Thanks for including me in this initiative, it seems to be very interesting and potentially very valuable to our community. I am originally from India. I grew up as an army brat, so I lived all over the country. In the United States, where I came in 1979, I have lived in a variety of places. First, I lived in Illinois, then for several years in New York, a number of years in Tennessee, and now I’ve been living in Texas for eighteen years. I love sports, mostly racquet sports, but I’ve played all kinds of sports. I love music, primarily classical rock and classical music. I love reading and I also love travelling. I used to brag that I’ve travelled to over 40 countries, and then realized that my son has already travelled to more countries than me.

To start with, we don't have undergraduate programs in Information Systems. We do have a BBA program, but in the Information Systems area, it is essentially just core courses. At the graduate level, we have both different forms of the MBA program and we also have MS programs. Most of our graduate programs in terms of Information Technology and Operations Management area, which we call ITON, are geared towards Business Analytics and Technology Consulting. Our Information Systems curriculum is tightly integrated with our curriculum in Operations Management as well as in Business Analytics. We don't have too many students that target careers in MIS or IT management in enterprises. Rather most of our students plan careers in areas such as Information Technology or Management Consulting in tech entrepreneurship or running operations in technology in terms of organisations. At the MS level, we have two programs that we are involved in. We have an MSBA program that is an MS in Business Analytics. It's a broad based technical specialty program. This prepares students for Business Analytics positions in data intensive organisations. We draw students from a variety of undergraduate and graduate specializations that range from Engineering and Physical and Life Sciences to the Liberal and Fine arts. This program is a joint program, so both our ITOM department and our Marketing department are involved. The program provides a nice combination of analytical skills as well as understanding of functional issues and applications in marketing and consumer analytics. We also have a program which is called the Master of Science in Management. This is geared towards recent graduates from Business undergraduate programs that are looking for skills in areas outside their primary majors; but also for recent graduates in Engineering or Sciences who have started working in organizations, and are beginning to take on some managerial responsibilities like leading a team or leading projects and so on. They get the benefit of a year-long program that’s geared towards topics like Project Management, Team Design, Team Management and Operation Sections.

As you can imagine, I've been around a while and I’ve worked on a number of areas through my career. In my doctoral work, I started off in Artificial Intelligence, which interestingly is now coming back into vogue. But this was back in the early eighties. At that time, I was working in methods for refining expert systems with approximate reasoning paradigms. I started there, which is fairly technical work with very much of overlapping with Computer Science. I expanded into Intelligent Databases and Decision Support Systems in the early part of my career as a faculty member at Maryland. I dabbled a little bit in Systems Development methodologies mostly in joint projects, and then got into Formal Modelling and Analysis methods. In recent years I've been focusing on the design of Effective Online Marketplaces and the integration of Information Technology with various key processes such as Product Development, Business Communications and Supply Chain processes.