Notre Dame’s Ahmed Abbasi honored as INFORMS Distinguished Fellow

Ahmed Abbasi, Joe and Jane Giovanini Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations at the University of Notre Dame, was awarded the prestigious INFORMS Information Systems Society Distinguished Fellow Award on October 28 during the organization’s annual conference. 

The award recognizes individuals who have made outstanding intellectual contributions to the information systems discipline through publications, intellectual leadership as reflected in editorial appointments and intellectual stewardship in the form of mentoring doctoral students and young researchers. 

“I am honored to receive this prestigious award in recognition of my 20 years of research, editorial service and mentoring activities at the intersection of human-centered artificial intelligence, digital technologies and people,” Abbasi said. 

Abbasi, who joined Notre Dame in 2020, serves as the co-director of the Human-centered Analytics Lab (HAL) and the director of the Ph.D. in Analytics program at the Mendoza College of Business. His recent research themes include topics of great public interest and concern at the intersection of the human condition and technological advancement, such as analytics for social good, the role of AI in supporting public health and the use of machine learning to better understand the human condition for enhanced decision making and policy outcomes. 

A prolific researcher with nearly 12,000 citations, Abbasi has published more than 120 articles in journals and conferences, including over 60 articles in top-tier outlets. His research has received more than a dozen individual and best paper awards. 

As a senior or associate editor for top journals, he has authored more than 350 editorial reports and guest-edited special issues on various AI-related topics such as the role of the institutional press in the digital age, disaster response management, health-care analytics and trustworthy AI. 

His work has been funded by more than 15 grants from the National Science Foundation and industry partners, including Microsoft, eBay, Deloitte and Oracle. Abbasi is a recipient of the IEEE Technical Achievement Award, INFORMS Design Science Award and the IBM Faculty Award. 

INFORMS is the largest professional association for the decision and data sciences. The Information Systems Society (ISS), part of INFORMS, supports scholars and professionals in the field of information systems through conferences, workshops and publications such as “Information Systems Research.” The society also recognizes excellence in research, teaching and service through a range of prestigious annual awards, including the ISS Distinguished Fellow Award and the Sandy Slaughter Early Career Award.