2 Purdue professors named ACE fellows

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Two Purdue University professors are among 50 fellows selected nationwide this year by the American Council on Education.

Selected for the honor were Liping Cai, professor and director of Purdue's Tourism and Hospitality Research Center and associate dean for diversity and international programs in the College of Health and Human Sciences, and Makarand Hastak, a professor of civil engineering and head of the Division of Construction Engineering and Management.

The 2013-14 class will bring to almost 2,000 the number of higher education leaders who have participated in the program since its inception in 1965. The program focuses on identifying and preparing fellows for senior leadership roles. More than 300 of the fellows have gone on to serve as chief executive officers of colleges and universities, and more than 1,300 have served as provosts, vice presidents or deans.

"We are proud to participate in this prestigious program because it affords us the opportunity to showcase and honor people at Purdue with tremendous leadership abilities," said Beverly Davenport Sypher, vice provost and the Susan Bulkeley Butler Chair for Leadership Excellence. "Professors Cai and Hastak exemplify everything the ACE program stands for."

The ACE Fellows Program combines retreats, interactive learning opportunities, campus visits and placement at another higher education institution to condense years of on-the-job experience and skills development into a single year.

Cai studies branding and consumers in tourism and specializes in emerging markets and community-based tourism. He is a governor-appointee to the Indiana Tourism Council and is director of Purdue University China Center. He pioneered a destination-branding model and has successfully applied the model and other destination-management expertise to assist economic development for communities. Before joining the Purdue faculty in 1999, he was director of the Center for Economic Development through Tourism at New Mexico State University.

Hastak has been involved with the construction industry for more than two decades and has conducted research, taught and assisted industry in the area of construction engineering and management, including disaster risk reduction, infrastructure management, cost control, project management, management decision-making, risk management and strategic planning. His research includes work to develop systems that predict how a disaster's impact on critical infrastructure would affect a city's social and economic fabric, a potential tool to help reduce the severity of impacts, manage the aftermath of catastrophe and fortify infrastructure against future disasters. He established the Solutions for Profitability and Assessment of Risk in Construction research lab at Purdue and serves as editor-in-chief of the ASCE Journal of Management in Engineering. Before joining the Purdue faculty in 2001, he was an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati.

A news release about new ACE fellows is available at http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/ACE-Names-Faculty-Administrators-Fellows-Program.aspx

Writer: Emil Venere, 765-494-4709, venere@purdue.edu

Sources: Beverly Davenport Sypher, 765-496-3509, bdsypher@purdue.edu

Liping Cai, 765-494-8384, liping@purdue.edu