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Sajeev Varki Is the Latest Muma College of Business Professor to Land a Fulbright Core Scholarship

By Keith Morelli

TAMPA (April 30, 2018) -- Sajeev Varki, an associate marketing professor in the University of South Florida's Muma College of Business, became the third faculty member of the college to receive a Fulbright Core scholarship in less than three months.

He joins seven other current professors who have won the prestigious honor since 2015.

Varki teaches marketing strategy, marketing research and global marketing at the undergraduate, graduate and doctoral levels. His research has been published in the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Retailing, the Journal of Advertising and Marketing Letters.

His co-authored work on "Modeling Fuzzy Data" in the Journal of Marketing Research won the 2000 Don Lehmann Award for the best dissertation paper and was also a finalist for the Paul Green Award for best paper. He is an editorial board member of the Journal of Service Research and an ad hoc reviewer for the Journal of Retailing and the Sloan Management Review.

Varki's scholarship will allow him to travel to Belarus.

He holds a degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and a PhD in management from Vanderbilt University. He has been with USF since 2007.

USF is among the top producers of Fulbright U.S. scholars, according to the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. USF is the only research institution in Florida on the State Department's ranking with eight scholars named during the 2017-18 year.

And that was before Tim Heath, professor in the Marketing Department, and Anol Bhattacherjee, professor in the Information Systems and Decision Sciences Department, were placed on that list. Their scholarships were published in The Chronicle of Higher Education just days after their awards were announced.

Heath will take a visiting professorship at Vienna University of Economics and Business in Vienna, Austria, from March 1 through June 30 of next year. And Battacherjee is headed to India during the spring semester of 2019.

Other current Muma College of Business faculty recognized by the Fulbright program over the past three years are:

• Dan Bradley, a professor of finance, who received a core scholarship last year to the Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa (ISCTE) Business School in the University Institute of Lisbon in Portugal.
• Jerry Koehler, a management professor, who was named a Fulbright scholar in 2016 and lectured last year about management in an MBA program for professionals at Belarusian State Economic University in Minsk, Belarus.
• Grandon Gill, director of the Muma College of Business DBA program, who has traveled to the University of Cape Town in Rondebosch, South Africa, beginning in 2015, to teach faculty from various universities how to write case studies and use cases in their classes.
• James Stock, a marketing professor, who was named a University Distinguished Professor last year and went to the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland, on his Fulbright scholarship, lecturing and doing research on supply-chain sustainability.
• Rob Hooker, an assistant marketing professor, who received a Fulbright specialist grant and traveled to Stockholm, Sweden, to lecture about supply-chain management.

Muma College of Business Dean Moez Limayem was the recipient of administrative Fulbright scholarship in March. He will travel to Japan in June to explore the Japanese higher education landscape and participate in briefings, campus visits, cultural activities and meetings with Japanese international education professionals in Tokyo and other cities.