ISS Haim Mendelson Teaching Innovation Award – 2026
Call for Nominations
The INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS) invites nominations for the ISS Haim Mendelson Teaching Innovation Award. Effective teaching of Information Systems (IS) courses plays a fundamental role in nurturing future generations of IS academics and practitioners. The primary aim of the award is to recognize IS faculty who have made outstanding pedagogical contributions to the IS discipline.
Eligibility
This award focuses on recognizing full-time IS educators. Both tenure-track and non-tenure track faculty across all faculty ranks are eligible for nomination. Nomination letters should describe the nominee's unique and exceptional accomplishments in teaching and education. Generally, the award aims to recognize IS faculty who made teaching contributions that have a broad, discipline-wide impact. Examples of such contributions include (but are not limited to): creating shareable and transferable IS teaching materials (textbooks, cases, games, technology, presentations, etc.) that have been widely adopted; creating/facilitating/promoting faculty communities or teaching-oriented events for disseminating IS teaching ideas, methodologies, and best practices; pioneering innovative programs, courses, or teaching formats; etc. The nomination letter should articulate clearly the nature of the contributions, and how it has affected the IS community.
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
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.
The nomination should include a brief (not to exceed two pages) description of the candidate's achievements and eligibility for the award, with the focus on the discipline-wide impact of the candidate's teaching/educational contributions. This description can include external links (URL) to teaching artifacts or any other supporting evidence. The nomination should also include the candidate's CV and/or bio.
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 D.J. Wu (Chair), Juan Feng, Sudha Ram, Yong Tan, and Jingjing Li (ex-officio, Vice President-ISS).
The award selection committee will deliberate upon the pool of nominees solely based on the information available in the nomination letters, the candidates' CVs or bios, and any supporting materials submitted, and make recommendations to the President of ISS. 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 provide additional information about their nominees in the nomination letters the next year.
The society will announce the full list of 2026 ISS Haim Mendelson Teaching Innovation 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 Haim Mendelson Teaching Innovation 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.