Soulaymane Kachani

Senior Vice Provost, Columbia University

kachani@columbia.edu
212 854-1804

Soulaymane Kachani serves as Columbia University’s Senior Vice Provost.  In this role, he oversees the development of Columbia University’s teaching, learning, and innovation strategies, supporting schools, colleges, and departments. He spearheads initiatives to enable the University to accelerate the expansion of its innovation in online and hybrid offerings. He also focuses on propelling Columbia’s excellence as a global university, working to enhance existing international academic partnerships and develop new ones, and to make its campuses ever more welcoming to students and scholars from around the world. He assists with budget and administrative planning across the units of the Office of the Provost, and coordinates efforts to enable excellence in all that the University does for its student employees.

Prior to this role, Professor Kachani served as Vice Provost for Teaching, Learning, and Innovation. He led the establishment of the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) in 2015. The CTL played a key role in the University’s transition to online and HyFlex teaching during the pandemic, and is now an essential resource for faculty and graduate instructors across Columbia. The Provost’s Teaching and Learning Grants program has enabled faculty from all schools to fold new educational methods and technologies into their classrooms and learning environments, and the Science of Learning Research (SOLER) Initiative has developed a vibrant hub for cross-disciplinary research that advances the scholarship of teaching and learning. 

Professor Kachani conducts research in the fields of dynamic pricing, revenue management, machine learning, logistics, supply chain management, algorithmic trading, statistical arbitrage, traffic flow modeling, and transportation analysis. He is an affiliated member of two centers of the Columbia Data Science Institute: The Financial and Business Analytics Center and the Foundations of Data Science Center. He is also an affiliated member of the Columbia Center for Financial Engineering and of the Computational Optimization Research Center. He teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the areas of quantitative corporate finance, industrial economics, operations consulting, logistics, pricing, and production and inventory planning.

At Class Day Ceremonies, Professor Kachani was honored with the Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association 2005 Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award for excellence in teaching and devotion to mentoring students, the 2007 Edward and Carole Kim Award for Faculty Involvement for going above and beyond the call of duty to foster student success, and the 2010 Janette and Armen Avanessians Diversity Award for outstanding performance in enhancing diversity in departmental, school and university programs at Columbia. He was also the recipient of the 2012 Egleston Distinguished Service Award for exceptional achievement, leadership and contributions to the excellence of Columbia University.

Prior to joining Columbia in 2003, Professor Kachani worked as a senior consultant in the Boston office of McKinsey & Company. He has continued to consult to McKinsey, to large corporations and to startups in the areas of pricing, supply chain management, operations, asset management, and corporate finance. Professor Kachani received a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also holds a Master of Science in Operations Research from MIT and a Diplôme d’Ingénieur in Applied Mathematics from École Centrale Paris.