Professor Jason Cohen

Commerce, Law and Management

Professor Cohen is Dean of the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management and a Professor of Information Systems in the School of Business Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He received his PhD in Information Systems in 2004. His research work is focused on information systems in organisations and e-commerce with over 65 publications in leading international journals and conference proceedings. He holds an NRF C1 rating. He has taught at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in topics such as business process management, digital commerce, and IT management. He has supervised 36 masters students and 4 doctoral students to completion. In 2011, he was Visiting Faculty at the International Centre for Health Innovation at the Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario. He was previously head of the Information Systems division in the School of Economics and Business Sciences (2004-2010) and then Assistant Dean Research (2015-2019) supporting the Faculty to establish a new research culture and grow its research output. Jason was later appointed Deputy Dean in the Faculty working with the Dean and Faculty Executive on long-term planning and leadership in areas such as staff development and academic affairs. Jason has served on the University’s Senate sub-committees such as Academic Planning and Development, Senate Teaching and Learning, Senate ICT Committee, as well as on the University Research Committee. He has also participated as a member of quinquennial reviews (QQR) for School of Computational and Applied Mathematics (2010), School of Law (2012), Wits School of Governance (2017), School of Electrical and Information Engineering (2019), School of Accountancy (2019), and School of Statistics and Actuarial Science (2021). He currently serves as an external member of the Humanities Faculty Staffing & Promotions Committee and was also recently elected to Senate. He has been a member of task teams contributing to institutional planning for the University. These include the teams that developed the Wits Strategic Plan for Research and PG Affairs (2018–2022), the Wits Learning and Teaching Plan (2020-2024), and most recently the Wits Vision 2033 Strategic Framework task team. He was a member of the specialist committee of the National Research Foundation for ratings in the field of information technology 2015-2019, and its convenor 2017-2018. He serves on the editorial board of the AIS-affiliated Journal of Information Systems Education. He is a director-at-large for the AIS Southern African Chapter.