Roland Rust Receives Norwegian School of Economics Honorary Doctorate

The Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) has named as an Honorary Doctor Roland Rust, Distinguished University Professor and David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

Rust, founder and executive director of two research centers at Smith: the Center for Excellence in Service and the Center for Complexity in Business, is being honored alongside Nobel Prize winners Bengt R. Holmström and Sandra E. Black, a former member of Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, plus University of Helsinki professor Anna Mauranen and MIT professor Bernt Øksendal.

“These are five outstanding researchers who are important partners and sources of inspiration for NHH," says the school’s Rector Frøystein Gjesdal.

According to NHH: “Roland T. Rust’s research interests cover a host of aspects on marketing, including service marketing, complexity, marketing research methodology and more. His numerous contributions to marketing research and education has won him a large number of lifetime achievement awards… He also plays an important role for service innovation research at NHH as a member of the advisory board at NHH’s Centre for Service Innovation.”

In 2015, the American Marketing Association named Rust an AMA Fellow for “significant contributions to the research, theory and practice of marketing, and/or to the service and activities of the AMA over a prolonged period of time.” (View Rust’s recent AMA Marketing Legends interview.)

Also a fellow of the European Marketing Academy and the American Statistical Association, Rust has captured four “best article” awards from the Journal of Marketing, where he also served as editor.

Rust was founding Editor of the Journal of Service Research and is currently Editor of the International Journal of Research in Marketing. He also is Visiting Chair in Marketing Research at Erasmus University in the Netherlands and International Research Fellow of Oxford University’s Centre for Corporate Reputation.