News

Congratulations to this year’s MIS scholarship recipients. 

Richard J. and Maureen Brennen Endowed Scholarship

Raihana Choudhury

Yusuf G. Mandviwalla Endowed Scholarship

Connor D’Arcy
Dylan Lloyd

Bill and Jean Devaney Endowed Scholarship

Jacob Guo

Ron and Ronda Riddell Endowed Scholarship 

Josia Phillip
Kumar Varathakumar

James and Andrea Stewart Endowed Scholarship

Omar Elamin
Jingwen Lin
Kelly Liu

IT Leaders Scholarship

Kayla Barone
Nosa Iyamu
Alexander McShane
Rahman Mohammed
Mia Myers
Allyson Yu

Professors Amy Lavin and Laurel Miller have been promoted to Associate Professor of Practice.

Professor Lavin has won numerous awards for her teaching, including the MIS Full-Time Teacher of the Year, Full-Time MBA Faculty Member of the Year, Fox Business Honors Faculty Member of the Year, and MS DIM Faculty Member of the Program. She was also a Dean’s Teaching Fellow and an Honors Teaching Fellow. Her program leadership includes serving as Academic Director of the MS in Digital Innovation in Marketing and as Assistant Academic Director for the Online MBA and BBA programs. Lavin has authored several Ivey case studies and her research in online learning has appeared in pedagogical journals and numerous conference proceedings.

Professor Miller teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs, including the MS in Digital Marketing, the Fox MBA, and the Fox Executive MBA programs. She won the MIS Full-Time Teacher of the Year award. In addition, Miller has made numerous contributions to MIS students’ professional development and industry engagement as co-manager of the Professional Achievement Program (PRO) and Director of the Institute for Business and Information Technology. Through IBIT, she is responsible for many events that connect students with alumni and the larger IT community, including the IT Career Fair and the annual IT Awards.

Temple AIS, the MIS Student Professional Organization, was selected as a Distinguished Student Chapter for 2021. The Distinguished Student Chapter Award is the second-highest honor given to an AIS student chapter. It is given to chapters “that have excelled in most of the areas of emphasis: professional development, membership, careers in IS, community service, fundraising, and communications..”

Temple AIS was recognized at the virtual 2022 AIS Student Chapter Leadership Conference on April 9, 2022.

This means back-to-back wins for Temple AIS! Last year Temple AIS won the Student Chapter of the Year for 2020, the highest honor awarded to an AIS Student Chapter. Learn more about the awards and past winners.

Celebrating 20 years of MIS and the Institute for Business and Information Technology

Professor Munir Mandviwalla has been awarded the Stauffer Award for Distinguished Faculty Service for 2021-2022. The award is administered by the Temple University Alumni Association and “recognizes outstanding faculty service and seeks out those faculty members whose service extends beyond the classroom and University community.”

Specifically, the selection committee cited professor Mandviwalla’s “numerous contributions to the Management Information Systems Department and the Institute for Business and Information Technology, an extraordinary role model for industry and academic engagement.”

“It is impossible to overstate the service contributions Dr. Mandviwalla has made to the Fox School, Temple University, and the field of management information systems,” said professor David Schuff, Chair of the MIS Department, “He is an institution-builder and a transformative leader. His more than 25 years of outstanding leadership is an example of how faculty should serve their institution and its students.”

Register by April 6. Join us on April 14.

Temple MIS faculty continued to be the among most prolific in the world in 2021 according to the Association for Information Systems’ List of High-Quality Journals, specifically MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, the Journal of Management Information Systems, and the Journal of the Association for Information Systems.

Temple faculty published in those four journals 19 times in 2021. Two Temple MIS faculty were featured in the list: Jason Thatcher, Milton F. Stauffer Professor, was #2 in the world and Min-Seok Pang, Associate Professor and Milton F. Stauffer Research Fellow, was #14 in the world.

“I’m excited that once again Temple University tops this list,” says MIS chair David Schuff. “It reflects the excellent research culture we’ve built within the MIS Department and throughout the Fox School of Business,” he says.

Temple was also the most frequently published institution in those journals during the last three years, with 47 publications from 2019 to 2021. During that time, in addition to Thatcher and Pang, professor Detmar Straub also appears on the list.

Pang, who studies strategic IT management in the public sector, remarked on the strength and intellectual diversity of the group, “It’s great to be part of a team that has accomplished so much. We have varied research interests and that creates many opportunities for collaboration.”

“I appreciate being in an environment that values and supports research. We celebrate each other’s achievements.,” says Thatcher, who studies workforce issues related to technology use in organizations and is the MIS Ph.D. concentration adviser, “We have a strong set of faculty and top-flight doctoral students.”

Noah Mercado (BBA ‘16) describes his Customer Engineer position at Google as a Cloud Solutions Architect who specializes in application modernization. “I help customers solve business problems, by building cloud-native applications on top of Google cloud,” says Mercado.

Mercado’s role is client-facing and requires strong technical skills. “We focus on helping our customers build and modernize their applications to be cloud-native, leveraging tools such as Kubernetes, serverless cloud functions, and containers, while adopting more modern, event-driven architectures,” says Mercado.

Mercado developed his skills at companies like Cigna before landing at Google last year, but he also credits Temple with giving him a strong foundation. “What I really liked about the MIS program was the wide range of courses that helped me develop my technical chops, as well as understand the business value technology can unlock,” says Mercado.

While at Temple, Mercado developed essential job skills outside of class, too. “I was the VP of IT for AIS, and I ran a technical development program for students,” says Mercado. “That gave me some really good exposure to public speaking, teaching, and coaching. And that’s definitely something I use when I work with clients today as well.”

As a Senior Manager, Digital Experiences at Comcast, Czarina Agravante (BBA ‘13) spends a lot of her time defining and solving problems. “I help design the customer experiences on our digital channels,” says Agravante. “So I work with our business stakeholders to understand what the problem is. And then I go and work with our engineering teams to understand how to build a solution.”

Agravante says her typical day at Comcast echoes her coursework at Temple. “The way that our classes were structured was very focused on real-life problems,” she says. “We would have a semester-long project, and go through our discovery phase, and then design a product and come up with the solution.”

After starting out at a small financial services firm as a front-end web developer, Agravante later moved into telecommunications, including a stint at EY, before joining the Comcast team in 2021. Today she focuses primarily on the apps and chatbots that support Comcast’s video and internet service customers.

Agravante said she prefers to “learn by doing” in school and at work. “Temple did a really good job of helping us to really do it live, instead of just giving us a textbook,” she says.