Professor Arun Rai from Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University and Professor Elena Karahanna from Terry College of Business at University of Georgia visited the eHealth Research Institute HIT on the afternoon of 8th July. Invited by the 2016 HIT International Summer School, Professor Arun Rai gave a presentation on “Synergies Across Research Traditions and Methods in the Age of Big Data”, and Professor Elena Karahanna presented on the topic of Healthcare Analytics. Both of them discussed healthcare research and future research of MIS with Professor Vogel and Professor Guo. Additionally, they gave some academic advice on student research and encouraged publication in top journals.

Arun Rai is Regents' Professor at the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University and holds the J. Mack Robinson Chair of IT-Enabled Process Innovation and Supply Chains as well as the Harkins Chair of Information Systems. Arun’s expertise is in IT-enabled innovation and business value, and IT-enabled governance of inter-organizational relationships. He co-founded the Robinson College of Business Center for Process Innovation, an interdisciplinary research center that also promotes industry-university partnerships on research. Arun has published 100+ articles in leading scholarly journals in Information Systems (e.g., Management Science, MIS Quarterly and Information Systems Research), Operations Management (e.g., Journal of Operations Management ), and Healthcare (e.g., Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association ), as well as in leading practitioner journals (e.g., Communications of the ACM, IEEE Computer and MIS Quarterly Executive). He is ranked among the top scholars for publications in the Information Systems discipline's premier journals.

Elena Karahanna is a University of Georgia Distinguished Research Professor and the L. Edmund Rast Professor of Business in the MIS Department, Terry College of Business, at the University of Georgia. She has also held visiting appointments in Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, and Italy and was on the faculty at the University of Cyprus and at Florida State University. Elena is also a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium’s Business-IT Strategies practice. Elena’s expertise is in the implementation and use of information systems, e-health, IS leadership especially at the CIO level, social media, and cross-cultural issues. Her research has been published in leading scholarly journals in Information Systems (e.g., Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research) as well as in practitioner journals (e.g., MIS Quarterly Executive, Cutter Benchmark Review, Business Horizons).  Elena’s research is highly cited with over 17,000 citations as per Google Scholar and three of her articles are among the top 15 most frequently cited articles in the history of the MIS Quarterly. She is ranked 4th worldwide for publications in the MIS Quarterly in the past 15 years (1999-2014). For her research achievements, Elena has received the Terry College of Business Outstanding Research Award in 2010 and was named a University of Georgia Distinguished Research Professor in 2016. She was also named a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems in 2012 for outstanding contributions in research, teaching and service to the Information Systems discipline.