We are saddened to share the news that Dr. Wayne S. DeSarbo, Smeal Distinguished Professor of Marketing Emeritus and longtime Penn State faculty member, passed away on November 20, 2024. An obituary is available here: Wetzler Funeral Home.
Wayne retired from Penn State in 2017 after more than 20 years on the faculty. Before coming to Penn State, he was a chaired professor at the University of Michigan as well as at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
Wayne received his PhD in Marketing and Statistics from Wharton in 1978. He was an expert in multidimensional scaling, classification, and multivariate statistics, especially as they pertain to substantive marketing problems in positioning, market structure, consumer choice, market segmentation, and competitive strategy.
To say that Dr. DeSarbo was prolific, even in his retirement, would be an understatement. He published over 280 papers in Marketing, Statistics, and Economics during his career, one as recently as August 2024 in a top journal in Statistics. His work had been cited 25,322 times at the time of his passing (h-index 73 and i10-index of 184).
In 2021, Wayne was identified as being in the top 2% of scientists in the world based on the Stanford/ Elsevier data repository. He was named a Fellow of the American Marketing Association in 2018 and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2016. He received the 2014 Parlin Award from the AMA as well. Wayne was one of a few marketing scholars to be selected by the Royal Swedish Academy to serve on the Nobel Prize Nomination Committee. He was the chair of the Statistics in Marketing Section of the American Statistical Society, recipient of the Cattell Award for his outstanding research contributions in mathematical psychology, and nominated to be President of the Psychometric Society, to name a few.
Throughout his career, Wayne was a proponent of PhD education and trained many PhD students as their dissertation advisor (e.g., Simon Blanchard at Georgetown, Qian Chen at Penn State, Chan Choi at Rutgers, Elizabeth Edwards (deceased but most recently at Eastern Michigan), Kamel Jedidi at Columbia, Amirali Kani at Guelph, Juyoung Kim at Kookmin University, Sunghoon Kim at Rutgers, Youngchan Kim at Yonsei University, Joonwook Park at Southern Methodist University, Venkat Ramaswamy at University of Michigan, Crystal Scott at University of Michigan-Dearborn, and Indrajit Sunha at Temple). He also informally mentored countless other PhD students and assistant professors over the years.
Dr. DeSarbo was also a strong proponent of the business of sport at Penn State and was the founding Director of the Sports Business Research Center in Smeal. Perhaps his passion for sport came from his own background as an elite athlete. In 2003, he earned the titles of USA National and World Powerlifting Champion in the 275lb Masters 2 division. He also won the 2004 IPA World Powerlifting title in the 319lb Raw Drug-Free division. In his retirement, he enjoyed spending time with family, playing chess, helping his church, and watching football.
A scholarship fund to support PhD students in Marketing has been initiated in memory of Dr. Wayne S. DeSarbo. If you would like to make a contribution, please use the link here and specify it is a memorial gift in the scholarship category for Wayne DeSarbo. If you have any questions, please direct them to Meg Meloy (mgm16@psu.edu), Department Chair.
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Simon Blanchard
Assistant Professor
Georgetown University
Washington DC
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