Roland T. Rust is Distinguished University Professor and David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, where he is founder and Executive Director of the Center for Excellence in Service. He is VP of Publications for the American Marketing Association, in charge of policy and editor selections for AMA’s five journals. A recent research.com study named him one of the top 100 “Best Scientists in Business and Management,” worldwide across all business disciplines, based on research impact. His lifetime achievement honors include the AMA Irwin/McGraw-Hill Distinguished Marketing Educator Award, the EMAC Distinguished Marketing Scholar Award, Fellow of the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science, the Paul D. Converse Award, Fellow of the American Statistical Association, as well as the top career honors in service marketing, marketing research, marketing strategy, and advertising, and honorary doctorates in economics from the University of Neuchatel (Switzerland) and the Norwegian School of Economics. He was one of the inaugural honorees in the American Marketing Association’s Marketing Legends video series, and one of the inaugural AMA Fellows. Awards for his publications include four best article awards from the Journal of Marketing, as well as the Berry/AMA Book Award for the best book in marketing. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Marketing, founded the annual Frontiers in Service Conference, was founding Editor-in-Chief of the
Journal of Service Research, and served as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM). He has consulted with many leading companies worldwide, including such companies as American Airlines, AT&T, Comcast, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Eli Lilly, FedEx, Hershey, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, NASA, NCR, Nortel, Procter & Gamble, Sears, Sony, Starwood, Tata, Unilever, and USAA. A national class distance runner in his collegiate days, he has been inducted into the DePauw University Athletic Hall of Fame. He has coached Olympic Trials qualifiers, and national and world age group champions in track and triathlon. Read more here: University of Maryland, Wikipedia, Google Scholar, CV, and  Linkedin.

After spending several years as an in-house organizational developer and systemic consultant for companies such as Hewlett Packard and Mülhens, Prof. Birgit Mager became interested in the paradigm shift from products and technologies to services, and in helping companies transition to this new model. In 1995, she started teaching “Service Design” at the University of Applied Sciences Cologne (KISD) in Germany. As the first professor in this field, she felt it was her responsibility to create awareness and interest among graduates and ensure they found jobs. Therefore, she was interested not only in developing the theory and methodology of service design and building a curriculum around it, but also in collaborating with real partners in the private and public sectors to publish and speak at conferences to spread the word about service design. In 2004, she co-founded the Global Service Design Network. Since 2008, she has served as president of the nonprofit organization, publishing Touchpoint, the international journal of service design, in various roles.  She organizes the Service Design Global Conference (SDGC) around the world.  Today, the Service Design Network has 30,000 followers worldwide and is open to interlinking with the service innovation community. Since 2014, Birgit has been a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Design (IJD). Since 2024, she has served on the advisory board of the Ph.D. in Service Design for the Public Sector at the University of Rome La Sapienza in Rome, Italy, and has served as a visiting professor. Additional honors include the 2023 Sir Misha Black Medal for exceptional contributions to design education and the Jury Prize for Good Administration. Read more here: TH Köln, Service Design Network, and LinkedIn.

Dr. Dundar Kocaoglu is Professor Emeritus and the founding Chairman of the Department of Engineering and Technology Management (1987-2014), as well as President and CEO of PICMET (Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology), and HDM Systems for Strategic Decisions. He is also the founding Director of RISE (Research Institute for Sustainable Energy). Still active in research, he continues to supervise PhD students in his research areas. Dr. Kocaoglu has been instrumental in establishing the field of Engineering and Technology Management. After developing and directing the Engineering Management Program at the University of Pittsburgh for 11 years, he joined Portland State University to start the Engineering Management Program (now the ETM Department) in 1987. He has graduated more than 30 PhD students, and been an advisor to well over 1,000 Masters students. Dr. Kocaoglu served as the Editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Series Editor of McGraw-Hill Book Series in Engineering Management, and the Series Editor of John Wiley Book Series in Engineering & Technology Management. Additionally, he is listed in over a dozen reference publications. PSU honored Dr. Kocaoglu with the George C. Hoffmann Award for his exceptional career and service to the university. Read more here: Portland State University, PICMET, Google Scholar, and LinkedIn.

Dr. Richard C. Larson has made significant contributions to understanding urban systems as service systems, including urban emergency services. In the popular press, bringing a deeper understanding of service waiting times to the general public, Dr. Larson is known as “Dr. Queue.” As former president of leading operations research professional associations (1993 to 1994, and again in 2005), he provided visible leadership to one of the pillar academic disciplines underlying a wide range of service innovations.

Dr. Larson is Professor (Post Tenure), Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT. Dr. Larson’s career has focused on operations research and systems expertise on a wide variety of problems, in both public and private sectors. He is author, co-author or editor of six books and author or co-author of over 175 scientific articles. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is an INFORMS Founding Fellow. He has been honored with the INFORMS President’s Award and the Kimball Medal. In 2017, he was given the first-ever Lifetime Achievement Daniel Berg Medal for “making significant contributions to technology innovation, service systems and strategic decision making.” Currently he is principal investigator of the MIT BLOSSOMS Initiative. His new book (Model Thinking for Everyday Life), being published by INFORMS, is now in production.

For more about Dr. Larson’s career and accomplishments, go to: MIT, Wikipedia, Google Scholar, LinkedIn.

Dr. Raymond P. Fisk has made significant contributions to understanding service marketing from both historical and ethical design perspectives. As founder of the leading service marketing professional association (American Marketing Association SERVSIG, in 1993), Dr. Fisk has provided visible leadership within the broader marketing discipline, which is one of the pillar academic disciplines underlying a wide range of service innovations.

Dr. Fisk is Founder and President of ServCollab (a human services nonprofit), which seeks to serve humanity through collaborative research. He is also Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Marketing at Texas State University. His research focuses on services marketing, service design, and transformative service research. He has published in the Journal of Service Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Retailing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, and others. Ray has published six books including Serving Customers: Global Services Marketing Perspectives. In 1993, he founded the AMA Services Marketing Special Interest Group (SERVSIG). In 2005, Ray received the Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award from SERVSIG. In 2012, he received the Grönroos Service Research Award from the Hanken School of Economics in Finland. In 2016, the American Marketing Association made Ray the Inaugural Recipient of the SIG Leadership Award.

For more about Dr. Fisk’s career and accomplishments go to: Personal website , Texas State University, Google Scholar, LinkedIn.

Dr. Stephen K. Kwan is Professor Emeritus in the Lucas College and Graduate School of Business at San José State University, and a fellow of the International Society of Service Innovation Professionals (ISSIP). He retired from being the Associate Dean of Graduate Business Programs and Lucas Professor of Service Science. He was the founding chair of the MIS department, had served as the Director of Online Programs Development and Senior Associate Dean of the College. He is still actively involved in research and community activities in Service Science, Management, Engineering, and Design (SSMED), global E-Commerce, service standards and standardization. He was a recipient of multiple IBM Faculty Awards, grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). He was a contributor to the IEEE online course on Innovation and Competition – Success Through Global Standards. He currently serves on the ISO/IEC JTC1 Sub-Committee 42 Artificial Intelligence; ISO Committee on Consumer Policy (COPOLCO) Working Groups on Shared Economy, Privacy, and Consumer Issues in Services; American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Committee on Education; ANSI Consumer Interest Forum; and the International Cooperation for Education about Standardization (ICES). He had published in the areas of Service Science, Queueing Systems, Database Management, E-Commerce, Service Standards, Standards Education and Standards Policy. He received a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Oregon, and a Ph.D. in Management from UCLA.

Louis E. Freund is a Professor Emeritus and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at San Jose State University, San José, CA.  During his early career, he worked on hospital systems design and improvements, focusing on service productivity, quality and nurse staffing algorithms.   After joining SJSU in 1986, he taught and worked in systems simulation, process quality control, workload measurement, as well as on topics in human factors and ergonomics.  He founded the SJSU interdisciplinary HF/EMS degree program in 1993 and served as the HF/E program Director for over 15 years.  Between 2000 and 2009 he was Chair of the ISE Department at SJSU.  Dr. Freund began the Service Systems Engineering course at SJSU in 2006, and an MS emphasis area in Service Systems Engineering soon after.  From 2010 – 2018, he served as Co-Chair of the Human Side of Service Engineering sub-conference of the AHFE.  He is the recipient of several IBM Faculty Awards to recognize and support his work and contributions to service science.  He is a past President of the Society for Health Systems.  Dr. Freund was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers in 2009.  In 2011 he received the “50 in 50” award from the Hospital Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) recognizing him as one of the 50 most influential persons in health care systems in the first 50 years of the Society.   He was a founding board member of ISSIP.  His research interests are in the development of metrics to describe the T-Shape construct for professional growth and achievement, and in the assessment of service systems quality with consideration of the customer’s contribution. Lou may be reached at louis.freund@sjsu.edu.

Stephen L. Vargo is a Shidler Distinguished Professor and Professor of Marketing at the University of Hawai’i and has held visiting positions at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, the University of Warwick, Karlstad University, the University of Maryland, College Park, the University of Auckland, and a number of other major universities, as well as VTT Technical Research Center of Finland. Prior to entering academics, he had a career in entrepreneurial business and has consulted for a variety of major national, regional, and local corporations and governmental agencies.

Ph.D. in Business Administration with Marketing and Accounting Emphasis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1975.
Courses:
Undergraduate: MTG 480 & 480H – Marketing Research for Entrepreneurs
Doctoral: MKTG 696a – Perspectives and Principles of Research Marketing
Honors Faculty Fellow

Mary Jo Bitner is the Edward M. Carson Chair in Service Leadership, Executive Director for the Center for Services Leadership, and Professor of Marketing at the W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University (ASU). In her more than 25-year career as a professor and researcher, Dr. Bitner has been recognized as one of the founders and pioneers in the field of service marketing and management worldwide. At ASU she was a founding faculty member of the Center for Services Leadership and has been a leader in its emergence as the premier university-based center for the study of services marketing and management. She also serves currently on the Board of the American Marketing Association.