Sudha Ram: Charting Your Own Path and the Value of Persistence

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Sudha Ram

Image provided by U of A Research, Impact and Innovation
Anheuser-Busch Foundation Professor of Management Information Systems, Sudha Ram, was recently the first guest on the University of Arizona Department of Resarch, Innovation and Impact's new podcast, Wildcat Wonder: Inside Arizona Research. In this episode, Ram spoke with Lisa Romero, associate vice president of research communications and marketing and Laine Kowalski. 
 
Throughout the conversation, she discussed her pioneering work in distributed databases, data analytics and interdisciplinary research spanning four decades at the U of A. She shares insights about several impactful projects including predicting asthma attacks using social media data, improving first-year retention rates through WiFi usage patterns, and COVID contact tracing.
 
Ram emphasized her passion for merging technology with human-centered solutions while maintaining privacy safeguards. The interview also touched on her personal life—her love for her rescue dog, outdoor activities in Arizona's natural spaces, and how she maintains work-life balance. 
 
As a woman in a male-dominated field, she discusses breaking barriers by following her own research path rather than conforming to expectations. Throughout the podcast, Ram expressed her commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration and mentoring students to think critically across traditional boundaries.
 

Ram is Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of MIS, Entrepreneurship & Innovation in the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona. She has joint faculty appointments as Professor of Computer Science, member of BIO5 Institute, and Institute for Environment. She is the director of the INSITE: Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics at the University of Arizona. Her research is in the areas of Big Data Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Large Scale Network Science. She is internationally acclaimed for her research that develops and uses different methods such as machine learning, statistical approaches, ontologies and conceptual modeling. Dr. Ram has published more than 250 research articles in refereed journals, conferences and book chapters.

She has received more than $70 million in research funding from both corporate sources and government agencies including organizations such as, IBM, Intel Corporation, SAP, Ford, Raytheon Missile Systems, US ARMY, NIST, National Science Foundation, NASA, and Office of Research and Development of the CIA. Dr. Ram served as the senior editor for Information Systems Research, Journal of AIS and on the editorial board for many leading Information Systems journals. She was a co-editor in chief for the Journal on Data Semantics and is currently a founding co-editor for Journal of Business Analytics. In 1991, she started the Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (WITS). Dr. Ram has published articles in many top journals, including Information Systems Research, Management Science, MIS Quarterly, JAIS, Journal of MIS, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

She is an AIS Fellow as well as an INFORMS ISS Distinguished Fellow and recipient of several IBM Faculty Development Awards and the Peter Chen Award. Most recently she was the Association for Information Systems Lifetime Achievement LEO Award. Her research has been highlighted in several media outlets including NPR news, and New York Times. She was a speaker for a TEDx talk on “Creating a Smarter World with Big Data”. She received a Woman of Impact of Award from the University of Arizona in October 2023.