Karahanna named a Distinguished Fellow of the INFORMS Information Systems Society

MIS professor honored for research impact, intellectual leadership and mentorship
Elena headshot

Terry College of Business professor Elena Karahanna was awarded the title of Distinguished Fellow by the INFORMS Information Systems Society.

The ISS Distinguished Fellow Award recognizes individuals who have made outstanding intellectual contributions to the information systems discipline. Karahanna was selected for her scholarly contributions to the information systems discipline, her work mentoring graduate students and junior faculty and her intellectual leadership in the field.

The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, known as INFORMS, is the leading international association for operations research and analytics professionals. This annual award is sponsored by the INFORMS Information Systems Society which promotes and disseminates research on the use and impact of information technology in organizations.

Karahanna accepted the award on Oct. 24 at the society’s annual meeting.

A University of Georgia faculty member since 2000, Karahanna is a Distinguished Research Professor who holds the C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry Distinguished Chair of Business Administration in the Department of Management Information Systems.

“Dr. Karahanna has been a leader in the development of our discipline,” said Maric Boudreau, professor and head of the MIS Department. “Not only has her research played a substantial role in moving the science forward, but she has been critical in supporting students and her fellow faculty members. She is respected and admired by the research community for the quality and relevance of her work, both within IS and across disciplines.”

Karahanna’s research focuses on the impact of information systems on work and in healthcare and, more recently, on the use and impact of bots and conversational agents. She has published extensively in top scholarly journals with over 30,000 citations to her research and is the co-author of three of the most cited papers in MIS Quarterly, one of the top two MIS journals.

ISS Distinguished Fellows are nominated by their colleagues and selected by the INFORMS awards committee.

In 2020, Karahanna received the LEO Award for exceptional career-spanning contributions from the Association for Information Systems.

Karahanna has served as a senior editor of MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research and the Journal of the Association for Information Systems. She has also served on the editorial board of several other journals, including Management Science. She is frequently invited to speak and deliver keynote addresses at international conferences and research universities.

At UGA, Karahanna serves as a graduate coordinator for the MIS Department and has taught courses on theory development, several other Ph.D. courses, systems analysis and design and business intelligence. She has received several teaching awards and has been an active mentor to doctoral students, chairing 15 dissertation committees and serving as a member on another 28.