Elisabeth Paté-Cornell is the Burt and Deedee McMurtry Professor in the School of Engineering and professor and chair of the department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Her primary areas of teaching, research, consulting and public service are engineering risk analysis and risk management, decision analysis, and engineering economy. Her research, in recent years has focused on the extension of probabilistic risk analysis models to include human and organizational factors, with applications, for example, to the maintenance of the tiles of the space shuttle, the management of offshore oil platforms, and anesthesia in operating rooms. She has also worked on the issue of treatment of ambiguity both in the risk analysis and in the decision analysis part of her work. She is currently involved in the development of decision support systems for the management of engineering programs of dependent projects such as unmanned space missions under tight constraints of time and budget.

She is a member of National Academy of Engineering, of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and of the California Council on Science and Technology. She currently chairs the Board of Advisors of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. She was until recently a member of the Air Force Science Advisory Board, of the NASA Advisory Council, of the Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics and Applications of the National Research Council (NRC), of the Marine Board of the NRC and chair of the NRC committee on Risk Assessment and Management of Marine Systems. She is a past president and a fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis. She is currently an elected member of the Stanford University Senate of which she was the vice chair in 1998-1999.

Her undergraduate degree was in mathematics and physics. She received her graduate Engineer Degree in Computer Science in 1971 from the Institut Polytechnique of Grenoble, France, a Master's degree in Operations Research in 1972, and a Ph.D. in Engineering-Economic Systems in 1978, both from Stanford University. She taught at MIT in the department of Civil Engineering (78-81) and at Stanford in the department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (81-99) which she chaired from 1997 to 1999. She is currently the chair of the newly formed department of Management Science and Engineering resulting from the fusion in January 2000 of the former departments of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, and of Engineering-Economic Systems and Operations Research. She served two terms as a CCST Council member (2000-2006).