Baylor Business Information Systems Professor Garners Quick Trifecta of Honors

August 3, 2018
News - Dorothy Leidner - Main1
Dorothy Leidner

Dr. Dorothy Elliott Leidner is the Ferguson Professor of Information Systems in Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business and director of the school’s PhD program in Information Systems.

Contact: Whitney Richter, Director of Marketing and Communications, Office of the Vice Provost for Research, 254-710-7539
Written by: Gary Stokes, Office of the Vice Provost for Research

WACO, Texas (August 3, 2018) - If Baylor business information systems professor Dr. Dorothy Elliott Leidner seems pleasantly bewildered this summer, she has good reason—in the space of only a few months she has received professional acclaim for her research and teaching from no fewer than three distinguished national and international sources.

In June Leidner's paper Review of IS Security Policy Compliance: Toward the Building Blocks of an IS Security Theory was named Best Paper of 2017 by the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group for Management Information Systems. The paper was co-authored by Dr. Puzant Balozian, Leidner's former doctoral candidate at Baylor who is now assistant professor of Information Technology at Lebanese American University's Adnan Kassar School of Business in Beirut, Lebanon. The honor raised to 10 the number of best paper awards/honorable mentions she has earned with 9 different sets of co-authors.

Even more recently Leidner's work and that of her Georgia Tech colleague Dr. Maryam Alavi was given extensive presence in the just-released French reference volume Les Grands Auteurs en Systèmes d'Information (Great Authors in Information Systems). Alavi holds the Stephen P. Zelnak Jr. Dean's Chair in Management in Georgia Tech's Scheller College of Business.

Dorothy Leidner

Leidner has spent two weeks each year since 2014 collaborating with and mentoring PhD students at Lund University's School of Economics and Management in Lund, Sweden. This past March Lund announced that Leidner would receive an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree in honor of her contributions as a visiting professor and researcher. Leidner received the honorary degree in May at the university's grand Doctoral Degree Conferment Ceremony held in the city's famed medieval cathedral built in the early 12th Century. She recalls the experience as one of her most memorable.

"I gave a talk titled Information Technology and the Democratization of Dignity," she said. "There was an honorary luncheon and a reception one evening. The ceremony itself was three-and-a-half hours, some of which was in Swedish, but most of which was in Latin. The ceremony was held in centuries-old Lund Cathedral with lovely classical music on various instruments played in between the diploma presentations for the different disciplines. In the evening, there was a formal evening dinner for all doctoral recipients and their guests. It was marked by exquisite food and beverage, speeches, and entertainment—it was a very amazing week."

A native of Dallas, Leidner earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author or co-author of over 50 refereed publications with over 34,000 citations. In addition to her visiting professorship at Lund, she has since 2005 held a similar post at the University of Mannheim, Germany. She currently serves as editor-in-chief of MIS Quarterly Executive and as senior editor of both Information Systems Research and the Journal of the Association of Information Systems. Leidner enjoys tennis and is an accomplished pianist. She is fluent in French and German and is learning Spanish. She and her husband have three daughters.