AIS Volunteer Spotlight

About Volunteer Spotlight

What makes AIS amazing? You do.  AIS has wonderful members who are constantly working hard behind the scenes—in addition to their regular jobs—to bring value to the AIS community.

So we’ve decided to spotlight outstanding volunteers every month right here on our homepage. Each month, a small committee will select a new volunteer to honor and give you a glimpse into the outstanding accomplishments of your AIS peers. 

Any active member of AIS may nominate another active member for recognition in this Volunteer Spotlight.  Nominations should reflect specific actions taken by the nominee to advance the field of Information Systems and AIS. Send nominations of no more than 500 words to: jgeorge@cob.fsu.edu.

The November 2010 Spotlight is on Varun Grover for His Lifelong Service to AIS, ICIS, and AMCIS 

Varun Grover
Clemson University

What distinguishes the volunteering efforts of Professor Varun Grover? He began volunteering for service in AIS conferences early in his career, and continues to do so, even though he is highly accomplished in his professional and personal life. Dr. Grover is the William S. Lee Distinguished Professor of Information Systems (Endowed by Duke Energy) in the Department of Management at Clemson University, South Carolina, USA.

Volunteer Roles at ICIS

Countless doctoral students have benefitted from Varun’s generosity with his time, insights and advice over the years through many interactions during the ICIS (International Conference on Information Systems) Doctoral Consortium. For doctoral students, working one-on-one with Varun during a consortium is a powerful experience, since, for many years prior to meeting him in person, Varun’s publications have influenced their thinking. It is often their first encounter with an eminent scholar.

Professor Grover co-chaired the Doctoral Consortium once and participated as a Doctoral Consortium Faculty Advisor three times at ICIS, and served as keynote speaker once at PACIS. These numerous interactions represent untold hours of preparation and meeting time, which have meaningfully contributed to the successful research careers of information systems doctoral students. He has also participated as an ICIS panelist at least five times.

Volunteer Roles at AMCIS

Numerous junior faculty have also personally met Dr. Grover through what is commonly referred to as “MIS Camp,” and more formally referred to as the “Junior Faculty Consortium.” MIS Camp, offered at both AMCIS and ICIS, is designed to enable junior faculty who have completed their Ph.D. and have worked as an assistant professor for a year or two to better balance their academic career with their personal life. 

Dr. Grover has served as co-chair of MIS Camp once and served as a faculty counselor three times. He is always energetic, engaged, and helpful in nurturing junior faculty to become better scholars and human beings in the process.

Pre-ICIS Workshops and Other Notable AIS Volunteer Roles

Varun has also taken on pre-ICIS volunteer positions, including serving as chair of the pre-ICIS SIM workshop and keynote speaker at various pre-ICIS SIG workshops, the JAIS Theory Workshop and the KPMG PhD Project.  Dr. Grover has also served on the program committee four times and served on the conference committee once. He also represented the East US Team in the IS Bowl.

Four aspects of Varun's actions as an academic and a volunteer are striking in that: he always volunteers; he works very hard and is extremely dedicated when he takes on a volunteer role; he has already achieved major milestones in his career with editorial positions, numerous PhD students and many publications and thus doesn’t appear to need to volunteer to achieve visibility in the field and, finally he is a very humble and likable human being. Please thank Dr. Grover for his services to our community when you see him. 

About Dr. Grover

Varun Grover is the William S. Lee Distinguished Professor of Information Systems (Endowed by Duke Energy) in the Department of Management at Clemson University. Prior to this he spent over 13 years building undergraduate, graduate and doctoral programs at the Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina.  There he was Business Partnership Foundation Fellow and Professor of Information systems.  While his background is technical, most of his work is on the business implications of information technologies. He holds a degree in electrical engineering from I.I.T., New Delhi, an MBA, and a Ph.D. in MIS from the University of Pittsburgh. 

Dr. Grover has published extensively in the information systems field, with over 200 publications in refereed journals. Nine recent articles (published in Decision Line (1998, 1999), Information & Management (2001, 2007), and Communications of the Association for Information Systems (2000, 2005, 2006, 2009) have ranked him first, second or third in research productivity (among over 4000 researchers) in the world in the top six information systems journals during different periods over the past 15 years.  

Dr. Grover has published his work in refereed journals like Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, JMIS, Communications of the ACM, Decision Sciences, IEEE Transactions, California Management Review, Database, Information and Management, among others. Some of this work has been funded by over $100,000 in grants from CIBER, through the US Department of Education.