Dr. Weiguo (Patrick) Fan is a Henry B. Tippie Excellence Chair Professor in Business Analytics at the University of Iowa. He received his Ph.D. in Business Administration in 2002 from the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research interests focus on the design and development of novel information technologies — AI, information retrieval, data mining, text analytics/NLP, social media analytics, business intelligence techniques — to support better business information management and decision making. He pioneered the application of Genetic Programming for search engine ranking optimization, and the application of natural language processing/textual analytics for business applications such as financial statement risk assessment, uncovering product/service quality issues from social media (quality analytics), assessing crowdfunding success from project descriptions, and finding product innovation ideas from user-generated contents. He has published more than 300 refereed journal and conference papers, of which 7 papers are designated as the ESI highly cited papers by Web of Science. His research has been cited more than 20000 times (h-index 69, i10-index 198) as of 4/21/2025 according to Google Scholar. His research has appeared in many premier IT/IS/OM journals, such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Productions and Operations Management, INFORMS Journal on Computing, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, Communications of the ACM, Information and Management, Journal of the American Society on Information Science and Technology, Information Processing and Management, Decision Support Systems, etc. He frequently consults for Fortune 500 companies and serves as expert panel reviewers for many government and funding agencies.