Alvin J. Silk (1935-2021)

Alvin “Al” J. Silk, renowned marketing expert, Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School and retired member of INFORMS, passed away at the age of 85. Silk was recognized as an Edelman Laureate in both the 1982 and 1983 Franz Edelman Competitions, serving as a member of the finalist teams for AT&T and Management Decision Systems, Inc., respectively.   

Silk earned a bachelor’s degree with honors from Western University (Canada) in 1959, an MBA (with distinction) in 1960 and his Ph.D. in 1968, both from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Following several years teaching at UCLA and the University of Chicago, Silk joined the Sloan School of Management at MIT. In 1988, after two decades at MIT, Silk joined the Harvard School of Business, where he introduced “brand marketing” into the Harvard MBA Program and taught the course “Research Design and Measurement.”  

Silk’s research interests focused on the development and management of advertising campaigns and decision support systems in marketing. He authored numerous publications, including journal articles, working papers, book chapters and case studies.  
In 2015, Silk received an Honorary Doctor of Laws from the Ivey Business School at Western University. Although retired from teaching responsibilities for more than a decade, Silk continued to be active in retirement, collaborating on research projects with faculty and graduate students at MIT. He also recently published work exploring trends in outsourcing marketing in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science (with Birger Wernerfelt and Shuyi Yu). Silk’s passion for education extended to providing educational opportunities at the schools that impacted him. In 2013, he established an endowed chair at Harvard Business School to honor his late wife, Diane Doerge Wilson, to support an HBS faculty member whose interests include the intersection of gender and work, career and family issues – a passion of Wilson’s throughout her academic and professional career. In 2015, he endowed the Dr. Alvin J. Silk Graduate Scholarship at Ivey Business School at Western University, and he most recently added the Alvin Silk Fellowship Fund at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a doctoral student fellowship in marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management to his list of endowments.  

Source

1. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonglobe/name/alvin-silk-obituary?id=31118563