Gary Knight Author

About our authors

Tamer Cavusgil has been mentoring students, executives and educators in international business for the past 4 decades. A native of Turkey, his professional work has taken him to numerous other emerging markets.

Tamer is Regents Professor in the University System of Georgia and serves as Fuller E. Callaway Professorial Chair at Georgia State University's Robinson College of Business. He is also a Trustee of Sabanci University in Istanbul.

Previously, Tamer served as Senior Fulbright Scholar to Australia and taught at Monash University. Tamer also served as a visiting professor at Manchester Business School, Leeds University Business School, and held the Gianni and Joan Montezemolo Visiting Chair at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, where he is also an Honorary Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. At Michigan State University, where he served for 21 years, he was the inaugural holder of the John Byington Chair in Global Marketing and founding director of CIBER.

Tamer is an elected fellow of the Academy of International Business (AIB), a distinction earned by a select group of intellectual leaders in international business. He also served as vice president of the AIB and on the Board of Directors of the American Marketing Association.

Tamer has authored several dozen books and some 200 refereed journal articles. His work is among the most cited contributions in international business. Various reviews have listed him as one of the most influential and prolific authors in international management. Google Scholar lists him among the top 5 scholars in the world in international business, international marketing, emerging markets, export marketing, and Born Globals research.

Tamer was awarded an honorary doctorate, Doctor Honoris Causa, by The University of Hasselt, Belgium, in May 2014 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Southern Denmark in October 2017. In 2018, Tamer was named an honorary professor by Atilim University in Ankara, Turkey.

Tamer was named International Trade Educator of the Year in 1996 by the National Association of Small Business International Trade Educators (NASBITE).

Tamer holds a Bachelor of Science degree in business and economics from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. He earned his MBA and PhD degrees in business from the University of Wisconsin.

Gary Knight has been teaching international business for more than 25 years. He has lived and worked in many countries around the world. In 2023, Gary was elected President of the Academy of International Business (AIB) for a 3-year term, having served as a Vice President in the previous 3 years. The AIB is the leading professional association of international business faculty, with some 3,500 members worldwide.

Gary has been Helen Simpson Jackson Chair in International Management at Willamette University since 2012. He was a professor at Florida State University for 15 years, where he directed the school's International Business Program. He also has been a visiting professor at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, Bilkent University in Turkey, Nihon University in Japan, the University of Southern Denmark, and Vaasa University in Finland.

Gary has been an invited speaker at institutions worldwide and developed study abroad programs in Asia, Europe and Latin America. He has won several awards, including the Excellence in Teaching Award, Willamette University, and Best Teacher in the MBA Program, Florida State University.

Gary has coauthored 9 books and more than 60 refereed articles in academic journals. His research emphasizes international business strategy, emerging markets, and internationalization of small and medium-sized enterprises.

Along with S. Tamer Cavusgil, Gary won the 2014 Decade Award at the Journal of International Business Studies for their article on born global firms. Gary also won the Thorelli Best Paper Award for his article “Entrepreneurship and Strategy: The SME Under Globalization.”

Gary is ranked in the top 5% of scholars who have published articles in the Journal of International Business Studies since 2000. He is ranked among the top 5 scholars in the US and top 15 worldwide in international business research impact based on Google Scholar citation data. He is on the editorial review boards of several international journals. He has provided expert testimony on global commerce to the US House of Representatives.

Prior to joining academia, Gary was export manager of a medium-sized enterprise, directing the firm's operations in Canada, Europe, Japan and Mexico and supervising some 50 distributors. He enjoyed a brief career in banking and as a teacher in Japan.

Gary earned his MBA at the University of Washington and PhD at Michigan State University, both in international business. Earlier degrees were in finance and modern languages. He also attended the University of Paris in France and Sophia University in Japan, and is fluent in French and Japanese.

John R. Riesenberger's teaching activities centered on leadership development and global project management at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Corporate Learning Group. His passion is to help students and young professionals develop the human skills required of new graduates entering careers in international business.

John is an accomplished author, consultant, and international executive with senior executive positions in major pharmaceutical firms, biotechnology firms, and pharmaceutical agencies. John's international business career spans more than 3 decades in the global pharmaceutical industry. He has conducted business transactions in 22 countries.

John previously served as the president of Consilium Partners, Inc., a pharmaceutical consulting firm with clients in pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical agency firms.

He worked for 30 years with Pharmacia & Upjohn and The Upjohn Company as a senior international executive. His experience covered a diverse range of divisional, geographic, and functional accountabilities. His most recent position was as vice president of Global Business Management. He also served as corporate vice president and chief commercialization officer for a biotechnology firm and as the executive vice president of a pharmaceutical science branding agency.

John served as a member of the board of directors of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and as the Chair of its Governance Committee. He was a member of the Global Advisory Board of the American Marketing Association. He served as an executive in residence at the Michigan State University Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER). He served on the editorial review board of the Journal of International Marketing and currently serves on the editorial review board of the Rutgers Business Review. He served as chairman of the Industry Advisory Board's Value of Marketing Program, SEI Center for the Advanced Studies in Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is the former chairman of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Association Marketing Practices Committee.

John holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics–Business and an MBA in Management from Hofstra University. He attended the Harvard Business School's International Senior Management Program.