In IIBG, five external academic experts are appointed as Distinguished Professors to nurture and lead the research teams. The Distinguished Professors lead research workshops, support research activities of academics and facilitate the Institute to organize conferences.
Professor Mario Kafouros
Professor of International Business and Innovation, Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, UK
Research areas: international business and strategy, global innovation and foreign direct investment
Professor Kafouros serves as the Chair of International Business and Innovation, and Associated Head of Research in Alliance Manchester Business School (UK). He is also Associate Editor of the journal of International Business Review (IBR), and is appointed adviser to the Commonwealth, and elected Secretary of the Academy of International Business (AIB UKI). Previously, he was member of the Faculty Executive Group (FEG), leader for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and he also served as Research Director and Head of Department (IB) in the University of Leeds (UK). He has extensive industrial and academic experience in the fields of innovation and international business & strategy. His research has received strong recognition in the form of (1) Best Paper Awards (e.g. European International Business Academy 2013, Academy of International Business 2010, and the British Academy of Management 2008); (2) funding from research councils, government organizations and multinational companies; and (3) publications in leading international journals such as the Journal of Management, the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Management Studies, Research Policy, Organization Studies, Human Relations, Technovation, the Journal of World Business, the British Journal of Management and the Journal of Business Research.

Professor Graham Kendall
Professor of Computer Science, The University of Nottingham, UK
Research areas: operations research, evolutionary computation, artificial intelligence, heuristics, meta-heuristics, hyper-heuristics and addressing real world applications
Professor Kendall is the Provost and CEO of The University of Nottingham Malaysia (UNM), and is also a Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University. Before becoming an academic, he worked in the IT industry for 20 years, starting his career as a computer operator, and progressing to a senior manager. In 1994, he took a break from his industrial career and went to The University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) to study Computation, obtaining a First Class Honours degree. Professor Kendall then decided to undertake a PhD from The University of Nottingham (School of Computer Science), which he completed in 2000. He was offered an academic position at the University of Nottingham in 1999, and was made a full Professor in 2007. He moved to Malaysia in August 2011, where he took up the role of Vice-Provost (Research and Knowledge Exchange). In August 2016, he became the Provost/CEO of UNM and also was appointed a PVC of the University.
He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) and the Operational Research Society (FORS). He is a Director of two companies (Nottingham Green Technologies Sdn Bhd and Nottingham MyResearch Sdn Bhd) and a former Director of Crops for the Future Sdn Bhd. He is an Associate Editor of 10 journals and a former Editor-in-chief of the I
EEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games. He has published over 250 peer reviewed scientific papers, with over 100 of those in ISI ranked journals.

Professor Raphael Nicholas Markellos
Professor of Finance, Norwich Business School, University of East Anglia, UK
Research areas: finance and responsible investment
Professor Markellos is currently a Professor of Finance and the Director of Research and Enterprise at Norwich Business School, University of East Anglia. His research has been published and cited widely in some of the most prestigious academic journals. With Terry Mills, he has published the third edition of the bestselling book The Econometric Modelling of Financial Time Series (by Cambridge University Press). This book is widely used for teaching at leading universities in the USA, UK and Asia. His work has often received much attention from the media.
Professor Michael Müller-Camen
Professor of Human Resource Management, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
Research areas: sustainable human resource management
Professor Michael Müller-Camen is serving as a full Professor of Human Resource Management at Vienna University of Economics and Business. Apart from teaching, he is an outstanding scholar with over 80 publications related to Human Resource Management, and Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility. Serving at different refereed journals, he was the Editor of German Journal of Human Resource Management since 2009 and became the Editor-in-Chief between 2012 and 2016. Also, he is experienced in soliciting research funding and has been granted more than €500,000 from research councils in the UK, Austria and Germany.

Professor Bala Ramasamy
Associate Dean and Professor of Economics at China Europe International Business School, China
Research areas: asian economies, foreign direct investment, corporate social responsibility and international business strategy
Professor Bala Ramasamy is Associate Dean and Professor of Economics at China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) since 2006. Before joining CEIBS, he was Professor of International Economics and Business at the University of Nottingham in Malaysia. Previously, he served on the Faculties at Massey University in New Zealand and University of Macau. He has been teaching at higher institutes of learning since 1988. He has had wide experience in teaching students of different backgrounds and culture in Mainland China, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and the UK. Professor Ramasamy received his PhD degree from University of Leicester, UK and his Master of Social Sciences from the University of Macau, both in Economics. His research has been published in Journal of Business Ethics, World Economy, Journal of World Business, Journal of World Investment and Trade, Journal of Business Research, among others. His views are regularly sought by the media. He has been interviewed by CCTV, Bloomberg, AP News, Al Jazeera, Channel News Asia etc. His comments have also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, China Daily, Global Times and other newspaper around the world. Outside academia, Professor Ramasamy runs leadership and moral empowerment programmes for young teenagers.

Professor Chengqi Wang
Professor of Strategy and International Business at Nottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham, UK
Research areas: the role of multinational enterprises in the process of emerging economies' integration into the global economy, innovation and knowledge spillovers in emerging market enterprises.
Professor Wang is Professor of Strategy and International Business at Nottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham, UK. Prior to this appointment, he served at the Centre for International Business, University of Leeds (CIBUL) at Leeds University Business School between 2000 and 2006. He undertakes external collaborative research with academic institutions throughout the world and has published around 50 papers. Many of these have appeared in UTD24, FT50, and ABS-4*/4 journals such as Journal of International Business Studies, Research Policy, Journal of Product Innovation Management, British Journal of Management, and Journal of World Business. His papers have attracted over 4,000 citations in Google Scholar. Journal of International Management (2016, Volume 22, Issue 4) ranks him 11th in the world in research on multinational firms from emerging markets based on impact score.