Announcing Retirement of IS Pioneer, Ephraim McLean

Last summer, Georgia State University Regents’ Professor Ephraim McLean retired after 64 years of professional and academic activities. To celebrate this rich career, the university was planning to host a reception in his honor in Atlanta. However, the COVID-19, coupled with the recent mutations, made holding such a face-to-face event infeasible.

AIS members are invited to participate in an electronic sharing of Eph’s life. You can use the following link (https://www.kudoboard.com/boards/P4gznJgQ)  to share a short note of congratulations to Eph – his life, his contributions, his impact on the field, your memories of him as a person, how you came to know him, or anything else that you’d like to say. At this site, you can easily add text, images, GIFs, or short video clips from almost any device. Your postings will be shared with Eph in a Memory Book. Some highlights of Eph's storied IS career include:

• Earned his B.M.E. and M.E. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Information Systems from M.I.T.’s Sloan School
• Faculty appointments at M.I.T. (1 year), UCLA (18 years), and GSU (34 years) – a total of 53 years
• ROTC Distinguished Military Graduate; Captain, Army National Guard (15 years)
• First computer project was done at Procter & Gamble in 1962; has worked in the computer field for a total of 59 years
• Awarded the G.E. Smith [GRA] Eminent Scholar’s Chair at GSU in 1987; promoted to Regents’ Professor in 2002
• One of the founders of AIS, AMCIS, and ICIS; Executive Director of AIS and of ICIS for 10 years
• Co-author of Information Technology for Management; the second-largest selling IS textbook in the world (for 6 years)
• One of the first Fellows of AIS (1999)
• Co-author of the DeLone & McLean Information Systems Success Model (1992), one of the most widely cited research undertaking in our field
• Published over 235 academic and professional papers, with over 42,900 citations of his published works
• Named an ACM Distinguished Lecturer (2007)
• Recognized with the LEO Lifetime Achievement Award (2007)
• ACM SIGMIS Lifetime Achievement Award (2020)

For more information about Eph’s career, please visit https://aisnet.org/resource/resmgr/insider/insider_2022/Resume_for_McLean_Updated2.pdf.

In 2020, AIS created the Ephraim McLean Doctoral Student Fellowship Program. The program fund supports AIS memberships for Doctoral Students at universities in countries classified with Medium or Low UN Human Development Index ratings and faculty at universities in countries classified with Low UN Human Development Index ratings. To celebrate Eph, members are invited to make online donations to the fund in his honor at https://aisnet.org/page/Donate.