Syed Saad Andaleeb has been named distinguished professor of marketing by Penn State’s Office of the President. This rare honor recognizes Andaleeb’s prominent profile as a teacher in the Sam and Irene Black School of Business at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, and as a scholar and researcher within South Asia’s international development community.
Andaleeb’s research investigates the roles society, politics and business play in the economic growth of developing countries, particularly his native Bangladesh. For 10 years he has edited the Journal of Bangladesh Studies, a multidisciplinary periodical that reaches both policy makers in developing countries and top-tier research institutions, including Cambridge University, Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley, Cornell and Illinois. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, a consortium of U.S. universities involved in research and promotion of educational exchange between the United States and Bangladesh.
As president of the Bangladesh Development Initiative (http://www.bdiusa.org), Andaleeb has twice chaired an international conference at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government that draws American and Bengali scholars, government officials, foreign and domestic policy makers, and international media.
“These conferences not only bring together international scholars with similar research interests, but also yield significant practical consequences because research results are presented to influential academic and commercial institutions and widely publicized in the news media in Bangladesh,” one faculty member wrote in a letter of support for Andaleeb’s nomination to distinguished professorship. “This is the kind of international education that really matters, where the dissemination of research findings potentially play a positive role in improving public policy and, ultimately, human welfare.”
A two-time winner of the Fulbright Senior Specialist award, Andaleeb also been a member of the program’s Discipline Peer Reviewing Committee. During his Fulbright projects, he mentored and trained young academics at BRAC University in Dhaka in modern research and statistical methods. By helping to develop research capacity, Andaleeb says, “faculty in developing countries can engage in indigenous knowledge-generation rather than be completely dependent on borrowed knowledge from Western sources.”
Within the Black School of Business, Andaleeb teaches upper-level courses in global marketing, service marketing, and marketing research, and is a past winner of the Graduate Student Association’s Professor of the Year award. A prolific writer and consultant, he has provided consulting services to the World Bank and a number of economic- and social-development programs overseen by the United Nations. Locally, Andaleeb and his students have provided research and consulting services to the Community Blood Bank of Northwest Pennsylvania, Better Baked Foods, Hamot Health Center, Scott Enterprises and the Loyal Christian Benefit Association.