Dr. Russell Arthur SmithFor the past four years he has served as the Vice Dean for CNI and was a member of the original Nanyang Technological University’s (NTU) negotiating team, appointed to establish the CNI, in collaboration with Cornell University. The institute hopes to recruit a permanent Dean by 2010. As Vice Dean, Dr Smith led the school’s academic research and administrative efforts. His expertise is in project planning and development and he has taught these subjects, within the field of hospitality and tourism for the past 27 years, primarily in Malaysia and Singapore. For the last 13 years, Dr Smith has been a professor in NTU’s Nanyang Business School. He is renowned within the hospitality industry for his work in coastal tourism, for which he has developed several coastal development models which have been published, including The Beach Resort Model, which documented a model of development from pre-tourism to city scale which is applicable to cases such as Pattaya, Thailand.