Papers & Presenters > Biography

Steve Sawyer is a founding member and Associate Professor with the School of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. He also holds affiliate appointments in Management and Organization, Labor and Industrial Relations, and with Science and Technology Studies. He 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. Prior to joining Penn State, Dr. Sawyer had the privilege to serve on the faculty of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. There, he was named Professor of the Year in 1997. In 2001, he was named the first IST Faculty Member of the Year. In 2002, he won the School’s inaugural George McMurtry award for Teaching. He has recently completed a book entitled "Understanding and Communicating Social informatics: A Framework for Studying and Teaching the Human Contexts of Information and Communication Technologies" with Howard Rosenbaum and the late Rob Kling. Dr. Sawyer holds a Doctorate of Business Administration from Boston University.