Sulin Ba was appointed dean of the Driehaus College of Business in July 2022. Prior to joining DePaul University, she was the Treibick Family Endowed Chair at the University of Connecticut School of Business, where she served as the school’s first Associate Dean of Academic and Research Support. In addition, she was the executive director of the Connecticut Information Technology Institute from 2014 to 2019.
During her tenure at UConn, she successfully championed multiple cross-campus collaborations, worked with state and local governments and the corporate community, and represented the University of Connecticut in state-wide initiatives focusing on entrepreneurship and innovation. She was a founding member of the board of directors for Innovation Place Hartford, an initiative jointly funded by the State of Connecticut and other public and private sectors to catalyze technological innovation.
An award-winning researcher who publishes regularly in leading academic journals, Ba started her academic career at the University of Southern California. She is an honorary distinguished professor at the School of Management at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. She also previously served as a distinguished visiting professor at University of Mannheim in Germany.
Ba’s current research interests include the design of crowdsourcing platforms, online word-of-mouth and digital health communities. Her work on the institutional setup to help small businesses grow in the digital economy has been used as the basis for testimony before the Congressional House Committee on Small Business. She served as a senior editor for MIS Quarterly from 2013 to 2017. She currently is a senior editor for the journal Production and Operations Management as well as Decision Support Systems.
Born and raised in China, Ba came to the United States to pursue graduate education. She received her master’s and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.