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Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Connecticut School of Business

Before Christina Kan completed her doctorate in marketing at the , she spent long days marketing residential real estate in Vancouver, British Columbia. She worked in one of the most lucrative housing markets in North America, but after three years in the industry, she craved a career change.

After applying to several PhD programs in the U.S., she landed at Leeds, where the high caliber of faculty members eager to share their knowledge drew her in.

“They are prolific researchers and thought leaders in their fields—and they place a lot of emphasis on mentoring their PhD students,” she explained.

Kan immediately benefitted from that research leadership. The first academic conference she attended was the Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making, hosted annually by Leeds and its Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making. She connected with the research being presented and decided to study the topic herself.

In the years since, she’s examined how people budget for their finances and how they make decisions under resource constraints. She also investigates the mental processes underlying consumer perceptions of price and sales promotion information.

The Leeds Impact

During her time in the PhD program, Kan benefitted from the rigorous coursework and opportunities for collaboration but noted it was the faculty support that most differentiated Leeds.

“The thing that really does stand out to me as uniquely valuable about the marketing PhD program at Leeds is the extent to which the faculty support their students from day one through to graduation, and beyond,” she said. “I’m now eight years out, and I still feel like CU Boulder is very much my academic home.”

In a way, it is—she continues to work with Leeds’ Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making and collaborate with faculty members. Most recently, she and Professor Donald Lichtenstein co-authored a study published in the Journal of Marketing evaluating how a sales promotion on one product influences the sales of other non-promoted products within a display.

She’s also carrying on the ethos of the Leeds PhD program. Now an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Connecticut School of Business, she finds it very meaningful to work with doctoral students.

“I think this really stems from the mentorship I received at Leeds,” she said. “I’m honored now to find a way to pay it forward.”