UCR SoBA

Tom Novak

Albert O. Steffey Professor of Marketing, Co-Director, Sloan Center for Internet Retailing

* The Albert O. Steffey Chair title alternates between Donna Hoffman and Tom Novak annually.

Aside from being part of the SoBA faculty, Tom Novak is co-director of the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing. He joined the faculty in 2006. Novak's research since 1993 has focused exclusively on Internet and Web-based commerce. His current research areas include measuring the online consumer experience (flow, consumer control and the design of compelling online environments); online advertising (Web advertising metrics and modeling online advertising exposure); Internet marketing strategy (business models, new paradigms for electronic commerce); and electronic commerce policy (the "digital divide," privacy, and trust).

An internationally recognized academic researcher on Web-based commerce, Novak has published extensively on the topic in academic journals in a range of scholarly disciplines, including SCIENCE, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, Communications of the ACM, the Information Society, and Harvard Business Review. He has also been a contributing writer to both Wired and HotWired.

Prior to joining the faculty at SoBA, Novak served on the faculties of Vanderbilt University, New York University, Columbia University, and Southern Methodist University. From 1995 to 1999, he spent summers as a visiting scholar at Paul Allen's Interval Research Corporation, Palo Alto California, and was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in the summers of 1997 and 2000.

Novak received his A.B. in psychology from Oberlin College in 1977 and his M.A. (1980) and Ph.D. (1984, in quantitative psychology with a formal minor in biostatistics) from the L.L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.