Dominic Thomas
My path into information systems research did not start in a computer lab. It started with a B.A. in English and American Literature from Brandeis University in 1994, with a minor in Russian and a certification to teach English in Massachusetts secondary schools.
For most of the 1990s, I taught English and helped design curricula across three countries. In Nepal, I helped create a nationwide 11th and 12th grade English curriculum for the Nepal Higher Secondary Education Board, and served as elected Co-Chairman of the Peace Corps/Nepal Volunteer Advisory Committee, representing volunteers across the country. I also sat on the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Small Projects Assistance Program Committee, helping fund and evaluate grassroots development projects. In Japan, I worked on English curriculum improvement for the Japanese government and served as a National Councilman for the Association for Japan Exchange and Teaching, while helping organize a Japan Earth Day event that drew more than 5,000 participants. Along the way I earned working proficiency in Nepali, Japanese, and Russian, on top of English.
None of that was information systems work — but all of it was systems work. Designing a national curriculum, running a volunteer committee across a country, organizing thousands of people around a shared civic project: each was an exercise in getting people, incentives, and processes to work together toward a goal, with technology (where it existed at all) as only one part of the picture.
That experience is what drew me back to graduate school, and it is the reason my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Georgia (2005) was not about a technology in isolation, but about The Team Leader Technology Facilitation Role in Information Systems Project Virtual Teams — how people, not just software, make distributed technical work succeed or fail. Twenty-five years later, whether I am studying how hospital IT staff drive innovation, how 911 dispatchers and AI models can work together to catch mental health crises earlier, or how the global shipping industry standardizes its data exchange, the underlying question is the same one I first ran into in a classroom in Nepal: how do you design a system that actually works for the humans inside it?