The Teacher

Dr. Panko is a professor of IT Management in the College of Business Administration at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He has also been a faculty member in the college’s marketing department.

His primary area of research has been spreadsheet development and management. Beginning in 1993, he embarked on a program of experimental research that is still continuing. He has also done work on spreadsheet good practice since the mid-1980s. Harvard Business Review did an executive briefing on his spreadsheet research, and The Wall Street Journal interviewed him about his spreadsheet research.

At Business Night 2003, he received the Dennis Ching College of Business Administration Teaching Excellence Award for Senior Faculty.

He received his doctorate from Stanford University, graduating with a 4.0 GPA. He received his undergraduate degree in physics, summa cum laude, from Seattle University. He also received his MBA from Seattle University.

Before coming to the University, he was a project manager at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). At the research institute and at the university, he has consulted from many local, national and international clients, including the following: The Office of the President of the United States, AT&T, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Western Union Telegraph Company, British Post Office, Bell Canada, Trans-Canada Telephone System, Fujitsu, Wang Laboratories, Hughes Aircraft Space Division, RCA, Royal Dutch Shell, The Council of European Post and Telecommunications Administrations, RCA, 20th Century-Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC, HBO, NASA, National Institutes of Standards and Technology, NSF, Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, U.S. Army Development and Readiness Command, U.S. Army Ballistics Research Laboratory, Naval Electronics Laboratory Command, A.C. Nielson DATAQUEST, Auerbach Publishers, Diebold Automated Office Program, International Institute of Research (Singapore), TEA Pty. Ltd. (Australia), and Communications Studies and Planning (U.K.).

He has written three textbooks. His End User Computing textbook was the top textbook in the field in the 1980s, and his security textbook is the second highest-selling textbook in that field. His networking textbook generally has been first to fourth in sales depending on the year.

His research has appeared in MIS Quarterly, Communications of the ACM, Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS), Communications of the Association for Information Systems (CAIS), Journal of Management Information Systems, IS Audit and Control Journal, Decision Support Systems, Journal of End User Computing, Office Systems Research Journal, Journal of Organizational Computing, and Telecommunications Policy. In 1996, Harvard Business Review published a management briefing on his spreadsheet error research. In 2006, he was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal about his spreadsheet research.