Ping Zhang appointed senior editor of JAIS

Tuesday, June 17, 2008, By News Staff

Margaret Costello Spillett
315 443 1069

Syracuse University School of Information Studies associate professor Ping Zhang has been named a senior editor of the Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS), beginning July 1. She will serve a three-year term.

According to Editor in Chief Kalle Lyytinen, Zhang’s primary role will be to make decisions on submitted articles by managing the review processes for the assigned manuscripts. As a senior editor, Zhang will also participate in setting policies for the journal and proposing and making decisions about the editorial board members. She will participate in the senior editor meetings and market the journal actively.

JAIS is the research flagship journal of the Association for Information Systems and publishes the highest-quality scholarship in the field of information systems, including rigorously developed and forward-looking conceptual and empirical contributions. In keeping with the information field, the journal encourages multidisciplinary and nontraditional approaches. Established in 2000 as an electronic journal, JAIS is inclusive in scope and covers all aspects of information systems and information technology.

“This is the highest honor in my career so far,” Zhang says. “I am so totally thrilled.”

Among her many published works, Zhang authored the inaugural article of JAIS, “The Effects of Animation on Information Seeking Performance on the World Wide Web: Securing Attention or Interfering with Primary Tasks?” (Vol.1, Art. 1, March 2000). She also co-authored two other JAIS articles: “The Intellectual Development of Human-Computer Interaction Research: A Critical Assessment of the MIS Literature 1990-2002” (Vol. 6, Issue 11, Art. 9, November 2005, with Na Li) and “Causal Relationships between Perceived Enjoyment and Perceived Ease of Use: An Alternative Approach” (Vol. 7, Issue 9, Art. 24, September 2006, with Heshan Sun).

Zhang teaches in the areas of human-computer interaction, information systems analysis and design, database systems and data management.

She holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Peking University, China, and a Ph.D. in information systems from the University of Texas at Austin.