Murray Turoff, PhD, is a distinguished professor emeritus in the Information Systems Department at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has been engaged in research and development of computer-mediated communication systems since the late 1960s. He was the designer of the Emergency Management Information System And Reference Index (EMISARI), which was the first group communication-oriented crisis management system and which was used for the 1971 Wage Price Freeze and assorted federal crisis events until the mid-1980s.

Turoff has been at NJIT since 1973 and developed the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) in 1976 as a computer-mediated communication system to support research in new applications of computer-based communications technology. He was instrumental in the formation of the Information Systems Department at NJIT and was its first chairperson. He has worked in such application areas as decision support systems, scientific communications, planning and technological foresight, the Delphi Method, and the development of the Virtual Classroom System on EIES at NJIT in the mid- to   late 1980s. He teaches courses in Human Computer Interaction Design, the management of information systems, and emergency management information systems. He received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Computer Pioneer Award. 

Turoff  is co-author of the award-winning book The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer that predicted all the current Web based communication systems in 1978.  He is a cofounder of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) and was program chair of their third international meeting in May 2006.  He has published a number of recent papers on the design of information systems for all aspects of crisis planning and emergency management.

He received his PhD in physics from Brandeis University and his BA in physics and math from the University of California at Berkeley.

Last update: 8/30/06