ASU's Center for Sustainable Tourism is a diverse collection of social, natural and economic scientists working collectively on community tourism development and critical thinking.
The faculty are diverse in their citizenship and race, as well as gender. Their degrees are also varied including tourism sciences, leisure studies, geography, park and recreation studies, and natural resource management.
Gyan Nyaupane is currently serving as the Director for the Center for Sustainable Tourism and is a Professor in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions at Arizona State University. He is also affiliated with the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation as a Senior Global Futures Scientist, and a Graduate Faculty in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication. His research interests lie in understanding the human-environment interactions, particularly connecting communities and conservation through tourism. He has done research on various topics, including sustainable tourism, ecotourism, protected area management, public lands, natural resource management, community development, and Indigenous Peoples globally. He has published over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. His research on Global South and the Himalaya has resulted in two co-edited books. The first book, “Cultural Heritage and Tourism in the Developing World: A Regional Perspective” synthesizes global and regional issues, challenges, and practices related to cultural heritage and tourism, especially in less-developed nations. The second book, "Tourism and Development in the Himalaya: Social, Environmental and Economic Forces," brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on nature, society, economic development, poverty, justice, social and environmental vulnerability, faith and culture, Indigenous Peoples, women, geopolitical conflicts, heritage and living culture, attachment to place, and many other concepts to broaden our understanding of tourism and development in the region.
He has led several federal/state-funded research projects to inform the agencies regarding participatory decision-making and community engagement efforts as crucial elements of sustainable development. One of his current projects is focused on cross-border ecological restoration and economic development within the US-Mexico border funded by the Department of Interior/National Park Service and the second project is focused on a statewide comprehensive plan for the state of Arizona on public lands and outdoor recreation. The plan is guided by equity, access, and justice and involves statewide stakeholders, including minority groups. He also led an international research project that explored the changing relationships of Indigenous Peoples with their natural environment in the USA, Australia, and Nepal. His research has been instrumental in envisioning and planning policies for federal, state, tribal, and local land management agencies in Asia, Africa, and the USA. Link to directory page.
Kathleen Andereck is a professor in the School of Community Resources and Development. Her research focuses on the tourism experience from the perspective of both visitors and residents particularly as it applies to sustainable tourism. Professor Andereck has done research work with a diversity of organizations and agencies at the federal and state level including the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, the Arizona Office of Tourism and the Arizona Department of Transportation as well as individual organizations and communities. She has published this work in numerous academic journals including the top-tier publications in tourism studies. She has also presented many papers at national and international conference. Professor Andereck is active in a number of local and national organizations. She is an associate editor for three academic journals.. Link to directory page.
Dr. Kelly Bricker is a Professor and the Director of Hainan University-Arizona State University Joint International Tourism College or HAITC. She completed her PhD with the Penn State University, specializing in sustainable tourism and protected areas. She has authored books on sustainability, highlighting case studies that address environmental and societal issues, such as “Sustainable Tourism & the Millennium Development Goals: Effecting Positive Change,” and adventure education in “Adventure Programing and Travel for the 21st Century.” She serves the boards of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council, Travel Unity, and Tourism and Protected Area Specialists Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Link to directory page.
Dr. Megha Budruk is an Associate Professor in the School of Community Resources & Development. She also serves as the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions. Additionally, she is a Senior Sustainability Scientist at ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability and is affiliated with the Center for Biology and Society, ASU. She is a natural resource social scientist whose work focuses on natural resource management and community development. Her research interests focus on the inclusion of stakeholder perspectives into resource management. Specifically, she studies human-nature relationships, visitor experience and impact management, and community development within the context of parks, protected areas and cultural monuments. She has extensive research experience with several U.S. federal, state, county and local public land management agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, Arizona State Parks and Maricopa County Parks. Her work contributes to the long-term sustainability of natural and cultural resource settings through an increased understanding of human relationships with these settings. Link to directory page.
Christine Buzinde is a Professor and Director in the School of Community Resources and Development. in the School of Community Resources and Development. She is also the Director of the School of Community Resources and Development. Her research focuses on two areas: community development through tourism and the politics of tourism representations. Buzinde’s work on development adopts a grassroots approach and it aims to understand the relationship between community well-being and tourism development within marginalized communities. Tourism development has been proposed by the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) as one of the tools through which the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can be accomplished to enhance well-being within South nations. However, questions of enduring interest posed within Buzinde’s research include: Are the well-being indicators, such those evidenced in the SDGs, (mis)aligned with wellbeing indicators articulated by communities in South nations? How does tourism development impact, if at all, the indicators articulated by communities in South nations? What is the cost to society of placing social welfare within a business paradigm and how does this varyingly impact the various generations within a given community? Buzinde’s work on the politics of tourism representations principally views tourism texts as cultural repositories through which issues of inclusion/exclusion, North/South and core/periphery can be understood. Scholarly explorations on tourism representations are central to our understanding of ways in which tourism is entangled with issues of power, oppression, agency and resistance. Buzinde has conducted research in the United States, Tanzania, Ecuador, Mexico, India and Nepal. Her work has been featured in top tier academic journals within tourism studies and outside the field as well as at national and international conferences. She serves on the editorial board of Annals of Tourism Research and she is also a faculty affiliate in the Tourism Lab at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Link to directory page.
Deepak Chhabra is an Associate Professor in the School of Community Resources and Development a Senior Sustainability Scientist with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at ASU. She also holds the position of affiliated faculty with the Center for Asian Studies. Her research interests include smart and strategic marketing in the tourism and hospitality industry; promotion of ethical production and consumption practices in tourism; building of social, cultural and economic equity or capital in local, regional, and global communities and authenticity and authentication process of heritage commodities in tourism. Link to directory page.
Yunseon Choe is an Assistant Professor at the Hainan University-Arizona State University International Tourism College in Haikou, Hainan Province, China. Prior to joining ASU, she worked as a research professor at Kyung Hee University in South Korea. She was the recipient of the Texas A&M University Dissertation Fellowship and Korean Research Foundation Fellowship. Her research theme falls within the nexus of people, park, and tourism toward sustainability. In this context, she has explored issues and relationships among stakeholder groups in the U.S. and Asia. From a U.S. perspective, she has examined specific lines of inquiry related to environmentalism, stakeholder participation in decision-making, and planning and management issues at parks and tourism. Transferring U.S. models to various settings in Asia, her research has focused on the examination of multiple themes (visitor behavior, national parks, residents’ perceptions of impact of tourism/mega-events, community development), utilizing the latest technological advances within the context of people, parks and tourism areas management. Link to directory page.
Dr. Bruno Ferreira is an Assistant Professor of tourism development and management at the Hainan University-Arizona State University International Tourism College in Haikou, Hainan Province, China. Dr. Ferreira's research is centered around the intersection of tourism, entrepreneurship and community development, looking at the psychological and environmental antecedents of tourism microentrepreneurship among individuals with vulnerable livelihoods. He developed the concept of Permatourism, a holistic tourism planning and management framework grounded in systems thinking and design principles. This novel approach to destination management pursues the complementarity between a diverse set of stakeholders in the tourism business ecosystem, with the aim to elevate the uniqueness and competitiveness of destinations as well as to regenerate economically depressed communities. He has worked in Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia as a researcher, instructor, project manager and consultant in community development projects leveraging the economic muscle of tourism. In the future, he wants to continue to carry out engaged research and contribute to making tourism a force for good. Link to directory page.
Dr. Jong-Hyeong Kim is the Graduate Coordinator and Associate Professor of Hainan University–Arizona State University Joint International Tourism College and an Associate Professor in the School of Community Resources and Development. has a strong record of research and scholarship with significant contributions to both instruction and service. Prior to joining Arizona State University, Kim has worked at universities in Canada, China, Taiwan and Australia and received multiple teaching excellence awards. Kim received his doctoral degree from Indiana University. Kim’s research interests have been in consumer behavior, with special emphasis on memorable experiences. As a part of his research program, he has published about 50 papers in top-tier refereed journals and book chapters. In recognition of the importance of his research, Kim has received numerous accolades during the course of his academic career. For example, in 2021, he was recognized as a highly cited scholars (ranked 68th) in Sport, Leisure, and Tourism globally based on a study conducted by Stanford University researchers. In addition, Kim received two best paper awards at international conferences. Kim is currently on the editorial boards of SSCI journals, such as Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics and Sustainability. In addition, to this date, he advised thirteen doctoral and master students as a major professor. Link to directory page.
Woojin Lee is an Associate Professor in the School of Community Resources and Development at Arizona State University. Lee holds a master’s degree from University of Nevada in Las Vegas with focus on convention sales and venue management, and the promotion of events and festivals. Lee also earned her doctorate in tourism studies from Texas A&M University with a concentration on communication technology, online consumer behavior and destination marketing. She serves on boards in one tourism association (Greater Western Travel and Tourism Research Association) and the Friends of the Orpheum Theatre (FOTO) in downtown Phoenix.
Lee has been conducting research in the areas of information communication technology, promoting and marketing local events and festivals, and further, MICE (Meeting, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions) attendees’ attitude towards the meeting facilities. Lee has expertise in examining the impacts of communication technology on online consumer behavior, especially the effects of using social media and mobile application on marketing and advertising strategies. Recently, she has expanded her research focus to encompass measuring attendees’ evaluation of meeting facilities and to examine their experiential values through the convention/trade shows, and local events or festivals, which can incorporate community well-being or community development. Link to directory page.
Junyu Lu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Community Resources and Development at ASU. Dr. Junyu Lu's research interests are mainly in the area of climate change and adaptation, the impact of extreme weather, sustainability, agricultural community engagement, and parks & protected areas. He integrates advanced methodologies into his research areas, including advanced statistical models, GIS techniques, high-performance computing (HPC), and cloud computing. He has published more than 35 peer-reviewed journal articles, including first-authored publications in top-tier journals such as Nature Sustainability, Scientific Reports, Journal of Environmental Management, Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, Applied Geography, Current Issues in Tourism, etc.
Before joining ASU, he was a postdoc in Natural Resources Social Science Lab at Purdue University involving in multiple research projects on understanding the use of online agricultural Decision Support Tools developed by the Useful to Usable (U2U) team and investigating factors influencing the adoption of agricultural conservation practices. He completed a Ph.D. degree in Geography and a Master’s degree in Applied Statistics from the University of South Carolina – Columbia in 2018. During his Ph.D. period, he has worked with NOAA’s Carolinas Integrated Sciences and Assessments (CISA) team for five years on a range of climate change and extreme weather research projects. Link to directory page.
Dallen J. Timothy is a Professor in the School of Community Resources and Development and Senior Sustainability Scientist at ASU. He is also a Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa; Furong Professor at Hunan Normal University, China; Visiting Professor at Guangxi University, China; and a Guest Professor in the Erasmus European Master of Tourism Management Program based at the University of Girona, Spain. Dr. Timothy is the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Heritage Tourism (Taylor & Francis) and is commissioning editor of Routledge's Cultural Heritage and Tourism book series. He is also co-commissioning editor over three book series at Channel View Publications and serves on the editorial board of 25 international social science journals. Professor Timothy’s tourism and community development-related research interests include cultural heritage, religion and spirituality, migration, globalization processes, geopolitics, and community-based/participatory development. He has researched, consulted or otherwise worked in more than 100 countries and has ongoing fieldwork projects in Arizona and the US Southwest, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe and the Middle East. Locally, he has collaborated with the Phoenix Sister Cities office, the Town of Gilbert, the Bureau of Land Management, the Arizona Office of Tourism, the Navajo Nation, and the Arizona State Historic Preservation Office. Internationally Professor Timothy has collaborated with a wide variety of public and non-profit agencies, universities and research scholars. In 2013, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award in Tourism Research by the International Association for Tourism Policy. In 2021, he received the John Rooney Award from the American Association of Geographers, Recreation, Tourism and Sport Specialty Group for outstanding contributions to the field and discipline of applied recreation, tourism and sport geography. Link to directory page.
Christine Vogt is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Community Resources and Development at Arizona State University. She is also former director of the Center for Sustainable Tourism in the school. She has over 25 years of tourism marketing and research experience at Arizona State University and Michigan State University primarily working in partnership with state, regional or local tourism government offices, and natural resource agencies and nonprofits. Her research interests focus on tourists’ trip planning and involving residents in tourism planning. In 2014, she held a fellowship with Singapore National Parks where she researched the social values associated with park use. Her goal is to help the tourism and natural resource recreation agencies sharpen their sustainability thinking, planning, and outcomes. Reach her at chrisv@asu.edu. Link to directory page.
Nicholas Wise is an Assistant Professor and joins ASU after working abroad since 2012, most recently at Liverpool John Moores University in England. Originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Nicholas completed his Bachelor’s degree at Lock Haven University (2006) and Master’s at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (2008). In 2012 he received his PhD at Kent State University in Ohio. For his PhD research he conducted an ethnographic study residing with Haitians in a remote village in the Dominican Republic studying sport, contested identities and (informal) events. Nicholas has travelled extensively in 100 countries as a student, an instructor, for research/fieldwork, to present at conferences, as a volunteer and for leisure, inspiring him to conduct internationally focused research and to edit collections bringing together a range of international perspectives. His current research focuses on placemaking, competitiveness, social regeneration and community impacts, conducting work across the areas of sport, events and tourism. He brings an international perspective to his teaching informed by scholarly research focusing on the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Brazil, Croatia, Serbia and Italy. He has published across several disciplines and collaborates with colleagues across a number of academic disciplines. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (now AdvanceHE). Link to directory page.
Xiao Xiao is an Assistant Professor at the School of Community Resources and Development at ASU and located at the Hainan University-Arizona State University International Tourism College in Haikou, Hainan Province, China, and conducts research in the areas of recreation, parks, tourism, and natural resources, more specifically in parks and recreation planning; tourism geography; and community engagement in rural and urban environments. Her expertise is transportation management in parks, social carrying capacity, social justice, climate change and adaptation for cultural resources and heritage, and sustainability planning and implementation. Specifically, Xiao is interested in diversity and social justice issues related to park and tourism destinations, transportation management in parks and tourism destinations, quantitative methodology in tourism management, decision-making sciences in tourism management, social aspect of climate change and adaptation, and applications of geospatial analytics in tourism management. Link to directory page.