Dr. Kishwar Joonas, associate professor of marketing in the College of Business, served as president of the 2011 Association of Collegiate Marketing Educators (ACME) annual conference held in Houston in March. ACME is a professional marketing organization founded to encourage exploration and development of superior marketing practices from an academic and practitioner perspective.
For the last 9 years, Joonas has served ACME in the capacity of researcher, reviewer, sessions chair, track chair, secretary, vice-president, and program chair, leading up to her role as president during 2010-2011. Under her stewardship, the conference chalked up over 39 technical papers in 17 tracks, in addition to 15 workshop and special session topics, involving 80 researchers.
Joonas said “Serving as ACME president was a learning experience. It was about teamwork, sharing lessons learned in prior positions, shaping future leadership, and most of all, expecting the unexpected. One can plan for just so much; a lot emerges from synergies of cooperation, the rest is serendipity”
Joonas has presented numerous research studies in consumer behavior at ACME conferences over the years. Her proceedings paper this year dealt with consumer healthcare decision-making in the U.S. and Taiwan.
Additionally, she has conducted faculty and practitioner workshops, in which collaborative COB student and PVAMU projects were showcased. For instance, this year, she presented integrated marketing communications projects for the minority-owned ARVO global realty consultants, by Patience Hill, Cedric Leday, Patrick Mack, and Chauntrice Gay.
The workshop was titled “QEP through i-READ” the role of Service-Learning and Student Research. Such projects are supported by College of Business Dean Munir Quddus and head of department, management and marketing, Dr. Sudhir Tandon.
Another contribution was conducting a faculty workshop on “Distance Education and Not Distant Education- Strategies for Effective Learning”, with Dr. Vivek Natarajan of Lamar University, and Dr. Linda Hayes of University of Houston-Victoria. Both workshops were well received by attending faculty. When asked what other accomplishments she is seeking, she said, “A starter list includes helping to launch a journal as an outlet for conference proceedings papers, recruiting more research participants to the Service-Learning Track, and recruiting PVAMU student participation in both, student research track, and workshops and special sessions.?”
Joonas is also an advocate on motivating her students, telling them after being elected to believe in themselves and invest in selfless service, to reap rewards that money cannot buy.
ACME is also closely affiliated with FBD (Federation of Business Discipline), which is a nonprofit, volunteer-driven organization. FBD also has more than 50,000 individuals that have attended and benefited from its meetings.