Portrait
Rhonda Phillips, Ph.D, AICP, CEcD.
Community investment and well-being comprise the focus of Rhonda`s research and outreach activities. With public, private and non-profit experience, she offers both practice and academic perspectives. As a professor in the School of Community Resources Development at Arizona State University, Rhonda works with faculty, staff, students and organizations to expand the reach of community-based education and research initiatives for enhancing quality of life. Her focus is community planning, development, and tourism planning as well as community indicator and evaluation systems for monitoring progress towards community development and economic development revitalization goals.
Prior to joining ASU, she served nine years on the faculty at the University of Florida`s Urban and Regional Planning Department where she was founding director of the Center for Building Better Communities. This outreach center provided community and economic development revitalization services throughout Florida. Her work before joining academe was in community and economic development at the state, local and regional levels; she holds dual professional certifications in urban and regional planning (American Institute of Certified Planners) and economic and community development (Certified Economic and Community Developer with the International Economic Development Council).
Rhonda`s honors include serving as the 2006 Fulbright Scholar in Northern Ireland at the University of Ulster, focusing on heritage and cultural based tourism as community and economic development strategies via The Heritage Initiative. Her work in tourism has included arts-based development as well as developing community indicator systems for tourist-based economies.
M. J. Sirgy a social/consumer/organizational psychologist (Ph.D., U/Massachusetts, 1979), Professor of Marketing, and Virginia Real Estate Research Fellow at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). He has published extensively in the areas of consumer behavior, marketing communications, business ethics, and quality of life. He presently serves as an editor of the Quality-of-Life/Marketing section of the Journal of Macromarketing and co-editor-in-chief of Applied Research in Quality of Life. He co-founded the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies in 1995 and is currently serving as its Executive Director. He was also the president of the Academy of Marketing Science (2002-03).In 1992, he received the Distinguished Fellow recognition from the Academy. In 1997, he received the Distinguished Fellow recognition from the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies. In a recent survey of scholarly productivity in business ethics, he was ranked as 82nd among 2,371 business ethics scholars world-wide. In 2003, the board of directors of the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies elected him to receive the highest distinction of the society, namely the Distinguished Quality-of-Life Researcher Award.
