Welcome Mojtaba Salem, new professor at KLU!
Mojtaba Salem may be KLU’s newest member of faculty, but the Assistant Professor in Humanitarian Operations and Management Practice is no stranger to the university. A graduate of the 2015 Masters in Management class, Salem also did his PhD at KLU, before taking up post-doctoral research roles at the Technical University of Munich and KLU’s Center for Humanitarian Logistics and Regional Development (CHORD). Nor is he unfamiliar with awards and accolades, having won the KLU Best Student Achievement Award for his master’s and graduated his PhD cumma sum laude.
A leading light in the field of research on humanitarian operations and leadership, Salem says he is relishing his new role at KLU and responsibilities and challenges that come with it.
“The big thing that is different, now that I’m professor, is teaching,” he explains. “I have a say on developing new courses and which direction we want to go as an institute, with regards to the teaching curriculum and emerging issues such as artificial intelligence (AI).”
As well as teaching international financial accounting and another course yet to be finalized, Salem is in the process of designing an course titled Managing Nonprofits: Strategies and Techniques for Organizational Impact he will also deliver to bachelor students next year.
Salem’s responsibility at CHORD, meanwhile, has also changed. “I am now a professor at CHORD, so I have a much bigger role in the management of the center, working with Professor Dr. Maria Besiou, who was my supervisor, making sure that our third-party funded project portfolios grow.”
These projects involve working with humanitarian organizations to measure the impact of their humanitarian operations.
“The humanitarian sector has traditionally been a sector where people responded to disasters, but the findings of our research suggest that it's good to be prepared beforehand, so humanitarian actors can provide a better response to disaster,” he explains.
“We look at whether preparedness investments from donor agencies, such as installing IT systems, digital transformation solutions, or trainings, make humanitarian actors more capable in incorporating and doing information management for disaster response.”
Another area CHORD is involved in is to provide the sector with trend analysis and producing reports and infographics that decision-makers can use to make strategic decisions.
“Most of my focus is to make sure that the projects have scientific rigor so we can use their data or publish academic papers, and make sure that we can address the needs of people in practice,” he explains.
Salem’s own research has garnered him several awards. His paper on authoritarian leadership won the POMS College of Humanitarian Operations and Crisis Management Best Paper Award in 2020, while his PhD dissertation, “Leadership in Humanitarian Operations”, earned him a Honorary Mention Award from the Board of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Research Institute at Hanken School of Economics in Finland a year later.
It's part of an impressive academic career might well have been forged elsewhere had it not been for a German professor at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul, where he did his Bachelor of Business Administration degree, graduating cumma sum laude in 2012.
“I wanted to do a master’s and initially thought I would end up in the US,” Salem explains. “At the time, I didn’t know there was a possibility to do your studies in English in Germany, but my professor told me there was an international university in Hamburg with a focus on business studies, particularly logistics and supply chain. It was a direction I wanted to go in, so I thought why not give it a try.”
Granted a scholarship to do his master’s at KLU, Salem says he quickly found himself enjoying life at the university and decided to stay on to do his PhD.
Then, from 2020-2024, Salem worked as a post-doctoral researcher in the Chair of Research and Science Management at Technical University of Munich, before returning to KLU to take up his professorship.
“It’s an interesting feeling,” Salem says of his progress from student to professor at KLU. “I was one of the first students to use this new campus in the HafenCity in 2013. I know a lot of people that stayed from that time. I have a new role and new responsibilities, and so my relationship is now different with many of these people, but I look forward to engaging with them in different ways. So far, the experience has been really good.”
