UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Guoray Cai, professor in the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), has been appointed to the Dewey Walker Professorship in Information Sciences and Technology, effective July 1.
The Dewey Walker Endowed Professorship was established to support an outstanding faculty member in the College of IST whose work advances interdisciplinary contributions in information systems solutions. The three-year appointment provides supplemental support to further the holder’s teaching, research and public service. The previous holder was Dinghao Wu, a faculty member in IST’s Department of Privacy and Cybersecurity Informatics and a faculty affiliate in the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence at Penn State.
“I am deeply honored to receive this appointment to the Dewey Walker Professorship,” Cai said. “This is both a recognition of my past research and an encouragement for continued leadership and excellence in the evolution of human-centered information technologies.”
Cai was recently promoted to full professor and named the inaugural head of the College of IST’s Department of Human-Centered Computing and Social Informatics. Since joining the college as an assistant professor in 1999, he has served many leadership positions, including as chair of the faculty council, chair of the promotion and tenure committee and interim department head in the human-computer interaction faculty area.
Cai’s research is centered around improving human use of geospatial information in various decision-making contexts, such as crisis responses, civic engagement, urban planning and visual analytics. He received multiple research funding awards on projects that support geocollaboration, geocollaborative crisis management and multi-modal interfaces for collaborative systems. He is the founding director of the Spatial Information and Intelligence Laboratory, which is housed in the College of IST. Cai holds a doctoral degree in information science from the University of Pittsburgh.
“Guoray is well-deserving of this prestigious honor,” said Andrea Tapia, dean of the College of IST. “This professorship, along with his role as department head, will support his leadership efforts to create a positive impact on the evolution of technologies that increasingly impact society.”
Cai was recently selected to participate in the 2026 Big Ten Academic Alliance Department Executive Officers Program. This leadership development initiative offers in-depth training, case-based learning and opportunities to collaborate with department heads, chairs and school directors across the Big Ten on the challenges and responsibilities of academic leadership.