ARC: Connections: Tributes: Erin Anderson
It is with extreme sadness that we announce that Erin Anderson, the John H. Loudon Chaired Professor of International Management and Professor of Marketing at INSEAD, died on November 21 at age 52.
Erin Anderson was a widely respected mentor and scholar who had written two books and over forty scholarly articles in the fields of marketing and management. She won many of the field’s most prestigious awards, including the Louis Stern Award from the Journal of Marketing Research and the Decade Award from the Journal of International Business Studies. She belonged to the ISI Highly Cited list in Business and Economics, which includes the most referenced ½ of 1 percent of researchers in Business and Economics. She served on the editorial boards of several journals, including Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and International Journal of Research in Marketing. Her research focused on the problems of motivating, structuring, and controlling sales forces and channels of distribution, with a particular emphasis on vertical integration issues, including modes of foreign market entry.
Erin Anderson joined INSEAD in 1994 as a professor of marketing and immediately became a pillar of the institution, working in a variety of academic and institutional roles. Under her leadership as area coordinator between 1998 and 2001, she spearheaded a period of major growth for the marketing area. She was a very successful and much-loved PhD supervisor, chairing seven dissertation committees (Sharmila Chatterjee, Wujin Chu, Frédéric Dalsace, Adam Fein, Rupinder Jindal, Vincent Onyemah, and Alberto Sa Vinhas) and working with 11 other PhD students throughout her career at INSEAD and Wharton. In recent years, she became highly involved in the management of INSEAD, becoming Dean of Executive Education in 2006, co-chairing the taskforce on faculty gender diversity, and serving as faculty representative on the board of INSEAD.
Prior to joining INSEAD, Erin Anderson was a tenured faculty member at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, which she joined in 1981. She received her PhD in Marketing in 1982 from the Anderson Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. It was at UCLA that she met her future husband, Hubert Gatignon, who was also a PhD student in marketing. She also taught at the Catholic University of Mons, Belgium, and was a visiting scholar at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, Brussels.
Erin Anderson is survived by her husband, Hubert Gatignon, their daughters, Aline and Valérie, her brother Philip, and her sister Ellen.
The funeral service will be held on Tuesday 27th November at 10.00 am at Héricy church, France. Flowers may be sent to the church, Place de l'Eglise, 77850 Héricy, France to arrive between 9.30 and 9.45 am on Tuesday.
A webpage has been created in Erin's memory at http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/areas/marketing/memorial/ where messages may be read. If you have a memory or story about Erin that you would like to share, please send them to ruth.lewis@insead.edu, and we will post them on this webpage. To honor Erin’s memory, we have also establishing the Erin Anderson Excellence in PhD Education Fund. In recognition of Erin’s contribution to the INSEAD and Wharton communities, the fund will support PhD candidates in the field of marketing from both schools. If you would like to contribute to a cause that is dear to Erin’s heart, please follow the instructions on the memorial page.
Erin was not only a great scholar and teacher. She was a very hard-working and inspiring colleague and a warm and generous person. We all owe her a lot and we will all miss her greatly.
The INSEAD marketing group