At the time she was awarded the Zipf Fellowship, Debra Ruffner Weiss was a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information and Library Science at UNC at Chapel Hill. For 10 years before starting her graduate career there, Ms. Weiss worked in the creation of large-scale information systems. She served as project manager and application developer on projects that handled large data repositories at ATT, the University of Virginia, and the Fairfax County Office of Research and Statistics in Fairfax, Virginia. Maureen L. Mackenzie is a doctoral student in the Palmer School of Library and Information Science on the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University. Maureen is currently working on her dissertation, which focuses on the information behaviors of line-managers.
Information provides the opportunity for improved product design.
I want to gain the ability to teach our future corporate leaders to manage effectively the limitless amount of information available to them. Ms. Mackenzie brings to her studies more than 13 years of management experience at Allstate Insurance Company, where she was responsible for divisions ranging in size from 15 to 100 employees, and where, in the past ten years, she advanced through the positions of training and development division manager, operations development manager, shared markets field manager, and marketing manager. At the time he was named a Zipf Fellow, John I-Chung Chuang was a doctoral candidate in Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. This knowledge was to be applied toward determining the optimal pricing and efficient allocation of network resources. John is now an assistant professor at the School of Information Management and Systems, University of California at Berkeley.