The College of Computing & Informatics (CCI) at Drexel University is deeply saddened to announce that M. Carl Drott, PhD, former associate professor of information science, passed away on May 6.
As associate professor, Drott taught hundreds of students in information systems courses over 41 years at Drexel’s College of Computing & Informatics, formerly the College of Information Science and Technology. He retired in August 2020.
Prior to joining Drexel, Drott was visiting professor of information systems at the International Management Center in Budapest, Hungary. He also served as director of academic computing and chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of the Virgin Islands, and as head of the Department of Operations Research at the University of Michigan’s Library.
Drott’s background and training centered around industrial engineering, including operations research, stochastic processes, decision theory and computer simulation. He earned an MS in engineering and a PhD in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan.
He authored software programs to help people with grammar and writing, as well as two books, Measuring Student Information Use: A Guide for School Library Media Specialists (with the late Professor Emeritus Jacqueline C. Mancall, PhD) and Dr. Drott's Random Sampler Using the Computer as a Tool for Library Management (both with Libraries Unlimited, 1983 and 1993, respectively).
Drott was a distinguished researcher and scholar in areas such as open access; information resources management; computer programming; computerized text processing; computer applications; research design and statistical analysis; information systems analysis; information systems research; scientific communication; cognitive processes; and webpage design and evaluation. He held editorships at the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Journal of the American Society for Information Science, and reviewed proposals for the National Science Foundation and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the prestigious Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1979.