Ellen W. Faran, an executive with Houghton Mifflin Co., will become director of the MIT Press on Jan. 6. She succeeds Frank Urbanowski, who is retiring after 27 years.
Faran is vice president and director of planning for finance and operations in Houghton Mifflin's trade and reference division. She managed the startup of an in-house electronic licensing group, as well as domestic and international distribution arrangements, which was instrumental in rebuilding the financial health of the division.
Before joining Houghton Mifflin in 1996, Faran was senior vice president, chief financial officer and general manager at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Previously she worked at Harper & Row Publishers and the National Academy Press. She holds a B.A. from Radcliffe College, a certificate from the Radcliffe Publishing Course and an M.B.A. from Harvard University.
As MIT Press director, Faran will lead initiatives in all areas of development, from traditional content acquisition through the exploration, development and management of innovative tools and technologies. The Press publishes more than 200 new titles and some 40 journals a year and hosts CogNet, an electronic community for cognitive and brain sciences. More than one million copies of books and journals bearing the MIT Press imprint are sold each year, 30 percent to export markets.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on December 11, 2002.
