Richard Vietor is the Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration where he teaches courses on the regulation of business and the international political economy. He also teaches in several executive education programs. He received a B.A. in economics from Union College (1967), an M.A. in history from Hofstra University (1971), and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pittsburgh (1975). He was appointed Professor in 1984.

Before coming to the Business School in 1978, Professor Vietor held faculty appointments at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the University of Missouri. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and Harvard's Newcomen Fellowship. In 1981, he received the Newcomen Award in business history. He serves on the editorial board of the Business History Review, the advisory board of IPADE, in Mexico, and the Infrastructure Committee of the Competitiveness Policy Council. He was President of the Business History Conference for 1993-1994.

Professor Vietor's research on business and government policy has been published in numerous journals and books. He has contributed chapters to America versus Japan (1986), Wall Street and Regulation (1981), Future Competition in Telecommunications (1989), and Government, Industries and Markets (1990). His books include Environmental Politics and the Coal Coalition (1980), Energy Policy in America (1984), Telecommunications in Transition (1986), Strategic Management in the Regulated Environment (1989), Contrived Competition (1994), Business Management and the natural Environment (1996), and Globalization and Growth: Case Studies in National Economic Strategies (2004), and How Countries Compete (2007).

For his courses in business-government relations and environmental management, Professor Vietor has published more than three dozen case studies on international energy issues, on the regulation of natural gas, nuclear power, air pollution and hazardous wastes, and on strategy and deregulation in airlines, railroads, telecommunications, and financial services. He has been a consultant to the Hudson Institute and the Energy Research and Development Administration, and is currently consultant to several corporations, such as IBM, General Electric and Anglo American and the Government of Malaysia.

Professor Vietor lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with his wife Cindy.