James Allan Appointed Distinguished Professor
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James Allan, Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) professor and director of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), was appointed Distinguished Professor following approval by the UMass Amherst Board of Trustees at its June 2025 meeting. The title Distinguished Professor is conferred upon select, highly accomplished faculty who have already achieved the rank of professor and meet a demanding set of qualifications.
Allan first joined UMass Amherst as a postdoctoral researcher and formally joined the faculty in 1996 as research faculty after receiving a PhD in computer science from Cornell University in 1995. He became an assistant professor in 1998, earned tenure as an associate professor in 2003, and was promoted to professor in 2008. He has served as the director of CIIR since 2021, after holding leadership roles in the center for more than two decades.
A specialist in information retrieval (IR), Allan’s research focuses on detecting and tracking events and topics, evaluating retrieval systems, understanding the mechanisms that underlie those systems, and generally improving information access. His work in topic detection and tracking—the automatic identification of new events in digital streams and following their development across news and other sources—laid the groundwork for today’s real-time search and news aggregation technologies.
Allan has secured more than $31 million in research funding over his career, including major awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and industry partners such as Amazon. He has been a co-principal investigator on a $3 million NSF ADVANCE grant that champions faculty development and equity and continues to serve in leadership roles in national and international organizations, including as treasurer and, more recently, as chair of the board of the Computing Research Association.
He has authored more than 230 peer-reviewed papers, which have been cited over 24,000 times, earning multiple best paper awards and two “Test of Time” awards. Allan was elected to the SIGIR Academy and was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2021, both for his sustained contributions to information retrieval. One external reviewer called him “one of the world’s leading IR researchers, someone whose work continues to have a substantial impact on the lives of individuals around the world.”
In addition to research, Allan has made enduring contributions to teaching and mentoring. A former Lilly Teaching Fellow and nominee for the UMass Distinguished Teaching Award, he has taught courses ranging from introductory programming to graduate seminars in information retrieval. He has advised 29 PhD students and served on dozens more committees, with many of his former students now in leadership roles in industry and academia. “The quality of his supervision can be reflected by the quality of his trainees who became active and top researchers in IR,” noted a reviewer.
Allan has also provided extensive service to CICS and the wider university. He was the inaugural chair of the CICS faculty from 2015 to 2022, a period of rapid growth that saw the doubling of faculty and staff, significant gains in student enrollment and diversity, and the development of new academic programs. He currently serves the college as associate dean of research and engagement.
“Professor Allan has outstanding accomplishments in all three arenas—research, teaching, and service—that are widely recognized in his field and beyond,” says former Manning CICS Dean Laura Haas. “He is exactly the type of faculty member we aspire to recruit and cultivate. His remarkable research credentials, his excellence in teaching and advising, his dedication to service and to making an impact make him a model that colleagues and students should aspire to emulate.”
