Murray To Draw Upon Management Skills in BP Oil Spill Commission

In her recent appointment to a national commission on the BP oil spill, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Dean Cherry A. Murray will draw upon decades of experience in managing engineers and scientists—an asset that colleagues say will prove fundamental to her government charge.

The creation of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling came on the heels of a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico—considered the largest offshore spill in U.S. history—that resulted from a drilling rig explosion in April. The group has been tasked with providing recommendations to prevent future spills.

Murray joins the commission after spending her first year at the helm of SEAS, where she launched broad efforts to expand the school's footprint within Harvard, initiated a multi-year program to convert individual tracks in Engineering Science into discrete concentrations, and increased national awareness of developments within SEAS.

But Murray's past year as a top-level administrator at SEAS is only the most recent capstone of decades of prior experience that many say might actually prove more helpful in her new government role than her administrative tenure at Harvard.

Murray has an extensive history in managing scientists and engineers in their research at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where she led 3,500 employees as the lab's principal associate director.

“I think that Dean Murray—especially after the Livermore Labs—has broad management skills in science and technology that will be necessary for her work on the commission,” said Venkatesh “Venky” Narayanamurti, former dean of SEAS.

Murray's management skills, supplemented with her exposure to the intellectual riches of Harvard, provides the dean a deep understanding of risk management systems—an asset that will inform her contributions to a commission that ultimately seeks to shape the way that the government responds to oil spill catastrophes.

“This [job on the commission] requires a sort of dispassionate look—her distance might allow her to see things that insiders might not recognize,”  Venky said. “If you take Livermore Labs, they have some of the very large laser facilities and they make nuclear weapons: Dean Murray had to manage complex systems in that environment and manage the risks in those complex systems.”

Indeed, some believe that Murray's work on the commission mandates an awareness of the complexity of harnessing an engineering team, moreso than direct experience with fuel science.

Geophysics and Engineering Sciences Professor James R. Rice said that while he does not think Murray has "any specific experience" with oil- and petroleum-related issues, Murray's time at Livermore Labs represents a crucial element of her work history that "properly equips" Murray for her role on the commission.

The seven members of the bipartisan commission, created by an executive order from President Barack Obama, will have their first meeting in mid-July, according to The New York Times.

Rice, who said that he was “astonished by the rate at which the oil was coming out,”  said that creating a committee in which all members are highly knowledgeable about every detail of the committee's charge—in this case, the BP oil spill—is nearly impossible, particularly given the sheer size of the current catastrophe. A committee with members who specialize in different, yet relevant, areas of the issue at hand is a better fit to deal with complex disasters, Rice said.

This type of commission is not uncommon in the wake of such a large calamity, according to Kennedy School Professor Herman “Dutch” B. Leonard ’74, who specializes in crisis management.

“I think it was done because it makes sense to do,” Leonard said, adding that the executive order that established the commission, which he believes will succeed in mitigating future similar disasters, piggybacks on current high public outrage regarding the dangers of unregulated offshore drilling.

—Staff writer Gautam S. Kumar can be reached at gkumar@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Evan T.R. Rosenman can be reached at erosenm@fas.harvard.edu.