Faculty

The Master of Science in Information Technology faculty strike the perfect balance between the academic and professional worlds, providing a range of theoretical knowledge and practical experiences that the unique curriculum of the MSIT demands. This combination of academic and “real-world” knowledge helps you immediately apply what you’ve learned directly into your work environment.

Renowned professors from the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Kellogg School of Management, and Northwestern's Law School bring their academic expertise to the classroom, giving students a balanced view of academic principles and practical applications. Industry leaders add their considerable talents to our program by bringing their professional successes and relevant experiences into the classroom.

Faculty Members in 2011-12

Randall Berry, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, McCormick School. Dr. Berry has a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1993 and the M.S. and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996 and 2000, respectively. In 1998 he was on the technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Advanced Networks Group. His primary research interests include wireless communication, data networks, and information theory. Dr. Berry has served as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless communications and the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and has also served on the organizing committee for several major conferences in the communications and networking fields. He is the recipient of a 2003 NSF CAREER award and the Best Teacher award for the 2001/2002 academic year from the ECE Department at Northwestern University. More information can be found at http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/~rberry/ Dr. Berry serves on the Board for the MSIT and teaches 432, Communications Networks.

Yan Chen, Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University.  Dr. Chen received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley in 2003.   He has over ten years of experience in network security, network management and diagnosis from both academia and industry. He won the Department of Energy (DOE) Early CAREER award in 2005, the Department of Defense (DoD) AFOSR Young Investigator Award, and the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Awards in 2004 and 2005 with his colleagues. Besides publishing in premier conferences such as ACM SIGCOMM, he has served as chair or on the technical program committee (TPC) of many major networking and security conferences. He started several security courses at Northwestern University, including the EECS 350 Introduction to Computer Security, EECS 354 Network Penetration and Security, and EECS 450 Internet Security. He was a Searle Junior Fellow (granted by the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence) of Northwestern University in 2004. More information can be found at http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~ychen/ . Dr. Chen teaches 458, Information Security and Assurance.

Alexander Chernev, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Dr. Chernev holds a PhD in Psychology from Sofia University and a PhD in Business Administration from Duke University. Dr. Chernev's research applies theories and concepts related to consumer behavior and managerial decision making to develop successful marketing strategies. He serves on the editorial boards of top research journals, including Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and International Journal of Research in Marketing. Dr. Chernev's research has been published in leading marketing journals and has been quoted in business and popular press, including Business Week, Forbes, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He has written numerous teaching cases focused on corporate planning, marketing strategy, and brand and customer management. At Kellogg, Dr. Chernev teaches marketing management, strategic marketing, marketing research, and behavioral decision theory in the MBA, PhD, and executive education pro-grams. In addition to teaching, he advises companies around the world on issues of strategic marketing planning and analysis, business innovation, brand and customer equity, new product development, and customer management. More information can be found at: http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/Faculty/Directory/Chernev_Alexander.aspx
Dr. Chernev teaches 451, Strategic Marketing.

Peter DiCola, Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern Law School.  JD (2005) and PhD in Economics (2009) from the University of Michigan.  Prof. DiCola uses empirical methods and applied economic models to study intellectual property law, media regulation, and their intersection. His research has centered on the music industry and related industries. In graduate school, he worked with the non-profit Future of Music Coalition on many research projects and he continues to serve on its board of directors. He is the co-author, with Kembrew McLeod, of Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling, which Duke University Press published in March 2011.  Prof. DiCola previously clerked for the Honorable Thomas L. Ambro, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.  More information can be found at http://www.law.northwestern.edu/faculty/profiles/PeterDiCola/ .  Prof. DiCola teaches 455:  Law of IT. 

Alan Graves, Adjunct Instructor. Mr. Graves is a Project Consultant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. He conducts in-depth examinations of large financial institutions and other businesses regulated by the Federal Reserve System and works on special assignments, primarily in Washington D.C.  Alan transfered October 2008 from the Technology Lab housed at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago for the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC). The Council is a formal body empowered to prescribe uniform principles, standards, and report forms to promote uniformity in the supervision of financial institutions. Alan has over twenty years of prior experience as an IT consultant and systems architect at Bell Labs/Lucent/NCR and Amoco Corporation. He has a very diverse background having held positions in Education, Diving and Broadcasting. His credentials include BA (Radio and Television), BS (Psychology), MS in Information Technology, and he holds certifications from the FCC, Novell, Microsoft, Information Systems Audit and Control Association, ISC 2 and Citrix. Mr. Graves teaches 490, IT Management.

Abraham H. Haddad, Program Director of the MSIT, Henry and Isabelle Dever Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, McCormick School. Ph.D., Princeton.  Also a Fellow of IEEE, IFAC and AAAS.  Dr. Haddad served as President of the IEEE Control Systems Society, and is a member of the Council of IFAC.  His favorite projects are analysis, modeling, estimation, detection of systems, with applications to communication systems and networks.  More information can be found at http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/~ahaddad/ahaddad.html Dr. Haddad is chair of the MSIT Board of Directors and teaches 431, Probability and Statistical Methods. He is the former chairman of the EECS department for academic year 2004-05.

Michael Honig, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, McCormick School. Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley. After receiving his Ph.D., Dr. Honig joined Bell Laboratories, and subsequently moved to Bellcore Applied Research where he worked on digital communications for both wired and wireless systems. He has been at Northwestern since fall 1994.  He has served as an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications, the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, and has served on the Board of Governors for the IEEE Information Theory Society. He is a Fellow of IEEE and former Ameritech Professor of Information Technology at Northwestern. He has received two IEEE prize paper awards with co-authors at Northwestern for work on interference mitigation, and was the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The Humboldt award is in recognition of Mike's past accomplishments in research and teaching. More information can be found at http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/~mh/ He teaches 413, Wireless Technologies.

Russ Joseph, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, McCormick School. Dr. Joseph received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton.  His primary research interest is in computer architecture,  focusing on the design and implementation of power-aware and reliability-aware computer systems. Some of his recent projects have examined microprocessor design for reliability and variability tolerance, circuit and compiler technologies to support timing level speculation, and on-line power management for multi-core systems. More information can be found at http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~rjoseph/ Dr. Joseph teaches a segment of 490, Selected Topics in Information Technology: Virtualization.

Chung-Chieh Lee, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, McCormick School.  Ph.D., Princeton.  A consultant to many sectors of information and telecommunication industry and a former co-director of Center for Information and Telecommunication Technology at Northwestern, Dr. Lee was instrumental in designing and guiding the MSIT through the approval channels of the University.  His current research projects involve advanced QoS architectures and control algorithms for all Layers 1-4 and novel wireless ad hoc network protocols and architectures.  More information can be found at http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/faculty/Lee_Chung-Chieh.html Dr. Lee is a member of the MSIT Board and teaches 411, Fundamentals of Telecommunication Engineering.

Edward Malthouse, Theodore R. and Annie Laurie Sills Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications, Medill School at Northwestern. Ph.D Statistics, Northwestern University.  Professor Malthouse is an expert in data mining, market research, and media marketing. He won the 2009 Best Paper of the Year honors from the European Advertising Academy, the 2006 Best Paper of the Year award from the Journal of Interactive Marketing, and received the Walter Award for Research Excellence from Northwestern in 2009, to name but a few of his research awards.  He was the co-editor of the Journal of Interactive Marketing for 5 years. His primary research is in the areas of media and database marketing. He develops statistical models and applies them to large data sets of consumer information to help managers make marketing decisions.  Dr. Malthouse has won numerous teaching awards, including IMC Teacher of the Year and the Robert B. Clarke Outstanding Educator Award, and he has been an invited visiting professor at Aoyama Gakuin Univeristy, Wuhan University, Xiamen University, National Chengchi University, Münster University, and Università Della Svizzera Italiana.  More information can be found at: http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/faculty/imcfulltime.aspx?id=128403 
Dr. Malthouse teaches 423, Data Mining and Business Intelligence.

Hugh W. Ryan, Adjunct Instructor. MS ME, New Mexico State University.  Mr. Ryan is a retired partner from Accenture. While at Accenture, he led the Large Complex Systems. He has extensive systems integration experience with a focus in the application of leading edge IT technology on some of Accenture's largest IT projects. He has published on application and use of client/server and internet technology. Mr. Ryan teaches 443, Enterprise Applications and Integration.

John R. Twombly, Adjunct Instructor. MBA and Ph.D., University of Chicago. Dr. Twombly is the Director of Undergraduate Programs in Business and a Clinical Professor of Accounting and Finance at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Stuart School of Business. Dr. Twombly's research has been published in The Journal of Accounting Research and The Accounting Review, and he has written continuing education monographs and conducted seminars for the Center for Executive Education in New York, the Financial Analysts Federation, The Wharton School's Executive Education Program and numerous major corporations. In addition to his academic accomplishments, Dr. Twombly, who is a Certified Public Accountant, supervises the management of a real estate portfolio consisting of one hundred rental units. More information can be found at http://www.stuart.iit.edu/about/faculty/john_twombly.shtml He teaches 456, Financial Management for IT Professionals.

Alan Wolff, Adjunct Instructor, MS and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Northwestern University. Dr. Wolff is the Director of Information Resources for Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering. He has more than 20 years of work experience in the Information Technology field and over 10 years experience in teaching graduate level courses in telecommunications and computer science. In addition to being an instructor in the MSIT, Dr. Wolff has also been an adjunct faculty member at DePaul University's School of Computer Science, Telecommunications, and Information Systems. Alan is a member of the IEEE and Educause organizations. His group has won 5 Northwestern University "Best Practice" awards for particular projects in the last 4 years, for web applications work and high performance computing. More information can be found at Alan Wolff. Dr. Wolff teaches 421, Principles of Computer and Information Technology.