Keynote Speakers
Prof. Elena Cavagnaro
Professor Elena Cavagnaro teaches Sustainable Development and Leadership at NHL Stenden. Her main area of interest is on the interrelationship between personal values and attitudes on one side and action taken at company level on the other side. She has have done research on youngster preferences for sustainable produced goods; on youngster attitude towards sustainable tourism; on sustainable leaders’ value set; on the role of personal leadership in small enterprises in the process of change towards sustainability. Cavagnaro and George Curiel co-authored the book The Three Levels of Sustainability, which was published in 2012 and became a bestseller. Her keynote will discuss work that was produced collaboratively with Simona Staffieri from University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy, and focuses on how value orientation influences travel motivations, and that travellers experiences alongside personal and interpersonal change also change in relation to nature.
Ass. Prof. Federico Niccolini
Federico Niccolini is Associate Professor of Organizational Science at the Department of Economics and Management, University of Pisa and Associate Faculty at Colorado State University. His research interests are focused on protected areas management, organizational dynamics related to sustainable development and sustainable tourism, and organizational vision and culture. He has authored more than 20 scientific publications covering the topics of organization and management of protected areas and sustainable tourism. . He coordinated several national and international (including EU funded) projects. Since 1999, Niccolini has been a member of the World Commission on Protected Areas of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. He participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State – Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. His keynote for the conference will focus on 'Nature Based Tourism in Mediterranean Protected Areas'.
Prof. Donna Chambers
Prof. Chambers is interested in how people and places are represented primarily through cultural and heritage tourism, the link between heritage and national identities, postcolonial and decolonial epistemologies in research and teaching, visual methods, sexuality and in critical and innovative approaches to tourism research. She is the Head of the Faculty of Business, Law and Tourism Research Institute at University of Sunderland. Prior to joining Sunderland, she was employed at the University of Surrey and at Edinburgh Napier University. She also spent five years in the Ministry responsible for tourism in Jamaica prior to coming to the UK in 2000. She is a Resource Editor for Annals of Tourism Research, sits on the editorial board of Leisure Studies and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is also a lay member of the Central University Research Ethics Committee of the University of Oxford. Her Keynote for the TNC conference is entitled ‘World heritage and sustainable development: A decolonial critique’.
Prof. Shuangyu Xie
Shuangyu XIE, is a professor of the College of Urban & Environmental Sciences, Central China Normal University. She got her PhD in biosphere co-existence from the Graduate School of Biosphere Science, Hiroshima University in Japan. She entered Central China Normal University in 1995. Now she is the vice director of Wuhan Branch of China Tourism Academy. She is also one of the executive directors of Education & Training Branch of Wuhan Tourism Association and a member of the Geographical Society of China and the industrial ecological economy and technology committee, Chinese Society for Ecological Economics. Her research interests include tourism geography, regional tourism and environment and etc. She has organized or participated more than 40 projects supported by Hubei Provincial Government, Hubei Tourism Bureau, Wuhan Tourism Bureau and etc. She has published 51 academic papers on Business Strategy and the Environment, Journal of Environmental Science (Japan), China Environmental Science, China Population Resource and Environment, Tourism Tribune, and etc. She has chief-edited three books and co-edited six books. Hey keynote will focus on Mountain-based Tourism in China.
Gisela Immich
Gisela Immich, M.Sc., is working as scientific research associate in the working group „Medical Climatology“ (Prof. Dr. Dr. Angela Schuh) at the Chair of Public Health and Health Service Research (IBE), Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich, Germany. She completed successfully a Master of Science in Diagnostic, Intervention and Prevention in the life span, Bachelor of Science in complementary and alternative Medicine (CAM) as well as CAM practitioner. She gives her main research attention to the scientific evaluation of different aspects of forest medicine/forest therapy/healing forests in order to develop new preventive or therapeutical concepts for specific target groups. Additional research themes are chronobiology, CAM and development of an advanced training in “Wald-Gesundheitstrainer” (a Shinrin-yoku Guide completed with traditional German CAM).
Simona Staffieri
Simona Staffieri obtained a PhD in “Research Methods for the Analysis of Socio-Economic Change” from “La Sapienza”, discussing a doctoral thesis on Youth tourism in Italy. In the academic years 2015-2017 she was contract professor of Statistic for tourism, and in the academic years 2017-2019, contract professor in economics of tourism at the faculty of Arts and Humanities at University Sapienza in Rome. Since 2018, she teaches Statistics and data analysis at the Master in Languages of Tourism and Intercultural Communication at the University of studies "Roma Tre". Since 2012 she is an external member of the Research Group Sustainability in Hospitality and Tourism, at the Academy of International Hospitality Research at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands. She will be presenting alongside Prof Cavagaro their work on how value orientation influences travel motivations, and that travellers experiences alongside personal and interpersonal change also change in relation to nature.
Andrew Wirth
After a 32 year career in the ski and hospitality industry, Andy Wirth retired in 2018 having most recently served in the position as President and Chief Executive Officer of Squaw Valley Ski Holdings. Wirth lead the acquisitions of Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows in 2010 and 2012, respectively. After overseeing a USD $100M customer experience transformation, Wirth and his team took Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows to the venerated position of #1 Resort in North America, three years in a row, as selected by USA Today readers and the #1 Resort as selected by Outside Magazine. In 2017 he helped build The Alterra Mountain Company, with a broad “dream-list” of resorts in the portfolio, making it one the largest ski resort operating groups in North America. Wirth is also is deeply experienced in the growing ski and travel market in China. True to his conservation roots, in 2018, after a six year effort, Wirth advanced the Squaw Valley to being the first major resort powered by 100% renewable energy, inclusive of utility grade energy storage as provided for by Tesla.
Upon his retirement, Wirth has dedicated himself to serving on the boards of a multitude of nonprofit organizations, serving the special warfare, conservation and skiing sectors/communities. His work in the special warfare community relates to his surviving a skydiving accident whereby his arm was torn off and reconstructed/reattached. As part his work in the special warfare community, he has received a special invitation and will be skydiving with a group of US Navy SEALs into the Iron Mike drop zone, after the conference, as part of the D-Day ceremonies in Normandy, France.
Wirth began his career in Steamboat, Colorado having lived and worked there for over 25 years. Prior to Steamboat, he was a Backcountry Ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park and also served on an initial-attack wildland firefighting crew in New Mexico. He attended Colorado State University, the University of Edinburgh and Stanford University. Wirth now resides in San Juan Capistrano, California.