EDSIG Educator of the Year

The EDSIG Board has named Professor Paul Gray EDSIG Educator ot the Year. He is Professor and Founding Chair of Information Science at Claremont Graduate University. Paul was instrumental in bringing one of the 13 IBM $2 million grants to Claremont in 1986, which established Claremont as one of the leading academic institutions in information systems.

Starting in 1983, Paul Gray created, developed and built what is now the largest PhD producing Information Systems programs in the world. Claremont graduated its first PhD in 1991. Since then, the school has produced 44 PhD's. During the 1990's, Claremont was the largest producer of PhD's in IS in the world, far exceeding both University of Minnesota and University of Arizona's production. The size of the PhD program allows Claremont to offer 5 required doctoral-only courses in IS each year, which makes the program a true PhD program in IS rather than offering additional masters or MBA courses. At the masters level, Claremont offers 1 year and 2 year MS in IS degrees as well as an MS in Electronic Commerce. Currently, the Information Science program has 130 graduate students majoring in Information Systems, of whom approximately 60 are PhD students.

By keeping Information Science separate from the Drucker Management Center (i.e., the Business School) he was able to create a School that concentrates only in IS, and is able to offer specialized courses that reflect current trends. For example, this year, courses in ERP, Knowledge Management, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence are being offered.

Professor Paul Gray has made outstanding national level contributions to the field of information systems. Paul was co-chair of the joint ACM-AIS Committee on the MSIS degree. The work of this committee, which was published in January 2000, provided the first revision in 18 years of the standards for the MS degree in IS. It makes the MS program relevant to the 21st century. He is the first editor of the Communications of AIS and a fellow of the Association for Information Systems. He was president of the Institute of Management Sciences (now INFORMS) for 1992-93, and was formerly president-elect, vice president and secretary of the Institute.

He specializes in decision support systems, knowledge management, electronic commerce and data warehousing. He is on the editorial board of several journals. He is the author of over 115 journal articles and author/editor of 12 books, most recently Decision Support in the Data Warehouse with H.J. Watson. Professor Gray has both industrial and educational experience.

He worked for 18 years in research and development organizations, including nine years at SRI International. He is living proof that you can complete a PhD at Stanford while working full time. Since he completed his PhD in 1968, he has been a professor at a number of Universities including Stanford University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Southern California, Southern Methodist University, and, for the last 17 years at Claremont. He served as Department Chair at USC, at SMU, and at Claremont.