James S. Dyer is the Fondren Centennial Chair in Business at The University of Texas at Austin. He served on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, for nine years, before returning to The University of Texas. Dr. Dyer served as chair of the Department of Management from 1982 until 1986, and as chair of the Department of Management Science and Information Systems for nine years (1988-97). He also served as chair of the Decision Analysis Special Interest Group of the Operations Research Society of America (now known as INFORMS). This group has a membership of over 500 academics and practitioners in the field of decision analysis. Dr. Dyer teaches courses on decision and risk analysis, decision-making with multiple objectives, and management science in the M.B.A. and Ph.D. programs at The University of Texas at Austin. He also teaches in the Master of Science program in Commercialization of Technology. Dr. Dyer has consulted for a number of private firms and government agencies, including Amoco Oil Company, Texas Instruments, Inc., Schlumberger, Texaco, Inc., and the Department of Energy (DOE). For the DOE, he directed a team of professionals who provided an evaluation of alternatives for the disposition of surplus weapons-usable plutonium currently stored near Amarillo, Texas. The results of this study supported the DOE recommendation regarding this policy issue announced in 1997. More recently, he was co-chair of a seminar jointly sponsored by The University of Texas and Schlumberger on applications of decision and risk analysis in the oil industry.