Weiguo “Patrick” Fan, professor of accounting and information systems in the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech, was recently named the R.B. Pamplin Professor of Accounting and Information Systems by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.

Established in 1994, the R.B. Pamplin Professorship in Accounting and Information Systems is one of several named professorships established with part of the $10-million gift presented to the college by the Robert B. Pamplin family. The professorship supports excellence in accounting and information systems education.

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.

He has published more than 65 papers in scholarly journals, including the field’s most eminent journals, and more than 100 papers in conference proceedings. He has established himself as a leader in the application of text analytics methods to a variety of relevant domains, including an assortment of effects of social media adoption.

In the classroom, Fan has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate-level courses. He has served on numerous Ph.D. committees, including as chair, and continues to mentor and interact well with Ph.D. students in his department and beyond.

He has served as the associate director of the Digital Library Research Lab since 2006 and was the co-director for the Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics from 2013 to 2015.

Fan previously held the L. Mahlon Harrell Senior Faculty Fellow in Accounting and Information Systems from 2009 to 2016.

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.

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