Liang Wins Prestigious ECU Five-Year Achievement Award

East Carolina University has honored Professor Huigang Liang in the Department of MIS with the prestigious ECU Five-Year Achievement for Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award.  Officials will formally recognize his work on April 29 at an awards presentation and reception.

Originally from Hebei, China, Liang has taught at ECU for six years. His research interests focus on social, behavioral, psychological, and managerial aspects of information systems phenomena, including IT adoption, IT compliance, IT security, IT strategy, IT implementation, outsourcing, knowledge management, e-commerce/online behaviors, and health informatics. He has received more than $2 million grants from companies, non-profit organizations, and federal agencies including Biogen, GSK, Stand Among Friends, CCHIE, HRSA, and NIH.

Liang said, “I feel blessed and humbled. I didn’t expect to win this award, because the best researchers throughout ECU are considered for it. It is definitely a great honor to be recognized by colleagues from different disciplines across the university.”

Liang has published more than 40 articles in scholarly journals, and he has been consistently ranked among the top researchers in the field of information systems (IS), based on the number of publications in the two top IS journals, MIS Quarterly and Information Systems Research.  Specifically, in the five-year period from 2007 to 2013, Liang is ranked #22 internationally, and he was ranked #10 in the three-year period from 2007 to 2009. Liang’s wife, Yajiong “Lucky” Xue, who teaches at ECU as a professor in the same department, is a frequent coauthor with Liang and is also a top ranked researcher in the IS field.

In July 2012, Liang received the prestigious Robert Dillard Teer Jr. Distinguished Professorship of Business, honoring his excellence in research based on publications in premier journals, external grants, and worldwide academic reputation. He was also awarded the College of Business Research Fellowship in 2009.

In addition to teaching MIS, he directs ECU’s Center for Healthcare Management Systems, and he serves as associate editor for two premier Information systems journals: MIS Quarterly and Information & Management. He is also on the editorial board of the Journal of the Association for Information Systems and several other journals.

Liang holds a Ph.D. in Healthcare Information Systems and an M.S. in Computer Sciences and Software Engineering from Auburn University. In addition, he earned an M.S. in Pharmacy Administration and a B.S. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from China Pharmaceutical University, a renowned university in Nanjing, China.

He is the first recipient from the College of Business to win the ECU Five-Year Achievement Award.

Liang said, “I must thank our dean, Stan, and my department chair, Rich, for their consistent support in the past years. I think great leadership is important to create an organizational climate in which research and innovation are valued. It’s a privilege to work in such an environment.”

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