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Featured Research Faculty

You may want to visit our more general School of Information Systems and Management page for an overview of the school and our entire faculty, which includes additional scholars of interest. Many of our faculty conduct research, though the most research-active among them are on the tenure track (Assistant Professors, Associate Professors, and Professors). We also benefit greatly from numerous non-tenure track faculty, some of whom conduct research and all of whom are industry experts, such that everyone contributes to our research mission through their scholarship and/or business expertise.

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Featured Senior Professors

Sunil Mithas - Professor and World Class Scholar (Tampa)

Sunil Mithas, PhD is a World Class Scholar and professor, and serves as director (rankings and reputation) at the Muma College of Business. He is a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the UNSW Business School, Sydney. Previously, Mithas was the Ralph J. Tyser Professor of Information Systems at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, where he served as associate chair, and co-directed two centers. He has held visiting positions at the University of California Davis, UNSW Sydney, University of Mannheim, and HKUST Hong Kong.

Mithas is recognized among the foremost information systems scholars in the world. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Information Systems Society of INFORMS, an AIS Fellow, a Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar, and a Vaishwik Bhartiya Vaigyanik (VAIBHAV) fellow. He is the author of two books, and his research published in top journals and conferences have won multiple best-paper awards, and featured in practice-oriented publications such as the MIT Sloan Management Review, Management Business Review, and Bloomberg.  Mithas serves as a department editor of Production and Operations Management, and on editorial board at the Journal of Management Information Systems. Earlier he served on the editorial boards of MIS Quarterly and Information Systems Research.

He has consulted and conducted research with organizations that include A. T. Kearney, EY, Johnson & Johnson, the Social Security Administration, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Tata Group. He is a frequent keynote speaker in corporate and academic settings. Mithas had a decade-long successful career at the Tata group in engineering, marketing, and general management positions before he dedicated himself to an academic career. He earned his PhD from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and an engineering degree from IIT, Roorkee.

Dezhi Yin - Associate Professor (Tampa)

Dezhi (Denny) Yin is an associate professor in the Muma College of Business' School of Information Systems and Management. 

His research interests include user-generated content (e.g., online word-of-mouth, social media, Q&A sites, crowdfunding), emotional expression in online environments, and cognitive biases/heuristics in computer/algorithm-mediated communication. As an interdisciplinary researcher, he has collaborated with scholars from marketing, strategy/entrepreneurship and organizational behavior beyond information systems. His primary expertise in methodology is laboratory experiments, but as a strong proponent of triangulation, he strives to use multiple studies and multiple methods (such as econometric analyses and surveys) to produce more valid and reliable findings.

His research has appeared in premier academic journals such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Academy of Management Journal, and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. His research has won several awards, including the Emerald Citations of Excellence Award (for his 2014 MISQ paper), the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP)'s William A. Owens Scholarly Achievement Award (for his 2019 AMJ paper), the Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST)'s Best Paper Runner-up Award in 2017, and the Workshop on E-Business (WeB)'s Best Paper Award in 2020. 

He won the INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS) Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award in 2021 and the MIS Quarterly Outstanding Reviewer of the Year Award in 2017. He also served as guest Associate Editor for a special issue at MIS Quarterly.

Yin earned a PhD in IT management from the Georgia Institute of Technology, a master's degree from Peking University and a bachelor's degree from Shandong University in China.

Kaushik Dutta - Associate Dean of Undergraduate and International Relations (Interim Director)

Kaushik Dutta has 22 years of professional and research experience in the field of enterprise IT infrastructure, data analytics and big data systems. He is professor in and chair of the School of Information Systems and Management. His current research interest is big data analytics. Dutta's primary expertise combines operations research and data mining techniques with computer science systems knowledge to efficiently handle big data and manage large IT infrastructure. He has been the mentor of two startups out of USF in the NSF-iCorps program.

Prior to joining USF, Dutta was a tenured associate professor at National University of Singapore and Florida International University. Before starting out on his academic path, he pursued a career in engineering, most recently as the chief technology officer and vice president of engineering of Mobilewalla, a NUS-incubated and Madrona-funded company that developed big-data-based mobile advertisement platforms.

Dutta earned a PhD in management information systems from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a master's degree in computer science from the Indian Statistical Institute. He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Jadavpur University.

Anol Bhattacherjee - Professor & Academic Director, BAIS program

Anol Bhattacherjee is a professor in the School of Information Systems and Management and the Exide Professor of Business Ethics. His research focuses on a broad range of information systems topics related to healthcare informatics, algorithm biases, social media, and organizational innovations. He teaches classes on statistical data modeling, text analytics, and research methods.

Bhattacherjee is the world’s 12th ranked researcher in career-long impact (8th ranked in single year 2020 impact) in the information systems discipline, according to a 2021 Stanford University study. His papers have been cited over 30,000 times on Google Scholar, with six papers exceeding 1,000 citations each. His sole-authored 2001 paper in MIS Quarterly, cited over 8,000 times, is credited with starting a new stream of research on technology continuance. Bhattacherjee has more than 100 refereed journal papers and conference proceedings, of which 10 are in Financial Times 50 journals and five are in MIS Quarterly – the No.1 journal in the discipline. Over the 2001-10 decade, he was the world’s 8th ranked researcher in information systems, based on papers published in the top two journals in the discipline. In 2012, he was listed in Most Prolific Authors in MIS Quarterly, and in 2019, he was awarded the Stafford Beer Medal by the Operational Research Society, United Kingdom, for his research. In addition, his free textbook on research methods, titled Social Science Research: Principles, Methods, and Practices, has been downloaded over 1.2 million times, used in 22,000 institutions in 222 countries, and translated into seven languages. Bhattacherjee was the principal investigator in U.S. federal grants exceeding $750,000 and he served on the editorial boards of MIS Quarterly and the Journal of the AIS for six years.

Bhattacherjee earned a PhD and an MBA from the University of Houston and master's and bachelor's degrees from Indian Institute of Technology. He had prior faculty appointments at Arizona State University and the University of Colorado at Denver and served as the Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Chair in 2019 (at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur) and Fulbright Senior Scholar in 2012 (at ESPRIT, Tunisia).

Wolfgang Jank - Anderson Professor and advisor, Center for Analytics and Creativity (Tampa)

Wolfgang Jank is the Anderson Professor of Global Management in the School of Information Systems and Management. He teaches classes in statistics and data mining in the masters, MBA and Executive MBA programs.

An author of more than 80 refereed articles, Jank's research focuses on the application of statistics and data mining to data-driven problems in marketing, information systems and operations management. He has been published in journals such as the Journal of Forecasting, the INFORMS Journal of Computing, Marketing Science, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society and the Annals of Applied Statistics. He was awarded the best Information Systems Publication in 2008. He has written three books and has presented his work at national and international meetings.

Jank earned a PhD in statistics from the University of Florida and a master's degree in mathematics from the Technical University of Aachen (Germany). Prior to joining the Muma College of Business, he was an associate professor in the Department of Decisions, Operations & Information Technologies, and served as the director of the Center for Complexity in Business at the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business.

Shivendu Shivendu - Associate Professor (Tampa)

Shivendu Shivendu is an associate professor of information systems in the School of Information Systems and Management. He has created and taught undergraduate, graduate, MBA, and doctoral courses in areas related to economics of information systems, design of information systems, business analytics, econometrics, blockchain technology and crypto economy including fintech. Shivendu serves as chair for the Graduate Council at USF and chair for the Blockchain Task Force at the Muma College of Business. He led the prestigious White House initiated federal TechHire grant of $600,000 as principal investigator and is the co-organizer of the annual "State of the Region" conference held in the Tampa Bay region, an event that draws hundreds of business and civic leaders to learn more about how the region compares to other metropolitan areas in key areas such an unemployment, income inequality, economic growth, and educational attainment. Before transitioning to academics, Shivendu served in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) in senior leadership roles in the government in India.

His research focuses on the emerging business and policy issues at the intersection of technology, economics and public policy. He employs analytical, empirical, and experimental methods to study technology mediated business models, sourcing of IT services, security and privacy in big data, health IT and algorithmic fairness and bias. His work has been published in information systems journals including Management Science, Information Systems Research, Production and Operations Management, the Journal of Management Information Systems, and Information Technology Management. His research papers have won many best-paper awards in conferences. Shivendu also serves as pro bono academic advisor to the National Institute of Smart Government, New Delhi.

He earned a PhD and a Master in Economics from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

Alan Hevner - Distinguished University Professor and AAAS Fellow

Alan R. Hevner is a Distinguished University Professor and Eminent Scholar in the School of Information Systems and Management in the Muma College of Business at the Â鶹ÊÓƵ. He holds the Citigroup/Hidden River Chair of Distributed Technology.

Hevner's areas of research interest include design science research, digital innovation, information systems development, software engineering, distributed database systems, and healthcare systems. He has published over 300 research papers on these topics with nearly 30,000 citations to his papers.

Hevner received a PhD in computer science from Purdue University. He has held faculty positions at the University of Maryland and the University of Minnesota. Hevner is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems, and a Fellow of IEEE. He is a member of ACM and INFORMS.

Additional honors include selection as a Parnas Fellow at Lero, the Irish software research center, a Schoeller Senior Fellow at Friedrich Alexander University in Germany, and the 2018 Distinguished Alumnus award from the Purdue University Computer Science Department. From 2006 to 2009, he served as a program manager at the U.S. National Science Foundation in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate.

Manish Agrawal - Professor (Tampa)

Manish Agrawal is a professor and former chair of the School of Information Systems and Management who teaches courses in information assurance, business data communications and applications development. Agrawal received USF's university-wide award recognizing teaching excellence. He also received the University’s Excellence in Innovation Award in 2022 for his NSF STTR-funded startup company, EdVision.

An expert in the areas of cybersecurity, social media analytics, software quality, offshoring and outsourcing, his research interests include extreme event response, social media analytics, decision fusion and software quality. He is an avid researcher and his work has been published in numerous academic journals, including Management Science, MIS Quarterly, the INFORMS Journal on Computing, the Journal of Management Information Systems, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Decision Support Systems and the Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce. His research and teaching have been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum and Sun Microsystems. Prior to joining academia, Agrawal was a member of the Indian Police Service.

Agrawal earned a PhD in information systems from the State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo and studied at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India.

Tenure-track Assistant Professors

Reza Ebrahimi - Assistant Professor (Tampa)

Reza Ebrahimi is an assistant professor at the School of Information Systems and Management and the lead of Star-AI Lab at the Â鶹ÊÓƵ.

Ebrahimi’s current research is focused on statistical and adversarial machine learning for AI-enabled secure and trustworthy cyberspace. He leverages a wide range of statistical learning theories, including Transductive Learning, Transfer Learning, Adversarial Learning, and Deep Reinforcement Learning. Ebrahimi’s dissertation on AI-enabled cybersecurity analytics won the ACM SIGMIS best doctoral dissertation award in 2021. He has published 35 articles in peer reviewed journals, conferences, and workshops including MIS Quarterly, NeurIPS, JMIS, IEEE TPAMI, IEEE TDSC, Applied Artificial Intelligence, Digital Forensics, IEEE S&PW, AAAIW, IEEE ICDMW, and IEEE ISI. He has served as a program chair and program committee member in IEEE ICDM Workshop on Machine Learning for Cybersecurity since 2022 as well as the IEEE S&P Workshop on Deep Learning Security and Privacy. He has contributed to several projects supported by the National Science Foundation. He is an IEEE Senior Member and a member of the AIS, ACM, and AAAI.

Ebrahimi received his PhD in information systems from the University of Arizona, where he was a research assistant at the Artificial Intelligence Lab directed by Regents’ Professor Hsinchun Chen, and a master's degree in computer science from Concordia University in Montreal at the Center for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence Lab directed by Ching Y. Suen.

Lu Kong - Assistant Professor (Sarasota-Manatee)

Lu Kong is an assistant professor in the Muma College of Business' School of Information Systems and Management. Her teaching interests include operations management, quality management, data analytics and business modeling. 

Her research interests reside broadly in service operations. More specifically, Kong's research focuses on health care operations management, nursing homes related topics and the interface of health care and hospitality. She presents her work frequently at conferences including INFORMS, POMS, and DSI.

She earned a PhD in operations management and a master's degree in hospitality administration from Cornell University. She received a bachelor's degree in management from Tianjin University of Finance & Economics.

Daniel Zantedeschi - Assistant Professor (Tampa)

Daniel Zantedeschi is an assistant professor in the School of Information Systems and Management, joining the full-time faculty in August, 2019. He comes from the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University, where he was an assistant professor in marketing and logistics. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor in the Muma College of Business where he was affiliated with the Center for Analytics and Creativity and the Interdisciplinary Consortium for Data Sciences.

His research interests include digital multi-channel Attributi9on, Advertising, Pricing and promotions management and various topics in statistical methodology, data science and computer skills.

Zantedeschi earned a PhD in information risk and Operations management and a masters’ degree in economics from the University of Texas, Austin. He received a master’s degree in statistics and stochastic modeling from the University of California, Santa Cruz