A musician who became a technologist, and a technologist who became a researcher.

I am an Assistant Professor of Management at Clemson University, where I study how digital technologies reshape the way people work, trust, and organize. I also co-direct the M.S. in Data Science and Analytics program, and I founded Iron River Analytics, a small data-visualization consultancy.

My path to the professoriate was not the usual one. I began as an opera singer, with a Bachelor of Music from The Cleveland Institute of Music and a Master of Music from the Shepherd School at Rice University. The discipline of practice, of performing under pressure, of listening closely to everyone else on stage, has stayed with me longer than any role I ever sang.

My first job out of music was teaching. In the late 1990s I worked as a technology trainer in New York, running new-analyst training for investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, teaching young hires to use the systems their work would depend on. That led into roughly fifteen years in technology and IT leadership: I joined IBM as an IT Specialist, worked as a technology consultant, and eventually served as Director of Systems Development at J. Walter Thompson and Team Detroit. I built and led teams that shipped real systems for real organizations, and I learned what it actually takes to move software from a whiteboard into the hands of people who depend on it.

That experience sent me back to school. I earned an MBA and then a Ph.D. in Information Technology Management from Michigan State University, and I have been a researcher and teacher ever since. The applied perspective I carried out of industry still shapes both. My research, at the highest level, investigates how technology changes the way people behave, individually, in groups, and in organizations. In practice that means how generative AI is reorganizing knowledge work, how digital platforms substitute for institutions in the Global South, and how people construct trust in the technologies they use. My teaching asks managers to learn by building, not only by reading.

The opera-singer-to-technologist-to-professor arc is not as crooked as it sounds. Teaching runs through all of it. Whether the room held new bank analysts, a development team, or an MBA cohort, the work was the same: take something complex, understand how its parts fit, and help other people perform it well. I have come to think I was made to teach.

The best way to reach me is by email at john@jftripp.org.