keynote Speakers

Professor Jason Thatcher is the Stauffer Professor in the Department of Management Information Systems. He joins the Fox School from Culverhouse College of Business at University of Alabama, where he was the MIS Endowed Faculty Fellow. Prior to Alabama, Thatcher was a Trevilian Fellow in the College of Business at Clemson University. Thatcher earned both his PhD in business administration and MPA from Florida State University. He also received his BA in political science and BA in history from the University of Utah. Thatcher studies individual decision-making, strategic alignment and workforce issues as they relate to the effective application of information technologies in organizations. His more recent projects focused on cyber security and social media. Thatcher has been published in journals such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of Applied Psychology, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Management Information Systems as well as has published in Financial Times 50 journals roughly once a year since earning his Ph.D. He serves as a senior editor at MIS Quarterly, a senior editor at the Journal of the Association of Information Systems and an associate editor at the European Journal of Information Systems. He has also served as the president of the Association of Information Systems.

Professor H.R. Rao was named the AT&T Distinguished Chair in Infrastructure Assurance and Security at The University of Texas at San Antonio College of Business in January 2016. He also holds a courtesy appointment as full professor in the UTSA Department of Computer Science. Prior to working at UTSA, Professor Rao was the SUNY Distinguished Service Professor at the University at Buffalo. He graduated from Krannert Graduate School of Management at Purdue University. His interests are in the areas of management information systems, decision support systems, e-business, emergency response management systems and information assurance. He has chaired sessions at international conferences and presented numerous papers. He also has co-edited four books, including Information Assurance Security and Privacy Services and Information Assurance in Financial Services. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 technical papers, of which more than 125 are published in archival journals.

Professor Rao was the inaugural recipient of The Bright Internet Award for his contributions to the information systems discipline by KMIS, the Korea Society of Management Information Systems. In 2018 Professor Rao was awarded the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Outstanding Service Award for significant service contributions to the field of information systems and information systems security. In November 2016, Professor Rao received the prestigious Information Systems Society Distinguished Fellow Award (Class of 2016) for outstanding intellectual contributions to the information systems discipline.

Rao’s work has received best paper and best paper runner up awards at ISR, AMCIS and ICIS. He has received funding for his research from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense and the Canadian Embassy. He also received the Fulbright fellowship in 2004. Rao is a past chair of IFIP WG 8.11/11.13, the working group for Information Systems Security Research. He is co-editor in chief of Information Systems Frontiers, advisory editor of Decision Support Systems, associate editor of ACM TMIS and senior editor at MIS Quarterly.

Professor Suprateek Sarker (“Supra”) is Rolls-Royce Commonwealth Commerce Professor at the McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia. His research, which largely uses qualitative or mixed-method approaches, has been published in many leading journals. He serves (or has served) on editorial boards of a number of journals, including MIS Quarterly, Decision Sciences, Information & Organization, and Information Systems Research (as a senior editor), Journal of Management Information Systems and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management (as an editorial board member), and the Journal of the AIS (as the editor-in-chief). He has been a visiting professor or a visiting scholar at many leading universities around the world. He is the current President of the Association for Information Systems (AIS). He is the incoming Editior-in-Chief for ISR Journal. He has served as a Program Co-Chair for the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS, 2020), and has been given the opportunity to serve as a Conference Co-Chair for ICIS, 2023. An extended bio can be found at https://www.commerce.virginia.edu/faculty/ss6wf