PhD: Under the supervision of Professor Geert Duysters and Professor Ard-Pieter de Man, she investigates the role of alliance capabilities in the management of alliance portfolios of companies. Her thesis postulates that the increasing complexity of alliance portfolios necessitates companies to develop certain alliance management capabilities in order to ensure their competitive survival. Both theoretically and empirically, her thesis seeks to establish the most effective alliance management techniques for the successful management of alliances.  The thesis is planned to be defended by early 2009.

Her further research interests are innovation and strategic management, mergers& acquisitions, strategic alliances and networks, and technology catch up strategies of developing countries.  

Masters: She obtained her Masters of Business Administration from the University of Maastricht in 2005. With Professor John Hagedoorn as her supervisor, she successfully completed her master thesis on 'Perils and Promises of ICT for developing countries'; particularly investigating the case of the software industry in India.

Academic and work experience:

With her diverse background in international business and economics, she is interested in both academia and business . Over the last two years, she has been teaching strategic management courses at the Department of Organization and Strategy at the University of Maastricht. Further, she has been involved in several consulting and training programmes on the subject of strategic alliance management, for example, working together with senior managers of the Central Bank of Nigeria as well as with alliance managers of local Dutch companies.

She holds a strong affiliation to the Wuhan University of Technology in China, where she spent a month of field work in 2007, initializating a China-wide survey on alliance management of Chinese companies. Her fieldwork involved several expert interviews with leading Chinese companies in the field of strategic alliances. The application of the concept of alliance capability to the Chinese context resulted in two publications on the topic of Chinese alliance management.

She is fluent in English, German and  Persian, and has a basic understanding of French, Spanish and Dutch.