Ercan Sirakaya-Turk, Ph.D., Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies

Dr. Sirakaya-Turk received his Ph.D. from Clemson University, South Carolina. He has work experience at three major Carnegie VH Research universities. Before joining USC, he worked as an associate professor at Texas A&M University and as an assistant professor at the Pennsylvania State University, the School of Hospitality Management.  Dr. Sirakaya-Turk is the writer of one of the most influential articles in tourism; google-scholar’s h-index= 29, i-index=39 with total citations over 4,889 times as of October 2016. As a prolific grant writer, he completed many grant projects in excess of $1.3 million. He also published a significant number of articles in the areas of tourism destination marketing and sustainable developmental policies in prestigious tourism and business journals such as the Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Travel Research and Journal of Business Research. Dr. Sirakaya-Turk was the founding Editor-in-Chief for e-Review of Tourism Research, the online tourism research bulletin. Moreover, last year in 2015, he assumed the Editor-in-Chief position of the top-6 ranked journal of Tourism Analysis. Currently, he serves at editorial boards of several major journals including Journal of Travel Research, Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Analysis, Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research and new journals such as European Journal of Tourism Research (based in Bulgaria) and European Journal of Economic and Political Studies (based in Turkey). He teaches tourism, marketing, tourism economics, and research methods classes. Currently, he oversees faculty grants, research, graduate and international programs among the four departments in his college. He conducts grant and statistics workshops for faculty and PhD students, provides individual consultation in research and grants, and approves all grant activity going forward from his college. In 2011, with his network of accomplished scholars from around the world, he published his first book: Research Methods in Leisure, Recreation and Tourism. The second revision is expected to appear in the fall of 2016. With his network of accomplished tourism researchers, just recently he published two more books: Management Science in Hospitality and Tourism: Theory, Practice, and Applications and Handbook of Scales in Tourism and Hospitality Research. His current research focuses around destination branding, tourist behavior, associative networks, and sustainable tourism.