Dr. Zhiqiang Zheng
- Professor of Information Systems
- Ashbel Smith Professor
The University of Texas at Dallas supports the Ashbel Smith Professorship. Dr. Ashbel Smith was the first president of the UT System Board of Regents. He had a long and distinguished career in medicine, education and public service. During his term on the Board of Regents, Smith was dedicated to recruiting the best faculty members available and to developing a curriculum befitting a “university of the first class.” Smith became known as both the “father of Texas medicine” and the “father of The University of Texas.”
“The professors at the Naveen Jindal School of Management are among the most productive in the country. I am proud to be among this group and look forward to working with them to grow the school and provide insights to our bright students.”
Dr. Zhiqiang (Eric) Zheng is, in essence, a consumer advocate. His data analysis research focuses on how organizations can improve their customer service and how consumers can make better buying decisions.
One area of study for Zheng is how new technology can be used to innovate financial processes and services. He has been researching social trading, a new phenomenon where a person uses social media to follow groups of investors. Then, if consumers like what they see, they can make stock purchases that mirror a particular investor from the group.
Another research focus is health care analytics, specifically electronic medical records and how they are managed and shared by hospitals. The goal of such work would be to help hospitals, for example, reduce readmission rate or duplicated tests.
“If a chronic patient is treated by one hospital and then, a few days later, is treated at another hospital, the second hospital typically would redo a number of the tests, even though the same tests at the first hospital would still be valid,” Zheng said. “We are looking at a health information exchange system (HIE) to see if it would reduce such unnecessary, duplicated tests.”
Zheng is a senior editor at Information Systems Research and has served roles for INFORMS Journal on Computing, Information Technology Management, Journal of E-commerce Research and Journal of Management Analytics.
He recently secured three grants worth more than $1.3 million supporting his research on big data analytics, health care analytics and financial technology. In addition, several of Zheng’s research articles have earned best paper awards by journals and various conferences.
Zheng earned his PhD in information systems in 2003 from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he also earned his master’s degree.
He began teaching at The University of Texas at Dallas in 2006 as an assistant professor in information systems and operations management at the Jindal School. He was promoted to professor in 2015. Zheng also teaches a class on financial technology. Prior to joining UT Dallas, he was an assistant professor in the business school at the University of California, Riverside.