Eller MIS Professor Receives Informs ISS Distinguished Fellow Award

Sudha Ram, professor of management information systems and Anheuser-Busch Chair in MIS, Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Eller College of Management, has been awarded the 2021 Informs ISS Distinguished Fellow Award.

This award recognizes individuals who make outstanding intellectual contributions in the field of information systems. The awards committee takes into consideration various scholarly contributions, including publications that have made a significant impact on theory, research and practice; intellectual leadership in the discipline as reflected in editorial appointments, particularly of Informs journals; and intellectual stewardship of the field as reflected in the mentoring of doctoral students and young researchers.

Ram was asked to give an acceptance speech in which she spoke about her many years working in the field of information systems. “I have spent more than 35 years in the information systems field,” says Ram. “This community has inspired me, provided intellectual stimulation, encouraged and constantly helped me to learn about new and interesting research problems to solve and forge new paths in many different ways.”

Ram joined the Eller College of Management in 1985 after earning her PhD in Management Information Systems from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She directs the INSITE Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics and has received more than $60 million in research funding. Her areas of expertise include big data analytics, machine learning, network science and business intelligence. She was a speaker for a TEDx talk in December 2013 on “Creating a Smarter World with Big Data.” She received a fellow of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) award in 2018. She is an editor for the Journal of Business Analytics and a senior editor for Journal of AIS.