The Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference 2000: §021    Home    Papers/Indices    prev (§013)    Next (§022)     Keynote Speaker (invited)

Educator of the Year 2000: Paul Gray

Paul Gray is Professor and Founding Chair of Information Science at Claremont Graduate University. Paul was instrumental in bringing one of the thirteen 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 one of the largest PhD producing Information Systems programs in the world. Claremont graduated its first PhD in 1991. Since then, the school has produced 44 PhDs. During the 1990s, Claremont was the largest producer of PhDs in IS in the world, far exceeding the production of both the University of Minnesota and the University of Arizona. The size of the PhD program allows Claremont to offer five 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 one-year and two-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 50 are PhD students.

By keeping Information Science separate from the Drucker Management Center (Claremont's 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 eighteen 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 or 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.

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