Miesing Heads to South Africa for Fulbright Entrepreneurship Program
ALBANY, N.Y. (April 24, 2025) — During his more than 40-year tenure at UAlbany, Professor Emeritus of Business Paul Miesing made a career of teaching the principles of strategic management and organization behavior.
In May, Miesing will head to South Africa as a Fulbright Senior Specialist, where his goal will be to help equip academic leadership, faculty and support professionals with the knowledge and tools needed to foster a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem within their institutions.
Over the course of the trip, Miesing will conduct workshops in six regions covering the country’s public institutions, with a focus on curriculum development and how innovation in the U.S. has helped to foster its entrepreneurial ecosystems.
“The project promotes inclusive economic development through programs that support public-private educational, entrepreneurship and job skills training that target youth, including historically disadvantaged individuals,” said Miesing, who previously served as a Fulbright lecturer at Fudan University in Shanghai (1998-99) and a Fulbright specialist at the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María in Chile (2023).
As he prepares for the trip, Miesing is in the process of collecting materials from former UAlbany colleagues and relevant offices, as well as meeting with local organizations.
It will be Miesing’s first trip to Sub-Saharan Africa, although he visited Tangier in North Africa in 2009.
“I look forward to seeing and learning more about the continent first hand this time and contributing to its successful emergence,” said Miesing. “South Africa was once considered to be one of the 10 big emerging markets but its economic growth has slowed significantly lately.”
The opportunity to stay involved in international education through the Fulbright program was something Miesing couldn’t pass up, despite retiring from the Massry School of Business in 2021.
“I keep telling my kids (and even grandkids) that you can retire from your job but not from your career,” said Miesing, who is a charter member of the Eastern New York Region Chapter of the Fulbright Association and is currently serving on its Board of Directors.
Miesing has also taught a 3-week module on “Strategic Thinking” for the International Business School, Sao Paolo (Brazil) a couple of times a year since 2018, which is hosted and organized by UAlbany.
He is currently working on the project, “Systems Thinking to Avoid Being Blindsided by a Black Swan Event,” with fellow Fulbright alum and UAlbany research associate April Roggio, PhD ’11, and UAlbany graduate Felippe Cronemberger, MBA ’11, PhD ’18, that models corporate anticipation and response to unlikely, yet high-impact events.