By Ruth Hammond

St. Mary's University's new business dean might have had a career as a physicist, had her temperament been different. Her bachelor's and master's degrees, from Allahabad University, in India, are in physics.

"I was a pretty good physicist," said Tanuja Singh, who has been chair of the marketing department at Northern Illinois University's College of Business for three years. "But I'm inherently a people person." And physics, she concluded, "is a fairly lonely field."

So "just for the heck of it," she took India's national examination to be a bank officer and then found work with the State Bank of India, where she became an officer of international banking in 1985. She found herself enthralled with the import-export side of trade, and a new pursuit was born.

Ms. Singh's international background is one of the assets —along with being "terrifically energetic," innovative, and change-oriented —that she will bring to San Antonio, where she will lead St. Mary's Bill Greehey School of Business, says Charles L. Cotrell, the university's president.

She will be the first female dean of the 86-year-old business school, which in 2005 was named for Bill Greehey, an oil executive and alumnus who endowed it with $25-million. Part of the money was to be used to attract top professors and students.

Ms. Singh, who turns 46 this month, says she has been fascinated since childhood by how countries develop. So it seemed only natural that, once she got involved in international trade, she would pursue an M.B.A. and do so in the United States, following a path similar to those her brother and an uncle had taken.

She ended up at Millsaps College, a small, private institution in Jackson, Miss., where she earned her M.B.A. in 1990. A professor there remarked on how well she worked with students and encouraged her to get a Ph.D. That advice re inforced her own ideas about what to do next.

"You have to know what you love," she says. "For me, it was a big risk to jump from physics, where I was pretty good, into a new field. So some of it is personality also —how comfortable you are with risky situations."

In 1994 she earned a doctorate in business administration at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Concepts she had learned in physics made their way into her dissertation on "advertising wearout," particularly entropy, with a little bit of chaos theory thrown in. "I used the foundation of how entropy works in the thermodynamic world," Ms. Singh says, "and translated it to how it should work in a cognitive world, where we were dealing with information processing."

She analyzed "how information wears out, why people get bored with it, overloaded with it, and how soon this information dissipates."

The year before she finished her dissertation, she became an assistant professor of marketing at the Florida Institute of Technology. She returned to Illinois after a few years, to Northern Illinois University's College of Business, where she became a tenured professor of marketing. The business school's balance between theory and practice is what drew her there, she says.

At Northern Illinois, Ms. Singh has brought real-world experience into the classroom by having students work with businesses in nearby Chicago on global-marketing strategies and learn from Chinese business leaders who visited the campus for an international executive-education program.

She was not looking to leave right away but was approached by a search firm about the job at St. Mary's after being nominated by a dean who met her at a conference for aspiring business-school deans.

The more she learned about St. Mary's, the more excited she grew about the prospect of working there. "It was almost as if the position was designed with me in mind," she says. The university's emphasis on ethics, social justice, service, and a concept known as "peace through commerce" all appealed to her.

The Greehey school, with fewer than 1,000 undergraduate and M.B.A. students, is smaller than Northern Illinois's business school, but its faculty is about as large as that of the department Ms. Singh has led. Far more important to her than size, she says, is knowing that the business schools share certain values about learning. And smallness, she adds, might give her more flexibility in decision making and allow her easier access to the next level of leadership.

Michael Ariens, a law professor at St. Mary's who led the search committee for the dean, says that even at a preliminary interview, Ms. Singh "just stood out." It was a matter of weeks before she returned for more interviews and was offered the job.

"She brings a vision, a passion, an energy," he says.

President Cotrell hopes she will build partnerships with the local business and civic communities and beyond, enhance the business school's commitment to service and global corporate responsibility, and elevate its reputation "to the next plateau," he says.

Ms. Singh will begin her new job on July 1. She will further the goals of the previous dean, Keith A. Russell, who died unexpectedly last year, and add some of her own. Not only will she oversee the teaching of global marketing, but she will also use her own marketing skills to make known the strengths of the Greehey school. True to her focus, she plans to tell the world.