Penn State Behrend Business Professor Organizing Conference at Harvard
A professor in the Sam and Irene Black School of Business at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, is organizer of next month’s “Bangladesh in the 21st Century” conference at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Syed Saad Andaleeb, professor of marketing at Penn State Behrend, is president of Bangladesh Development Initiative (BDI). BDI is jointly hosting the June 13 and 14 scholarly conference in collaboration with the Democracy and Development in Bangladesh Forum of Boston, Mass., and the Roy and Lila Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
As the conference’s primary planner, Andaleeb has worked with the U.S. Department of State and the Bangladesh Embassy in Washington, D.C., to make travel arrangements for Bangladeshi scholars, coordinated conference speaker invitations, scheduling and publicity, arranged for U.S., Bangladeshi, and European media coverage of the event, and secured $40,000 in sponsorships to help cover the conference’s expenses.
In addition to his conference organization duties, Andaleeb will give a research presentation, “Knowledge Generation in Nation Building: A Vision for Higher Education in Bangladesh,” based on his three Fulbright Fellowships spent at BRAC and East West universities in Dhaka. BDI is a U.S.-based nonprofit composed of independent scholars who promote educational exchange between the United States and Bangladesh, which has the tenth-largest population in the world.
In addition to coordinating scholar-exchange programs and hosting conferences to debate Bangladesh’s political and social policies, BDI publishes the Journal of Bangladesh Studies and archival collections of Bangladeshi indigenous knowledge. The Black School of Business at Penn State Behrend supports production of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies, as does the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, a consortium of U.S. universities and colleges pursuing research on Bangladesh.