BSB Associate Dean Receives Fulbright Award

Dr. Rajeev Sooreea, Associate Dean and Associate Professor of International Business in the Barowsky School of Business, has received a 2020-2021 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award to the Republic of Mauritius in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship. The award was announced by the U.S. Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

Dr. Sooreea is due to teach and conduct research at the University of Mauritius as part of a project to build the national innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem in Mauritius. When safe to travel to Mauritius, his research will focus on developing a model that examines how business incubators and entrepreneurial universities need to be designed as the country emerges as an innovation hub in Africa. 

Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, as well as record of service and demonstrated leadership in their respective fields. Dr. Sooreea is the first member of the BSB faculty to be recognized as a Fulbright scholar, said BSB Dean Dr. Yung-Jae Lee.

"The Fulbright scholarship is the most widely recognized and most prestigious international exchange program in the world,” Dr. Lee said. “The program supports participants to address the major global challenges of our time. Considering the highly competitive nature of the scholarship, Dr. Sooreea's acceptance is a testament to the quality and importance of his teaching and his research.”

The teaching and research Dr. Sooreea will undertake as a Fulbright Scholar in Mauritius aligns with and significantly expands the commitment to producing actionable research on international business that permeates his teaching, his development of curricula in global entrepreneurship, and his own widely published scholarly work, noted Dr. Nicola Pitchford, Dominican’s Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty.

Dr. Sooreea’s earlier research on and in Mauritius identified opportunities to leverage the ideal conditions for a robust entrepreneurial culture in the country. 

“Dr. Sooreea’s intention to develop a publishable case study on Mauritius and to pursue further scholarly dissemination of his findings presents a further avenue for raising the profile of the Mauritius business community and awareness of its potential in U.S. and other international contexts,” Dr. Pitchford said.

As a previous recipient of multiple Teaching Excellence Awards, Dr. Sooreea will also be assisting the University of Mauritius in developing their experiential learning curriculum through the use of The Harvard Case Method, a teaching methodology he currently employs in his undergraduate and MBA classes at Dominican and which he learned at Harvard, his alma mater.

Dr. Sooreea’s teaching awards include an International Teaching Excellence Award from X-Culture Project, hosted by the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He was selected from 186 professors from 148 universities in 41 countries. The X-Culture project was a real global consulting project in his MBA course on Cross-Cultural Management in Spring 2019. Currently, Dr. Sooreea is spearheading BSB’s application for accreditation by AACSB. 

At Dominican, Dr. Sooreea is known for engaging his undergraduate and graduate business students in real-world exercises. 

He mentors MBA students in the Global Consulting Practicum portion of their program—in which, as teams, they generate targeted solutions for challenges identified by businesses and non-profits/NGOs in sites as varied as Lima and Beijing.

This past spring Dr. Sooreea’s “Global Innovation and Entrepreneurship Practicum” undergraduate students conducted global virtual field research with participants across multiple countries to examine the business impacts of the COVID-19 global pandemic and how businesses and society are devising innovative response solutions. His students analyzed how Filipino fashion designers and entrepreneurs are redefining the supply chain of personal protective equipment, how China is creating stylish designs for masks and adding bead aromatherapy to create mint freshness and enhance the user experience, how Ghana is partnering with Silicon Valley companies to enable drone testing in rural areas, and how Japanese universities are using robotics and artificial intelligence in lieu of students to conduct graduation ceremonies.