PEOPLE

P. George Benson, formerly the dean of the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, recently became the 21st president of the College of Charleston. Benson takes over the position vacated by Lee Higdon, who left last year to become president of Connecticut College.

Under Benson’s leadership, the Terry College of Business has consistently ranked among the top 20 public business schools by leading college guides and business publications. Benson previously served from 1993 to 1998 as the dean of the Rutgers Business School at Rutgers University. From 1977 to 1993 he was a faculty member in the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. Prior to that, he was a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Whippany, N.J. In his first job following college, he worked for the U.S. Army Security Agency in Arlington, Va.

While at Rutgers, Business News New Jersey named Benson one of the “Top 100 Business People in New Jersey. ”He is currently chairman of the Board of Overseers of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, as appointed by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez. The Board of Overseers advises the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Secretary of Commerce on the conduct of the Baldrige Award program and on how well it is serving the nation. From 1997 to 1999, he was one of nine national judges for the Baldrige Award. The Baldrige Award recognizes the highest achievements in performance excellence by U.S. businesses, health care organizations, and educational institutions.

Benson serves on the boards of directors of AGCO Corp. (Duluth, Ga.), Nutrition 21 Inc. (Purchase, N.Y.), Crawford & Company (Atlanta), SignalONE Safety (Atlanta) and Athens First Bank and Trust Company (Athens, Ga.).

Benson received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Bucknell University in 1968, did graduate work in operations research in the engineering school of New York University and received a Ph.D. in decision sciences from the University of Florida in 1977. Benson is the co-author of one of the leading textbooks on business statistics that has been widely used in the United States and abroad for the last 29 years. Prentice Hall published the ninth edition in 2005. Benson’s research spans several fields including decision analysis, operations management, statistics, finance and economics.

Founded in 1770, the College of Charleston is a nationally preeminent, public liberal arts and sciences university located in the heart of historic Charleston, S.C.

Qiong June Dong, professor of management at SUNY Oswego, has received a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarly and Creative Activities. In the past five years, Dong has co-authored a book,“Supernetworks: Decision-Making for the Information Age,” and 23 other publications.

According to Dr. Anna Nagurney, Dong’s collaborator at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Dong “has established an international reputation through her . . . path-breaking research on a variety of network systems which underlie our economics and societies.... She excels in an area which is interdisciplinary and highly competitive and she does so with elegance and class.”

The Oswego professor has given presentations at international conferences in Australia, China, France and Hong Kong. She has received grants to further her research including two from the National Science Foundation. She is an associate with the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and regularly serves as a guest professor at Shanghai Normal University.

Dong “has a reputation as a worldclass scholar and as an innovator in the use of mathematical modeling to forecast transportation system behavior under varying conditions,” says SUNY Oswego President Deborah F. Stanley. “Her extraordinary work ethic is an inspiration to faculty and students alike.”

Dong earned her doctoral degree in management science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a master’s in systems engineering from Shanghai Institute of Mechanical Engineering and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Shanghai Teachers’ University.