ANN ARBOR—The University of Michigan has been awarded a five-year, $2.7 million National Science Foundation grant to support a multidisciplinary doctoral fellowship program for scholars interested in the social and technical aspects of e-commerce.

The program, known as STIET (Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions), will bring together four U-M schools and colleges: the School of Information, the School of Business Administration, the Division of Computer Science and Engineering in the College of Engineering, and the Department of Economics in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

Over its five-year duration, the NSF funding will provide fellowships for the first two years of graduate study for 65 doctoral students from these collaborating units. In addition, it will support STIET core courses and electives, a weekly research seminar, and twice-a-year workshops. The U-M units will also work with industry partners IBM and Microsoft in implementing the program.

“The program will focus on the interactions among human motivation, human behavior, and technical systems,” says Jeff MacKie-Mason, the Arthur W. Burks Collegiate Professor of Information and Computer Science and director of the STIET program. “We have professional master’s programs in this area already in place, with several pilot doctoral students pursuing this sort of multidisciplinary program. Now we have the support to establish the early training phase of a full multidisciplinary doctoral program.”

Co-investigators for the project are Michael D. Gordon, professor of business administration and computer and information systems, and Michael Wellman, professor of computer science and engineering.

For more information on the program and an application, write to stiet-info@umich.edu or visit stiet.si.umich.edu.

Related Links:

• National Science Foundation
• IBM