M JOSEPH SIRGY is a management psychologist (Ph.D., U/Massachusetts, 1979), Professor of Marketing, and Virginia Real estate Research Fellow at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). He has published extensively in the area of marketing, business ethics, and quality of life (QOL). He is the author/editor of many books related to consumer marketing and quality of life. He co-founded the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS) in 1995, served as its Executive Director/Treasurer from 1995 to 2011, and as Development Director (2011-12).
In 1998, he received the Distinguished Fellow Award from ISQOLS. In 2003, ISQOLS honored him as the Distinguished QOL Researcher for research excellence and a record of lifetime achievement in QOL research. He also served as President of the Academy of Marketing Science from which he received the Distinguished Fellow Award in the early 1990's and the Harold Berkman Service Award in 2007 (lifetime achievement award for serving the marketing professoriate). In the early 2000's, he helped co-found the Macromarketing Society and the Community Indicators Consortium and has served as a board member of these two professional associations. He co-founded the journal, Applied Research in Quality of Life, the official journal of the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies, in 2005; and he has served as editor (1995-present). He also served editor of the QOL section in the Journal of Macromarketing (1995-present). He received the Virginia Tech's Pamplin Teaching Excellence Award/Holtzman Outstanding Educator Award and University Certificate of Teaching Excellence in 2008. In 2010, ISQOLS honored him for excellence and lifetime service to the society. In 2010 he won the Best Paper Award in the Journal of Happiness Studies for his theory of the balanced life; in 2011 also he won the Best Paper Award in the Journal of Travel Research for his goal theory of leisure travel satisfaction. In 2012 he was awarded the EuroMed Management Research Award for outstanding achievements and groundbreaking contributions to well-being and quality-of-life research. He is the current editor of ISQOLS/Springer book series on handbooks in QOL research and the community QOL indicators best practices.
PAMELA A. JACKSON is a professor of Psychology at Radford University. She obtained her Ph.D. in Behavioral and Neural Studies at the University of Kentucky in 1989. Her research currently concentrates on cannabinoids administered during developmental periods in rodents (gestation, lactation, or puberty) and their well-being effects on adult behavior. Adult rats are much less susceptible to the adverse consequences of chronic use of marijuana than younger animals. Jackson primarily teaches methods and statistics in psychology, physiological psychology, learning, and psychopharmacology in both undergraduate and graduate courses.
JOSE DE JESUS GARCIA VEGA is currently consultant on the areas of human resources, well-being, quality of life, and happiness for communities, schools, and organizations. He has recently been Human Capital Manager for GT motors, CEO at Servicios Integrales Gama, and was a Researcher and a Professor of Economics at the Universidad de Monterrey, Mexico.
At the Universidad de Monterrey he also served as the Director of the Center of Well-being Studies, doing research and consulting on the topics of happiness, subjective well-being, and the quality of life in Mexico and other countries. He has contributed to several books and articles on happiness, well-being and quality of life and he lead a group who developed a model for measuring quality of life which was applied in Mexico at the national, state and city levels.
Dr. Garcia Vega was selected to participate on the project The World Book of Happiness and was part of the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of Applied Research in Quality of Life and the Social Indicators Research Journal. He was also part of the Editorial Board of the Encyclopedia of Quality of Life Research and participated on book The Pursuit of Well-being: The Untold Global History as an editor and as an author.
Mr. Garcia Vega graduated from Texas A &M University with a PhD in Agricultural Economics in 1995 and earlier earned an MBA and a bachelor's degree in accounting from the Universidad Autonoma de Tamaulipas in Tampico, Mexico.
Dr. Garcia Vega can be reached at: pepechuy13@gmail.com.
DAVID A. WALKER graduated from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) with a degree in computer science. He is responsible for managing and producing web content for the Management Institute for Quality-of-Life Studies, and for helping develop charts and figures for many of the books and publications MIQOLS is involved in writing. In addition, he has programmed the MIQOLS data exploration tools including the Quality-of-Life Indicators Toolbox and the Estes Index of Social Progress website.
EMMALINE SMITH is currently the development assistant at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. She earned bachelor's degrees in both Business Information Technology as well as History from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in 2011. Emmaline then completed a master's degree in Public History from the University of South Carolina in 2018. During this period, Emmaline has worked with several non-profit organizations, including MIQOLS, the Lunch Pail Defense Foundation, and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
MICHELLE SIRGY is the Marketing Director. She has a Bachelor's Degree in Art Education with an Endorsement in Elementary Education. Michelle taught elementary for two years in Virginia Beach 2011-2013 and another two in Tampa, Florida 2015-2017. She also has credits and experience in Graphic Design.
CHAD R. MILLER is Assistant Professor in the University of Southern Mississippi Department of Economic and Workforce Development where he instructs students in the department's master's and doctoral programs, pursues a research agenda in economic development, and through the Trent Lott National Center for Excellence in Economic Development and Entrepreneurship assists the Gulf Coast region with development of an innovation and sustainable economy. He teaches graduate classes on globalization, economic development organization management, and green economic development.
Miller recently joined the faculty of the University of Southern Mississippi from Virginia Polytechnic and State University. At Virginia Tech, he was a faculty in the Office of Economic Development where he helped businesses and communities to be competitive by conducting training, doing research, and providing technical assistance, as well as providing outreach support to state and federal economic development agencies. While in Blacksburg, he was conferred his Ph.D. in Public Administration and Policy and wrote his dissertation on the network governance of cluster-based economic development policy.
He is a native of Virginia and completed his undergraduate degree in Government from the College of William & Mary. After receiving his BA, he was an Army officer stationed in the Pacific Rim. Upon completing his MBA at Boston University, Miller was hired by Patton Electric in Hong Kong to launch their international distribution in over 20 countries worldwide. Later, he moved to Vietnam where he ran the operations for a distributor of consumer goods and building materials. Some of the well-known brands he helped launch in Vietnam were AT Cross, Stanley Tools & Hardware, and Tootsie Roll candies. Before joining the faculty of the Virginia Tech, Miller was a public sector export consultant in Maryland.
Miller has extensive applied experience in several areas of economic development including export promotion, logistics, and business competitiveness. He has provided leadership for over $500,000 in economic assistance grants. Some of the grants included an institute to train economic developers on providing export assistance, an initiative to increase rural exports to Canada and Mexico, establishment of a small business assistance center in Nepal, feasibility studies of tourism facilities, an action plan to establish a nanomanufacturing cluster, and designing a web site to help technology companies export.
DON R. RAHTZ is a marketing /marketing communications researcher (Ph.D., Virginia Tech 1984) and a Professor of Marketing at The College of William and Mary in Virginia. His expertise is in marketing communication programs, marketing research, survey methodology, analysis, and market assessment. He has had a particular interest in environmental issues, economic sustainable development, business/community interface evaluation, and health systems. He has traveled extensively in the South and Southeast Asian area with a focus on Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand. He has conducted a variety of workshops and seminars, and acted as a consultant to businesses in both the public and private sectors concerning these topics, both in the United States and abroad. He recently completed a World Bank funded baseline survey project for the legal system of Bangladesh.
He has been active in promoting the Quality-of-Life field of study in a variety of disciplines. He has published a variety of articles in journals from the social, behavioral science, communication, and marketing areas. His work as appeared in such publications as: The Journal of Advertising, Journal of Health Care Marketing, Journal of Macromarketing, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Ambulatory Care Marketing, Psychology and Marketing, Journal of Business Research, and Social Indicators Research.
He has authored or co-authored a variety of book chapters and conference proceedings papers, and presented numerous papers at professional marketing, quality of life, and health care conferences. He has acted as a co-editor on the proceedings of the Fourth and Fifth Quality of Life/Marketing Conference (1992, 1995), the Macromarketing Conference in 2001, and the International Society for Marketing and Development in 2003 among others.
He has served as the Editor of The Marketing Educator and on the Editorial Review Board of The Journal of Health Care Marketing. Presently he serves on the Editorial Review Board of The Journal of Macromarketing, The Journal of Business Psychology and the new journal, Journal of Quality of Life Research in Leisure and Tourism. He is a regular reviewer for many of the national conferences and journals in the marketing (e.g., Academy of Marketing Science), quality of life (e.g., ISQOLS), and health care (e.g. American Association for Advances in Health Care Research) areas.
DONG-JIN LEE is Professor of Marketing at Yonsei University (Seoul, Korea). He has previously taught at State University of New York at Binghamton and University of Western Australia. He served as vice president of academic affairs and vice president for publications for International Society for Quality of Life Studies.
NORA P. REILLY is an organizational social psychologist (Ph.D., Dartmouth, 1985), Professor of Psychology, and Associate Dean of the College of Graduate and Professional Studies at Radford University in Virginia, US. She has published in the areas of quality of work life, the behavioral expression of commitment, perceptions of/reactions to stigmatizing conditions in the workplace and the self-regulation of affect in such outlets as The Journal of Vocational Behavior, Motivation and Emotion, Journal of Business and Psychology, Applied Research in Quality of Life, and The Academy of Management Journal, as well as serving on several editorial boards. Her most recent work is a co-edited handbook on Work and Quality of Life: Ethical Practices in Organizations (Dordrecht, DE: Springer). Her teaching interests range from organizational psychology, applied social psychology, psychometrics, methodology, statistics and organization development. She has served as the coordinator of the master's program in industrial and organizational psychology at Radford as well as in numerous internal governance positions, including president of the faculty senate. She is currently responsible for graduate academic course and program reviews as well as the administration of graduate assistantships at Radford. She is a member of several professional organizations, including the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, where she serves on the Education and Training Committee. Finally, she is an active OD consultant, primarily in the area of healthcare.
JAMES E. LITTLEFIELD is Emeritus Professor of Marketing at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. Jim retired after twenty-eight years at Virginia Tech and eighteen years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served as Department Head at each institution. He is the author or coauthor of eight books and numerous research articles in marketing and international marketing. Much of Jim's career was spent abroad, having lived, researched, and taught in four countries and traveled in seventy countries. A major activity was developing and taking students on study abroad programs to Switzerland and other places in Europe, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other parts of Asia, and Chile. His industrial experience was with General Motors in Detroit, the B.F. Goodrich Company in Akron, and numerous consulting assignments in the U.S. and abroad.
OSMAN BALCI is a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Mobile Software Engineering Lab at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Boğaziçi University (Istanbul) in 1975 and 1977, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Syracuse University (New York) in 1978 and 1981. Dr. Balci currently serves as an Area Editor of ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation, Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Category Editor of ACM Computing Reviews, and Editor-in-Chief of ACM SIGSIM M&S Knowledge Repository. He also serves on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Simulation and International Journal of Simulation and Process Modeling. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of two international journals: Annals of Software Engineering, 1993-2002 and World Wide Web, 1996-2000. He served as Chair of ACM SIGSIM, 2008-2010; and Director at Large of the Society for M&S International, 2002-2006. Most of Dr. Balci's work has been funded by the U.S. Navy since 1983. From 1998 to 2004, he provided technical services for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency programs in the areas of M&S acceptability assessment and system independent verification and validation (IV&V). Recently, he has provided technical services for architecting naval surface warfare systems. His current areas of expertise center on Software Engineering (iOS – iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, net-centric, IV&V), architecting system of systems, M&S (methodology, V&V, certification).
MUZAFFER UYSAL is a professor of tourism (Ph.D., Texas A&M University) and department head of the Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has extensive experience in the travel and tourism field, authoring or co-authoring a significant number of articles in tourism, hospitality, and recreation journals, proceedings, book chapters, and four monographs, and four books related to tourism research methods, tourist service satisfaction, tourism and quality-of-life, and consumer psychology in tourism and hospitality settings. He also has conducted workshops and seminars on similar topics and field research in several countries. He is a member of International Academy for the Study of Tourism, the Academy of Leisure Sciences, and serves as co-editor of Tourism Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal. In addition, he sits on the editorial boards of several journals, including Journal of Travel Research, and Annals of Tourism Research as resource editor. He also received a number of awards for Research, Excellence in International Education, and Teaching Excellence. His current research interests center on tourism demand/supply interaction, Tourism development and QOL research in tourism.