Title: “Masters of the Resin Tears”: Restructuring the Knowledge Pattern for Non-Captive Audiences with Serious Games to Elicit Transformational Experiences

Dorothea Papathanasiou-Zuhrt, Open University of Cyprus, Cyprus; Artifactory, Greece

Short bio: Dorothea Papathanasiou-Zuhrt studied Classics and Germanistics at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens and History and Ethnology at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany, where she also obtained an M.A. degree in Linguistics. She has obtained her M.Sc. degree in Planning, Management and Policy of Tourism and her Ph.D. degree in Heritage Management at the University of the Aegean in Greece. She is proficient in English, German, French, Italian, Russian and have basic knowledge of Turkish. In the last 20 years she has completed 60 EU funded research projects with a total value of 19.496.302,51 EUR, including 58 museum applications, trails, guides, games, and digital apps and 21 training programs in HED and VET. She is active in the tertiary education at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the post-graduate study program “Cultural Policy and Development”, Open University of Cyprus and at the graduate study program at the “Department of Tourism Economics and Management”, University of the Aegean in Greece. In the last 20 years she has researched in the domains heritage and tourism with over 250 publications.

Title: Bridging Gaps or Breaking Grounds: Navigating the Economic, Environmental, and Community Challenges of Tourism Infrastructure Development in India’s Mountain State

Devkant Kala, School of Business, UPES, Dehradun, India

Short bio: Dr. Devkant Kala is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the School of Business, UPES, Dehradun, India. He earned his PhD in 2015 in services marketing, with research interests spanning consumer behavior, tourism & hospitality, and technology adoption. He has been the principal investigator on the project titled “Assessing the impact of food experience and restaurant services on tourist satisfaction in the Rishikesh-Badrinath Yatra Highway” and worked as a project assistant on the research project “Ecotourism planning and development in the Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary, Uttarakhand”. Dr. Kala has also authored an edited book, titled “Global Opportunities and Challenges for Rural and Mountain Tourism”, published by IGI Global. He has supervised two scholars who have successfully earned their doctoral degrees and is currently guiding three other PhD scholars. He has published extensively in renowned international journals such as Current Issues in Tourism, Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, Journal of Quality Assurance in Hospitality and Tourism, Digital Policy, Regulations, and Governance, Education and Information Technologies, and Journal of Teaching in Travel & Tourism, among others. His paper titled “Examination of relationships among technology acceptance, student engagement, and perceived learning on tourism-related MOOCs” was awarded Best Paper 2023 by Journal of Teaching in Travel & Tourism (Taylor & Francis). 

Title: Central Bank Digital Currencies, Opportunities and Challenges to Financial/Economic Stability

Muhammad Ali Nasir, University of Leeds, UK

Short bio: Dr Muhammad Ali Nasir is an associate professor in Economics at the University of Leeds and visiting research fellow at the University of Cambridge. He holds a PhD in Economics and is greatly interested in the areas of Monetary Economics, Macroeconomics, Financial Economics and International Economics and Energy and Environmental Economics. His recent book is entitled “Off the Target: The Stagnating Political Economy of Europe and Post-Pandemic Recovery”. Dr Nasir is also the associate editor of the Journal of Environmental Management and Research in International Business and Finance. He is the guest editor of Energy Economics, Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Technological Forecasting and Social Change and the Risk Analysis. Currently, he is working on the challenges of macroeconomic policy formulation and issues around financial, economic and environmental stability, particularly in the Post- COVID-19 world.

Title: Identifying the key factors for positioning places in the tourism industry

José I. Rojas-Méndez, Sprott School of Business, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Short bio: Dr. José Rojas-Méndez is Professor of International Business and Marketing at Carleton University's Sprott School of Busines, the Associate Editor (International Management) for the European Journal of Management and Business Economics, and the Editor-in-Chief of the Multidisciplinary Business Review. Dr. Rojas-Méndez’s research program is a robust combination of consumer behaviour and international marketing with three main interconnecting constructs—national brand personality in transitioning and developing countries; country wine personality; and understanding and measuring xenocentrism of consumers and employees in developing countries. He travels around the world to carry out his research and has collected data from over twenty-two countries in eleven different languages and cultures. Dr. Rojas-Méndez recognized an old construct but within a new framework—the phenomenon of xenocentrism (excessive admiration for anything foreign and at the same time, rejection of whatever is domestic) in developing and transitioning nations and his research program has him and his PhD student working on studies to elucidate the causes, moderating factors, and the consequences of xenocentrism. Moreover, he has developed a novel, highly effective scale, called X-Scale, that is reliable, valid, and multidimensional to define consumer preferences, which developing countries can use for identifying potential markets for business expansion at a global level.

Title: The Role of Investments in the Valuation of Cultural Heritage in the Context of Sustainable Development

Mariana Lupan, ”Stefan cel Mare” University, Suceava, Romania

Short bio: Mariana Lupan is a Professor at "Stefan cel Mare" University in Suceava, Romania. Her areas of interest include business investment strategies, investment policies, economic globalization, institutions and centers of economic power, and economic history. She has completed training programs in Slovenia, Scotland, Turkey, and England. Publications: author and co-author of seven books, with over 50 articles published in indexed journals; she has extensive experience in implementing research projects, as well as projects funded by non-reimbursable European grants and national funding sources.

Title: NORO Green Cities: Pioneering Urban Sustainability through Norwegian-Romanian Collaboration

Irina Gabriela Rădulescu, Petroleum & Gas University of Ploiești, Romania

Valentina Vasile, Institute of National Economy, Romanian Academy, Romania

Emanuela Modoran, Audit SRL / European DIH Wallachia eHUB, Romania

Short bio: 

Irina Gabriela Rădulescu is a Professor at Petroleum and Gas University of Ploiești, Romania. Her areas of interest include the European economy, international economics, business ethics, international trade, business administration, international entrepreneurial management, regional economic integration, political economy, management, and marketing. She is the author of 10 books and over 60 scientific papers presented at national and international conferences or published in indexed journals. She has extensive experience in implementing research projects.

Valentina Vasile is a Professor, holds a PhD in Economics, and is a Senior Researcher. She serves as Director of the Institute of National Economy at the Romanian Academy and teaches at Nicolae Titulescu University in Bucharest. She also acts as a PhD advisor. With extensive experience in economic research, she has participated in national and international interdisciplinary projects, focusing on topics such as labor economics, migration, human capital, the digital economy and employment, social policies, education, macroeconomics, sustainable development, resilience, and the circular economy. She has a strong record of international collaboration, serving as both coordinator and team member in interdisciplinary research projects funded by European funds, Horizon 2020, the SEE Program, Black Sea Basin ENI CBC, CEDEFOP, ILO, Eurofound, and various universities (e.g., Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan). Her work includes publications in scientific papers and books indexed in Web of Science, Scopus, and other international databases, and she also serves as a reviewer for several scientific journals.

Emanuela Modoran serves as the initiator and coordinator of the first Digital Innovation Hub in the region, instrumental in mobilising resources to establish the consortium for fostering the development of the digitisation innovation ecosystem.