ISS Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award – 2026
Call for Nominations
The INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS) invites submissions for the 2026 Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award (NCDA). The NCDA is named in honor of two University of Arizona professors, Jay Nunamaker and Hsinchun Chen, who have made significant contributions to the field of Information Systems over the past several decades. The NCDA has been created to recognize and reward outstanding dissertation research by scholars in the field of Information Systems.
Eligibility
To be eligible for the 2026 competition, dissertations must be in the field of information systems and must have been completed in the period from June 1, 2025 to May 31, 2026. Candidates must have successfully defended their dissertations and should have received the final approval and all required sign-offs on their dissertation documents by May 31, 2026. Dissertations that do not meet these criteria will not be considered eligible for the award.
The submitter (the entrant or the entrant's dissertation advisor) and the candidate must be members of ISS at the time of submission, except for unusual circumstances approved by the President of ISS.
Submission Instructions
The entrant (the candidate) or the entrant's dissertation advisor may submit the nomination.
INFORMS ISS encourages submissions from any country; however, all submitted materials must be in English.
The following four documents are required. All four files must be submitted as a single pdf file in the order listed below. Submissions that do not meet these requirements will not be reviewed.
· A one-page summary of the dissertation.
· A copy of the entrant's current curriculum vitae.
· An extended abstract of the dissertation that highlights the significance of the problem, the methodological approach, and the key results and their potential applications. The extended abstract should be no more than 4000 words (not including references, tables, or figures).
· A letter of recommendation from the entrant's dissertation advisor that describes the significance of the research and comments on the originality of the work.
Optional: If there are working papers or publications based on the dissertation, these can be cited in the extended abstract, and submitted as additional materials. All additional materials should be included in the same pdf file that contains the four required documents.
Submissions must be made through the ISS 2026 Awards nomination portal (Qualtrics): https://commercevirginia.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5i38OVCe2w1GcGa. The deadline for submission of nominations is 11:59 PM Pacific Time on August 8, 2026.
Process and Timeline
The committee members are Olivia Sheng (Chair), Arun Rai, Maytal Saar-Tsechansky, Feng Zhu, and Jingjing Li (ex-officio, Vice President-ISS).
Dissertations will be evaluated based on the following criteria: creativity and novelty, scope and magnitude of contribution to IS research, relevance to practice, technical quality, and richness of methodological approach.
The winner will be announced during the 2026 Conference on Information Systems Technology (CIST) in San Francisco, CA. We invite the winners and all of our members to come celebrate the winners' as well as our society's achievements at the Award session. Organization details of this celebration event will be updated later. Prior to the Award session, winners may individually share the good news with their deans, department heads, nominators, mentors and mentees, but the winners and others aware of the winning results should not reveal such information via online social media.
It is a condition of the award that the ISS Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award winner be a member of ISS, and, except for unusual circumstances approved by the President of ISS, remain a member of the Society until they retire from full-time work.