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ISDS professor recognized with AIS Fellow award

USF Muma College of Business ISDS Professor Alan Hevner has been named a 2016 Fellow of the Association of Information Systems, an honor given to leaders in the information systems research field.

The AIS Fellow Award is given to individuals who have "made significant global contributions to the discipline as well as outstanding local contributions in the context of their country and region." In addition, the award description states that AIS Fellows are role models to colleagues and students and respected by individuals outside the field as well as within it. A maximum of six scholars are selected each year.

Hevner is a professor, Eminent Scholar, and Citigroup/Hidden River Chair of Distributed Technology in the Muma College of Business, which he joined in 1994. His work has produced contributions in the fields of distributed database systems, cleanroom software engineering, and design science research, and he has published more than 200 papers on these topics.

"Al Hevner is the epitome of what this award was created to honor: he is a highly respected researcher with great integrity who has forged the path into new fields of thought," said Moez Limayem, dean of the USF Muma College of Business. "We are so proud that he has been recognized with this award, and as an information systems researcher myself, I am honored to know and work with him."

Hevner accepted the award on Dec. 14 at the 2015 International Conference on Information Systems in Fort Worth, Texas.

"It's a nice feeling to be recognized by your peer group," Hevner said. "Just to understand the respect that people have for your research is encouraging."

Hevner is especially passionate about his research in the design science arena, which looks at techniques for performing research - a passion he says stems from "a human desire to create solutions." Hevner's work in the field has brought design science into prominence in the information systems community, and he said he hopes that his mentorship of others will help the field's progress continue into the future.

"One of the real pleasures of bringing these ideas into the field is the ability to work with doctoral students and young faculty on the potential of this research," he said.

The many awards Hevner has been recognized with include the Schoeller Senior Fellow award at Friedrich Alexander University in Germany, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award for Contributions to Design Science Research from the International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology. Most recently, he and USF St. Petersburg Professor Christopher Davis received the Hermann Zemlicka Award for most visionary paper.

Respect for Hevner's work extends beyond academia: he has consulted for a number of Fortune 500 companies and served as a program manager at the U.S. National Science Foundation in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. He was also a senior editor for Management Information Systems Quarterly from 2007 to 2013.

He credits his success in research with being able to speak the different languages of the academic communities he works within.

"It takes someone with interdisciplinary thinking to bring new ideas across interdisciplinary borders," Hevner said.