Dr. Ellen E. Touchstone is the Deputy Dean for Global Business and Leadership at Sofia University. For the past 5 years, she was the Associate Dean for Responsible and Sustainable Business Education at the International Business School Suzhou (IBSS) at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University where she had previously served as the Director of Internationalization as well as the Program Director for the Chinese Top Tier Undergraduate Program, International Business with a Language. In addition to teaching at other US universities, she has also worked in the high-tech and services industries as well as running her own consulting firm.
She received her MBA in International Business from ASU Thunderbird School of Global Management and her PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Southern California. She is a thought leader on inclusive finance with her research on the linguistic servicescape and multilingual advertising published in the Journal of Business Research and the Journal of Consumer Research respectively.
Under her leadership, IBSS was named the first and only Champion business school in China by the Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) organization of the UN Global Compact. The carbon reduction initiative she launched with the Sustainable Future Talents student group, “Fifteen Ways in Fifteen Weeks” won the AMBA BGA Best CSR & Sustainability Initiative 2022 award.
In 2022, she received the “Model Citizen” award from the Suzhou Industrial Park government and was designated as the Outstanding Volunteer of 2023 by the Suzhou Industrial Park International Volunteer team. With the support of the American Chamber of Commerce Shanghai, she and two other Suzhou executives founded the now annual Suzhou Women’s Leadership Conference in 2023. Her family’s history of capacity building in higher education and health care in China was featured in national social media posts as well as in a multiple-award-winning documentary from Suzhou Broadcasting System, My Homeward Journey, and the CCTV4 program, Bond with China.
