Current Undergraduate StudentsCenters, institutes and labsInformation Systems Research Institute

At ISRI, teams of faculty and faculty-supervised students help companies solve specific problems through real IT projects. These projects give students real-time, hands-on experience as they prepare for careers.

Companies can tap into our expertise in cybersecurity, data analytics, data mining, systems analysis and design, and agile development.

ISRI, part of the , also provides opportunities for sponsored research, innovative teaching initiatives, internships and faculty development.

Whether you lack manpower or simply want additional expertise, ISRI can help. Contact Albert "Jim" Wynne at ajwynne@vcu.edu to learn how we can help solve your business needs in a timely, cost-effective manner.

Current projects

ISRI offers three dual-enrollment courses in conjunction with the Maggie L. Walker Governor's School. Courses introduce high school students to current or emerging web languages, e-business software development environments, web application servers and other packages used in creating and running web applications.

Students can earn up to 9 credit hours for the courses, and most are able to transfer the credits and, once in college, enroll in intermediate or advanced programming courses.

  • EBUS 202: eBusiness Technologies. This course introduces IT infrastructure, graphics for the web with GIMP or Paint.net, HTML, CSS, browser scripting with JavaScript, server-side programming with SQL and PHP, UML and accounting. Students work at the command line on a Linux web server using online resources provided at W3 Schools, Google, Mozilla and other sites as the introductory texts.

  • INFO 250: Programming Languages. This course introduces structured programming and algorithms with PHP at the command line to calculate descriptive stats for data in sequential files: counting and accumulating, mean, standard deviation, median, mode and graphing with histograms and scatter plots. Object-oriented programming introduces JavaScript, and database programming for the web introduces SQL and PHP.

  • INFO 291: Project in IS. This second-semester course requires either EBUS 202 or INFO 250 as a prerequisite. Students learn other programming languages such as Python, Node.js, Julia, Java, Ruby, C++ or C# for their projects. As first-year students are learning and developing in plain HTML and CSS, second-year students work with a CSS/HTML framework to make mobile-friendly, responsive websites.