INFORMS ISS Honors Assistant Professor Helen Zeng for Best Ph.D. Dissertation

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The INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS) has honored Assistant Professor Helen Zeng for the best Ph.D. dissertation research in 2024 for her paper, “Sound of Freedom Trilogy: Responding to the Rise in Human Sex Trafficking Facilitated by Digital Platforms."

Zeng accepted the 2024 Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award (NCDA) at the INFORMS Annual Meeting and Conference on Information Systems and Technology on Oct. 20 in Seattle, Wash. The award is named in honor of two University of Arizona professors, Jay Nunamaker and Hsinchun Chen, who have made significant contributions to the field of Information Systems over the past several decades.

INFORMS is the largest professional association for the decision and data sciences. The INFORMS Information Systems Society seeks to foster, promote, and disseminate research on the use and impact of information technology in organizations.

Zeng joined the UC Davis Graduate School of Management in July from the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

Zeng’s dissertation paper centers on addressing a critical and heartrending problem brought by the use of IT:  the widespread availability of child sexual abuse materials and human trafficking (especially the trafficking of minors) on digital platforms. Her dissertation previously received the 2024 William W. Cooper Doctoral Dissertation Award in Management or Management Science.

Her research aims to answer a key question: how institutions and firms should identify and respond to societal harms occurring in digital markets. She uses mixed methods in her research, including econometrics, structural models and causal inference with machine learning.

More about INFORMS 

INFORMS advances and promotes the science and technology of decision-making to save lives, save money and solve problems. INFORMS members support organizations and governments at all levels as they work to transform data into information, and information into insights that lead to more efficient, effective, equitable and impactful results. INFORMS’ 12,000+ members comprise a diverse and robust international community of practitioners, researchers, educators and students from a variety of fields. 

More about the INFORMS Information Systems Society

The INFORMS Information Systems Society seeks to foster, promote, and disseminate research on the use and impact of information technology in organizations. It provides a forum for researchers and practitioners in information systems to interact and further their interests in the area. One of the goals of the society is to encourage interdisciplinary research by leveraging connections between other societies and colleges within the INFORMS environment.