Longtime MIS scholar and endowed faculty member Prabuddha De to retire

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Prabuddha De, the Accenture University Professor of Information Technology at Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management and a seminal scholar in his field, is retiring in August 2020.

De was recruited to join Krannert in 2002 through an endowed faculty position. Beginning as the only full professor in the Management Information Systems (MIS) area, De articulated a clear vision for growth and led the initiative to bring talented MIS researchers and teachers to Purdue.

“He immediately exceeded expectations by assuming a strong and effective leadership role at Krannert,” says Dean Emeritus and Leeds Professor of Management Rick Cosier, who was dean when De was hired. “He led successful efforts to recruit great faculty and revise our MIS curricula across our various degree programs. He especially bolstered our MIS doctoral program. Over and above all that, Prabuddha is a wonderful person and remains a great colleague to all in Krannert. Prabuddha can look back on his career and take great pride in the contributions he made to furthering our knowledge of MIS and educating our students.”

To honor his many accomplishments, the school hosted “De Fest: A Celebration of Prabuddha De and Information Systems (IS)” in September 2019.

Prior to joining Purdue, De was the Sherman-Standard Register Chair in Management Information Systems (MIS) at University of Dayton for over a decade. He began his academic career at Ohio State University as assistant professor of accounting and MIS in 1978, and became tenured associate professor in 1983 and professor in 1988.

De received his PhD in industrial administration from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979. He also holds an MS in computer science from Pennsylvania State University and a BSc (honors) in physics from University of Calcutta, India. He received a National Scholarship in India and an IBM Doctoral Fellowship at CMU, among others.

He has published more than 70 articles in a wide range of journals, including Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, INFORMS Journal on Computing, Journal of MIS, and various IEEE Transactions, as well as Operations Research, Naval Research Logistics, Production & Operations Management, and Review of Financial Studies. His recent publications are mostly in e-business, social networks, and software engineering, while his prior publications were primarily in database management, computer networks, and machine scheduling.

De has served on the editorial or advisory boards of a number of journals, including Management Science, Information Systems Research, and Journal of MIS. He was program chair of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) in 1999, and co-chair of its Doctoral Consortium in 2006 and Dissertation Competition in 2007. He was co-chair of the Workshop on Information Technologies & Systems (WITS) in 1994, its president from 1998 to 2000, and advisor from 2001 to 2003, a role he played again from 2014 to 2019. De also served as president of the Information Systems Society (ISS) of INFORMS from 1990 to 1993. He was named an inaugural Distinguished Fellow of ISS in 2009 and a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) in 2014.

Among the various leadership roles De has played at Krannert is serving as founding chair of the board of directors of the school’s Business Information and Analytics Center, which is now the Krenicki Center for Business Analytics and Machine Learning.

“In the past two decades the business world, and business schools, have been transformed by the power of data to drive decision making,” says David Hummels, the Dr. Samuel R. Allen Dean at the Krannert School. “But that market imperative can only take you so far if you lack intellectual leadership in Information Systems research and degree programming. Krannert has been fortunate to have Prabuddha De’s intellectual leadership, and global reputation, in this critical area. Our students, our programs, our faculty, and the Krannert School as a whole have benefited greatly from his nearly two decades with us.”