2018 Distinguished Alumnus
Alan Hevner
Since 1994, Alan Hevner has been on the faculty of the University of South Florida. In 2017, he was named Distinguished University Professor. He also holds the Citigroup/Hidden River Chair of Distributed Technology.
Research
His areas of research interest include design science research, information systems development, software engineering, distributed database systems, healthcare systems, and Internet of Things computing.
He has published more than 200 research papers on these topics, and his work has been cited more than 18,000 times.
Design science
One of his major areas of interest is design science research, which seeks to increase the capabilities of humans and organizations through new and innovative creations. He has co-authored a book on the topic, and has co-created a conceptual framework with guidelines for understanding, executing, and evaluating the research.
He has presented numerous seminars internationally on the topic. In 2006, he co-founded an international conference, Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST). He is a recipient of the Design Science Research Lifetime Achievement Award.
Honors
Alan is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a fellow of the Association for Information Systems (AIS). He was inducted into the Purdue University ROTC Hall of Fame in 2001 and in 2017, he was named a Parnas Fellow at Lero, the Irish software research center. He was also named a Schoeller Senior Fellow at Friedrich Alexander University in Germany.
Purdue
Alan earned his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and Ph.D. from Purdue in computer science between 1969 and 1979. As an undergraduate, he was a dual major in computer science and math. After graduating, he spent two years in the military before returning to Purdue to complete the doctoral program in Computer Science.
He has previously held faculty positions at the University of Maryland and the University of Minnesota. He was a program manager at the National Science Foundation from 2006 to 2009 in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. He is an active tennis player and he and his wife, Cindy, enjoy traveling.