the first award presented from the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) for “the teaching of operations research/management science practice” in 1998. Howard was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1999, and in 2002 was among eight Stanford faculty to receive a fellow’s award from INFORMS.

Howard was an enthusiastic teacher and known for his ability to understand complex concepts and present them clearly, Shachter says.

“At faculty meetings when there was disagreement, at some point Ron would speak and contribute something that would provide a new way for everybody to think,” he says. “He knew how to take very complicated ideas and explain them in a way that made a lot of sense to people. He also liked to teach by the Socratic method, and very few people can pull that off.”

In addition to his research and scholarship, Howard’s legacy will include the thousands of students over more than six decades – and an estimated 100 doctoral students – who received the benefit of his teaching.

“Ron was one of the leading scholars in decision analysis, and he had a very long career at Stanford teaching many, many students,” Shachter says. “We want engineers to come out of school equipped to make major decisions in their personal and professional lives. A lot of engineers working today in a range of fields learned from him how to recognize which things are actual choices and which are not under their control, and this knowledge will impact them for their careers.”

In his 2014 Stanford interview, Howard discussed the value of making informed decisions.

“Clarity of action depends on quality of thought,” he said. “You have to get your thinking straight before you can talk about making choices. That’s what decision analysis is all about. We’re not saying as a profession we have the answers to all these things, but once you turn the light on at least you can see the wrong way to go."

“The only thing you can do that will change your future life are the decisions that you make. Otherwise, you’re not the wind; you’re the leaf in the wind.”