ECU professor receives lifetime achievement award
David Edgell
East Carolina University professor David Edgell was awarded the 2014 Board on Human Sciences Lifetime Achievement Award, which honors a nationally recognized leader with significant history of advancing human sciences in higher education.
Edgell is a professor in the ECU College of Human Ecology. The college’s dean, Judy Siguaw, nominated Edgell.
“I believe that very few individuals within the academic community have had the broad impact on humanity that Dr. Edgell has had and continues to have,” Siguaw said.
Edgell has devoted much of his career toward towards promoting tourism as an economic and social development tool for communities and nations worldwide. His experience includes explicit concern for poverty reduction and sustaining natural and built resources. His career includes leadership roles in the U.S. Department of Labor and in Travel and Tourism for the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Edgell has represented the United States government as head of a delegation to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Organization of American States, the Asia-Pacific Economic Council, the Caribbean Tourism Organization and as executive director of World’s Fairs and Expositions.
He joined ECU in 2003 and developed the ECU Center for Sustainable Tourism, the largest university program of its kind in the United States. He is a full time professor of international commerce, tourism and economic development.
Edgell has authored 10 books and more than 100 articles on tourism, trade and economic development.
The Lifetime Achievement Award is one of four awards presented annually by the Board on Human Sciences, an association of administrators of higher education units responsible for research/discovery, extension/outreach, and teaching/learning programs in the human sciences at universities across the country.
For more information on the Board on Human Sciences, member institutions, the BoHS Awards and the Award recipients go to www.TheBoHS.org.