Distinguished Scholar Award recipients for 2018: Ellram and Zhou
By Susan Meikle and Margo Kissell, university news and communications
Miami University Distinguished Scholar Awards for 2018 have been presented to Lisa Ellram, Rees Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management, and Qihou Zhou, professor and chair of electrical and computer engineering.
Distinguished Scholar Awards honor faculty whose sustained excellence in research or other creative activity has brought them prominence in their fields.
Read about the two Junior Faculty Scholars online.
Lisa Ellram received the Distinguished Scholar Award for a faculty member in business, education and social sciences.
Ellram is an internationally recognized leader in her field, with one nominator writing that she may be the most influential scholar in supply chain management (SCM) today.
Google Scholar puts her scholarly citation count at 24,800, which ranks 13th out of 2,362 scholars who have at least one citation in the field of supply chain management, a nominator noted.
“Professor Ellram was among the first researchers to apply theory to the concept of supply chain management and bring it into the academic literature,” a nominator wrote.
“Using theory and rigorous foundational methods, as well as her considerable expertise in accounting and purchasing (she is a CPA and a certified purchasing manager), Ellram developed foundational research that filled significant gaps in the areas of supplier cost management and buyer-supplier relationships and outsourcing.”
She continues to “challenge the frontiers of the discipline, working on sustainability in the supply chain as well as the supply chain of service industries,” the nominator added.
In recognition of her pioneering efforts, she was featured in the 2017 book (the original in French, translated here) The Grand Authors in Logistics and Supply Chain Management with a chapter, “Lisa M. Ellram. A pioneer of theory of Supply Chain Management.”
Ellram has presented her work in more than 25 countries.
Over the course of her career, she has published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and served as co-editor-in-chief of Journal of Supply Chain Management from 2007-2016. She is currently senior associate editor at the Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management.
She also has 34 refereed conference proceedings and 29 books, monographs and cases, according to a nominator.
Ellram has mentored and advised future academics, “helping them shape the impactful research that will characterize the SCM field for years to come,” the nominator wrote.
She has generated nearly $600,000 in grant funding over her career.
She received her doctorate from Ohio State University in 1990 and taught at Arizona State University from 1990-2006. She served as chair of the department of management and Allen Professor of Business at Colorado State University from 2006-2008. She joined Miami in 2008.
Follow her on Twitter.
Qihou Zhou received the Distinguished Scholar Award for a faculty member in the applied or natural sciences.
Zhou is a well-recognized researcher, nationally and internationally, in using radar techniques to study the space environment. He has made numerous fundamental contributions to the theoretical and experimental study of atmospheric physics. He is a recognized pioneer in applying Incoherent Scatter Radar (ISR) techniques for the study of space environments.
Zhou, a space physicist, has had several “firsts” in the area of atmospheric dynamics and chemistry.
He conducts research on the ionosphere through his connection with the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which has the world’s second largest single dish radio telescope (it was the largest until 2016).
He was the first researcher to use this radar data to study meteors. Very small meteors can be detected by the radar at the rate of one per second. He and one of his students have explored the meteor orbit distribution discovering that these orbits are dominated by circular rather than elliptical orbits. Despite the fact that most of these meteors are quite small, the accumulated effect over time can be significant.
Zhou has made significant research contributions to improving remote sensing technology at the extreme regions of the ionosphere.
In the theoretical research field, Zhou and a colleague extended classic work describing how waves propagate in a fluid — allowing this classic theory to be applied in places like the ionosphere that have the confounding factors of wind shear and varying background temperature.
Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
His research has been funded by the NSF, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Air Force Research Lab, and the Dayton Area Graduate Studies Institute. Since joining Miami in 2002, he has been awarded nearly $2 million in external grants.
His work has resulted in 98 papers in prestigious journals and 23 refereed conference proceeding papers.
Zhou’s connection with Aricebo Observatory — where he was a senior research associate before joining Miami — brings opportunities for Miami students. For the past four years he has led a winter term study abroad class at Aricebo for engineering students.
He also mentored a group of Talawanda high school students as they build an antenna with which to study the atmospheric effects of last summer’s solar eclipse.
“Zhou is a wonderful example of the type of scholar that makes Miami University a special place,” a nominator said.
Zhou received his doctorate from Pennsylvania State University in 1991. He was a research and senior research associate at Cornell University-National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, at Aricebo Observatory, Puerto Rico, from 1991-2002. He joined Miami in 2002 and became chair of electrical and computer engineering in 2013.
