Ali Kara, professor of business administration at Penn State York, along with his colleague Frank J. Carmone of Wayne State University, won the Best in Track Award at the 2013 Summer Marketing Educators’ Conference for their paper, “Two Useful Criteria in Estimating the Number of Market Segments in a Dataset: The Gap Statistic and HINoV.” The paper offers a tool to marketers to help with their decision-making process.
The conference was sponsored by the American Marketing Association (AMA), the largest marketing professionals/academicians organization in the country. The AMA Summer Educators’ conference is its largest meeting which included 15 different tracks of research areas. Kara’s paper earned the distinction of the best paper in the Research Methods and Analytics track.
Kara joined the faculty at Penn State York in 1993. He teaches a variety of marketing courses at Penn State York, including international business, marketing research, and principles of marketing, selling, and retailing. He also is a faculty liaison in the Graham Entrepreneurial Leadership Program which coordinates the efforts between faculty, corporate mentors, and Penn State York students to develop a tool box of skills for each student designed to support the host company’s culture and the unique demands of their particular workplace. Student interns receive performance appraisals and continuous feedback from the company, through their company mentor, that is shared and discussed with their Penn State York faculty member. Students in this leadership program experience company culture and work on real projects to benefit the company or organization.
In addition to serving as a faculty member at York campus, Kara is the discipline coordinator for the Division of Business and Economics, University College. He has served in various committees at the campus, college, and University level as a member and chair in the Penn State system.
His current research focuses on statistical modeling, model comparisons, and identifying segments using data.
Kara holds a doctorate from Florida International University, Miami, Fla., and a masters of business administration degree from University of Bridgeport, Conn. He has published in academic marketing journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Advertising” International Journal of Research in Marketing, European Journal of Operations Research, Omega, Journal of Small Business Management, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Global Marketing, and International Journal of Logistics Management. He has made several national and international conference presentations on a variety of topics.