Catherine Ridings

Professor Ridings is the Director of the BIS program in the College of Business and Economics. She teaches Electronic Commerce, Business Data Management, and Business Application Programming.

Her primary research interest is virtual communities, including social networks, social capital, trust, knowledge management and electronic commerce in this context. She also has secondary research interests in technology adoption and acceptance. She has published in journals such as Journal of Management Information Systems, The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems, and Journal of Strategic Information Systems. Her dissertation, "Determinants of Trust and Use in Virtual Communities," won the Decision Sciences Institute''s 2001 Elwood S. Buffa Doctoral Dissertation Award Competition.

Professor Ridings holds degrees in Decision Sciences with concentrations in Management Information Systems. Prior to academia, she worked in industry for 8 years managing software developers building a large scale client-server customer contact application for Bell Atlantic (presently Verizon Corporation).

Educaion

Drexel University, M.B.A., Ph.D.

Research Interests

Virtual communities

Social Networks

Social capital

Electronic Commerce