Education

D.B.A. - Boston University, Management Information Systems, 1995

M.S. - Boston University, Management Information Systems, 1989

M.S. - University of Rhode Island, Ocean Engineering, 1986

B.S. - The United States Merchant Marine Academy, Marine Transportation, 1982

Biographical Information

Prior to joining Penn State, Sawyer was a faculty member and Ph.D. program director in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University where he was named Professor of the Year in 1997. He has published more than 60 works including papers in a range of journals such as Communications of the ACM, Information Technology & People,The Information Society, The IBM Systems Journal, and the Journal of Information Technology and in a number of international conferences and workshops.

Research and Teaching

Sawyer conducts research on social and organizational informatics: studying how people work together and how they use information and communication technologies. His most recent research programs include: Investigating how software development can be improved through attending to the social aspects of working together; studying how people adapt to working with large-scale information systems implementations (such as enterprise resource packages); and understanding the changes to organizations (and organizational work) due to the increased distribution of computing. Corning, IBM, Sonoco, Xerox, the Lattanze Foundation, and the National Science Foundation have supported his research. Sawyer teaches information systems analysis and design, project management, and implementation; information-technology-enabled organizational change; social informatics; and field-based research methods.

Dr. Sawyer's publications are listed on his home web site above.