ISS Distinguished Fellow Award – 2026
Call for Nominations
The INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS) invites nominations for the ISS Distinguished Fellow Award. The primary aim of the award is to recognize individuals who have made outstanding intellectual contributions to the information systems discipline.
Eligibility
The award selection committee recognizes the multi-dimensional nature of intellectual contributions and will pay attention to a variety of scholarly contributions, including, but not limited to:
· Publications that have made a significant impact on theory, research, and practice.
· Intellectual leadership in the discipline as reflected in editorial appointments, particularly of INFORMS journals.
· Intellectual stewardship of the field as reflected in the mentoring of doctoral students and young researchers.
Nominators are encouraged to provide the award selection committee with specific indicators of a nominee's contributions in these and other categories.
The nominator and the nominee must be members of ISS at the time of nomination, except for unusual circumstances approved by the President of ISS.
Submission Instructions
The nomination should include a brief (not to exceed two pages) description of the nominee's achievements and eligibility for the award, and should be accompanied with the nominee's up-to-date CV. Any INFORMS ISS member may submit nominations and may nominate more than one candidate at their own discretion and judgment. One ISS member nomination is sufficient, multi-member nomination is not necessary.
Though self-nominations are discouraged, nominations may be submitted 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 Alok Gupta (Chair), Pei-yu Chen, Kenny Cheng, H. R. Rao, and Jianqing Chen (ex-officio, President-ISS).
The award selection committee will deliberate upon the pool of nominees solely based on information available in their CVs and the nomination letters. Winners of the award will be notified before the CIST. To be fair to all nominees, the selection committee cannot review new information about the nominees nor will the committee revote on the nominees after the notifications have been sent to the winners and nominators. We kindly request nominators of the non-selected nominees to re-nominate their nominees the next year and provide additional information about the nominees in next year's nomination letters.
The society will announce the full list of 2026 ISS Distinguished Fellow Award winners and present them with award plaques at the ISS Award session 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 Distinguished Fellow 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.