Weiguo “Patrick” Fan, professor of accounting and information systems and director of the Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics in the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech, was recently named L. Mahlon Harrell Senior Faculty Fellow in Accounting and Information Systems by Virginia Tech President Timothy D. Sands and Senior Vice President and Provost Mark G. McNamee.

The L. Mahlon Harrell Senior Faculty Fellowship in Accounting and Information Systems was established by alumni and friends to honor Harrell, who was a faculty member in the Department of Accounting from 1931 until his retirement in 1971. The fellowship recognizes teaching and research excellence and recipients retain the fellowship for a three-year period.

A member of the Virginia Tech community since 2002, Fan focuses on the design and development of new information technologies to enhance business information management and decision making. These technologies include information retrieval, data mining, text and web mining, and business intelligence techniques.

Fan has published 54 peer-reviewed journal articles, six book chapters, and more than 100 peer-reviewed conference proceedings. He has made many conference presentations and has given several invited presentations.

He has been co-principal investigator on eight research grants, five of which have come from the National Science Foundation.

Fan teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. He has served on more than 20 doctoral dissertation committees in accounting and information systems and in computer science. He chaired seven of the committees.

He received a bachelor's degree from Xi'an Jiaotong University (China), a master's degree from the National University of Singapore, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Dedicated to its motto, Ut Prosim (That I May Serve), Virginia Tech takes a hands-on, engaging approach to education, preparing scholars to be leaders in their fields and communities. As the commonwealth’s most comprehensive university and its leading research institution, Virginia Tech offers 240 undergraduate and graduate degree programs to more than 31,000 students and manages a research portfolio of $513 million. The university fulfills its land-grant mission of transforming knowledge to practice through technological leadership and by fueling economic growth and job creation locally, regionally, and across Virginia.

Share this story