Support the Gopalan Memorial Scholarship

Radhakrishnan Gopalan, a beloved professor of finance at Olin, lost his battle with cancer on December 6, 2022. He was 50.

He and Dean Anjan Thakor were close friends. The loss of Gopalan was a blow not only to him, but also to the entire Olin community.

Fast forward to February. Thakor announced the Radhakrishnan Gopalan Memorial Scholarship in an email he sent to faculty, staff and others in the Olin family. Now the Olin Blog is spreading the news.

‘I’m sure you share my sorrow’

“For those of you who knew Radha, I am sure you share in my sorrow,” Thakor wrote. “He was a prolific scholar, a brilliant mind and a passionate educator.” Also, he was a devoted father and husband we will remember for his kindness, the interim dean said.

Radha joined the Olin community 2006 as a member of the finance faculty. He steadily rose in esteem and responsibility, finally serving as the academic director of Olin’s Mumbai-based Executive MBA program in partnership with IIT-Bombay.

Exceptional scholar

“As a scholar, Radha was exceptional, and I was privileged to coauthor several research papers with him,” Thakor wrote in a tribute on the Olin Blog the day Gopalan died.

“His research into corporate finance, corporate governance, emerging market financial systems, mergers and acquisitions, corporate restructuring, entrepreneurial finance and household finance has been widely cited. Indeed, Google Scholar notes nearly 4,000 citations in his career, more than half just since 2017.”

You can read Thakor’s full tribute to Gopalan here.

Contribute to the scholarship here.

You may support the memorial scholarship to honor him and his legacy at Olin in one of the following ways:

• Make a one-time gift of any amount.
• Make a multiyear pledge.
• Join the Eliot Society by making a minimum contribution of $1,000.

If Olin meets its goal, Olin will award the Radhakrishnan Gopalan Memorial Scholarship in the fall.