Professor Deborah de Lange’s education and work experience give her a solid foundation in approaching international business and strategies. By virtue of her international experience in a “foreign country” just north of the United States, de Lange is already comfortable with issues involving currency, trade regulations and cultural differences. “Understanding how to move forward in a global marketplace can make a huge difference in a company’s success,” said de Lange, who was based in Toronto before moving to Boston to join the Sawyer Business School faculty.

Her dissertation explores the mechanisms of power and influence in international networks, using the United Nations as a way to investigate cooperative strategic decision making, backroom bargaining and diplomacy. Entitled “Power and Influence: The Effects of Embeddedness on Cooperative Strategic Decision Making,” it will be published as a book. She also has an edited volume on the topic of sustainability set to be published next year.

De Lange said Suffolk University appealed to her because it has a separate strategy and international business group. “Strategy often gets lost as a minor player at other universities,” she said. “But Suffolk understands its importance.” While operating as a separate department, the Strategy and International Business Department collaborates with the Management Department to give students a broad range of subject matter to study.

With a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, an accountancy, an MBA for Science and Technology, and hands-on experience as power transmission and distribution engineer at Ontario Hydro and as a manufacturing engineer and financial analyst at IBM, de Lange combines the practicalities of field experience with her analytical and management work. She has worked as a strategy consultant in banking, energy, computers and electronics, retail, pharmaceutical, biotech and health care.