Kourosh Dadgar

Associate Professor Kourosh Dadgar’s educational and professional background is diverse and interdisciplinary. His training and practice are in industrial product design and manage information systems (MIS) with the flavor of software engineering. His perspective in teaching and research is human-centric, participatory, and value-sensitive. 

His teaching philosophy is: explore, think, do, and learn. His classes are organically designed and include interactive and participatory business cases that require experiential learning at the intersection of technology, people, and organizations. Kourosh prioritizes critical thinking and problem solving in his classes and encourages students to push themselves and positively reframe their minds to learn and experiment. 

Dadgar’s research is human-centric and data-driven, and focuses on value-sensitive investigation of users, patients, and employees in relation to a variety of enterprise and personal technologies and systems that they use, design, and implement. He finds healthcare the most rewarding context for his work but his research publications and presentations span a wide range of topics and domains such as social media, process automation, and business ethics. Dadgar earned his BA at the University of Tehran, his MA from The Ohio State University, and his PhD from Washington State University.

• Health IT
• Design Science Research
• Business and Data Analytics
• Process Automation

• Strategic Growth Council (SGC) and City of Oakland, California, independent data evaluator and analyst 
• TCC (Transformative Climate Communities) project (Jan. 2021 - present )
  • Work on a $25 million transformative project with multiple stakeholders in Oakland such as displacement avoidance, workforce development, and community engagement plans
  • Improve their processes, create performance indicators, build and improve project data collection and integration processes and models, and evaluate their progress 
• Homeless Project for the City of Oakland, data analyst (May 2019 - May 2020)
  • Analyzed homelessness data for the city of Oakland and provided actionable insights to design fair and inclusive effective homeless intervention programs for different ethnic groups.
• Biodesign Institute, product designer (May 2012 - Aug. 2012)
  • Worked closely with medical scientists, researchers, and engineers designing the first portable metabolism tracker and performed usability and ergonomic tests.

• Ph.D, Management Information Systems, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, 2016
• MA, Industrial and Product Design, Applied Software Engineering (minor), The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, 2011
• BA, Industrial Design, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, 2008

• Founder and Faculty Advisor, Association for Information Systems (AIS), University of San Francisco Student Chapter (December 2017 - Present)
• Co-chair of mini-track, HICSS (Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences) (Jan. 2018 - Present)

• Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award, May 2024, School of Management, University of San Francisco
• Faculty Advisor of the Year 2021-2022, Association for Information Systems (AIS) - AIS Student Chapters
• Co-chair, ICIS CIO forum, December 14, 2018 San Francisco, CA
• Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award, April 28, 2016. Carson College of Business, Washington State University

• Dadgar, M., & Joshi, K.D. 2020. Ethically Building Business Intelligence in Healthcare: A Value-Sensitive Perspective. In J. Khuntia, X. Ning, & M. Tanniru (Eds.), Theory and Practice of Business Intelligence in Healthcare (pp. 256-278). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
• Vithayathil, J., Dadgar, M., and Osiri, J. K. 2020. “Social Media Use and Consumer Shopping Preferences,” International Journal of Information Management (54), p. 102117.
• Dadgar, M. 2020. Knowledge Creation by Practitioners and Designers: From Tacit to Explicit. In Endreß, T. (Eds.), Digital Project Practice - Managing Innovation and Change (pp. 78-88). Hamburg, Germany: tredition GmbH.
• Dadgar, M. and Joshi, K.D. 2018. "The Role of Information and Communication Technology in Self-Management of Chronic Diseases: An Empirical Investigation through Value Sensitive Design," Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS), 19(2), pp. 86-112.
• Lin, X., Clay, P. F., Hajli, N., and Dadgar, M. 2016. “Investigating the Impacts of Organizational Factors on Employees’ Unethical Behavior Within Organization in the Context of Chinese Firms” Journal of Business Ethics, 1–13.