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- Ramesh Sharda
Ramesh Sharda
The world is now awash in information-data-and today's problem is how to manage, aggregate, and interpret that data instead of simply being overwhelmed by it. This is particularly true for the business community. Ramesh Sharda of Oklahoma State University has been an internationally recognized leader in developing the techniques and methods for analyzing information, and his research and education contributions have made Oklahoma a major player in this field of analytics.
Ramesh Sharda earned a Bachelor of Engineering degree at the University of Udaipur (India), a Masters in Agricultural Engineering from Ohio State University, then an M.B.A. and a Ph.D. in Business, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Spears School of Business at Oklahoma State University hired him as an assistant professor in 1980, and by 1989 he was a full professor. During his career at OSU he has excelled in research, teaching, and administration, and served in several leadership roles including Director of the Institute for Research in Information Systems, and currently as the Vice-Dean for Graduate Programs and Research in Spears School of BusinessNVatson Graduate School of Management. He created two significant graduate programs at OSU: the interdisciplinary Masters in Telecommunications Management program-one of the first in the country-and recently the Ph.D. in Business for Executives Program, of which he was the Director from 2011-2015. Founding two graduate programs in one's career is unusual for any faculty member. These programs have made OSU's Spears School a prominent player in the respective fields.
Professor Sharda's research output has been nothing short of monumental. He has acquired more than $5 million in grants, has been an author or coauthor of six research books, seven textbooks, more than 100 refereed journal papers, hundreds of conference papers, and numerous other miscellaneous presentations and publications. These publications and his record at conferences have earned him a national and international reputation for business data analytics and Decision Support Systems. He is a coauthor of the leading textbooks in business intelligence and analytics. Some of his papers have been cited more than 1000 times. One paper was recently recognized as the third most cited paper in the area of firm failure prediction using neural networks technologies. He is also well known for attempts to use data mining technologies for prediction of the box office performance of movies. He has held a significant number of editorships with several publications, including Area Editor for Decision Support Systems, Co-Editor-in-Chief of Annals of Information Systems, Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, Associate Editor of INFORMS Journal on Computing, and Associate Editor for Information Systems Frontiers, among others. His scholarly output has not interfered with his teaching duties; he has mentored 12 Ph.D. students and hundreds of M.B.A. and M.S. in MIS/analytics students. As an instructor, Professor Sharda has had a unique impact on his students by setting high standards; those standards are achieved because the personal connection is so strong the students feel a personal embarrassment if they disappoint him. It is no accident that his students have been well placed in academia as well as in industry.
A plentitude of awards have recognized Dr. Sharda's accomplishments. He serves as the Faculty Director of Teradata University Network. He was elected as the Chair of INFORMS Computing Society, Chair of the SIGDSA of the Association of Information Systems, was honored with the Richard W. Poole Faculty Excellence Awards at OSU (2010-2014), OSU's Regents Distinguished Research Awards, acquired the Jewels of Rajasthan Award (India) in 2012, and the Harvey Greenberg Service Award of the INFORMS Computing Society in 2013. At Oklahoma State he became a Regents Professor in 1997, was named the ConocoPhillips Professor of Management of Technology 1991, and was elevated to the Watson Endowed Chair in the Spears School of Business in 2013. For this unparalleled record of achievement, the OHEHS welcomes Ramesh Sharda to the 2016 class of inductees to the Oklahoma Higher Education Hall of Fame.