Dr Aftab Dean

Dr Dean is the Deputy Director of the DBA at Leeds Business School. He has a very high number of doctoral completions and his research interests include social responsibility, governance, branding, student engagement and corporate reputation. He has two decades of experience working in HE and has experience of working in Europe, the Gulf and South East Asia. He developed the first MSc in E-business for the HE sector and has been active in the digital marketing field both as a practitioner, researcher and academic examiner. He is currently jointly developing the first Executive DBA in the UK.

After having presented over 50 papers, at numerous international conferences, he has been awarded a number of prestigious prizes for his research. Dr Dean has twice been commissioned by the UK Government's Higher Education Academy Business Discipline to analyse the National Student Survey (NSS) full dataset. His findings have challenged current views on factors that were believed to influence student satisfaction in Higher Education. His research on student engagement has been disseminated, through workshops, to university directors.

Dr Dean has been actively engaged with companies in Europe, Africa, North America and Asia to enhance their brand reputation through applying a rigorous governance framework of accountability. He has helped several companies design questionnaires and data mine their customer databases to develop new strategies of innovation and growth.