On the evening of April 11, the International Project Management Association (IPMA) held its Global Research Awards Ceremony in Dubai, where the recipients of the IPMA Global Distinguished Professor title were officially announced. Professor Ding Ronggui, Dean of the School of Management at Shandong University, and Professor Salvador Fernando Capuz-Rizo from the Technical University of Valencia, Spain, were honored with this prestigious title.
This honorary title is part of a newly established global academic recognition system launched by IPMA in celebration of its 60th anniversary. The system includes three levels—Distinguished Professor, Associate Professor, and Lecturer—and aims to recognize leading scholars who have made outstanding international contributions to project management education. The evaluation for IPMA Global Distinguished Professor is based on five criteria: academic qualifications, scholarly achievements, educational contributions, social impact, and contributions to IPMA. Recipients must have held a full professorship at a renowned university for over ten years, have teaching experience in at least three countries, and have made paradigm-shifting contributions to the global development of project management as a discipline. Additional qualifications include serving in leadership roles within international academic organizations, acting as editors-in-chief of leading journals, delivering over ten keynote speeches at international conferences, supervising doctoral students who have won international academic awards, and leading the drafting of IPMA standards or the development of IPMA academic products.
Founded in 1965 and headquartered in Switzerland, IPMA is the world’s first and one of the most influential professional organizations in the field of project management. It currently has member associations in 72 countries and regions. It publishes the International Journal of Project Management (IJPM), a top-tier academic journal in the field, and has developed over a dozen international standards, including the IPMA Project Excellence Baseline. Professor Ding Ronggui currently serves as IPMA Vice President in charge of research and publications, Editor-in-Chief of IPMA Project Perspectives, and a member of the IJPM Strategic Advisory Board. He is also the lead drafter of the IPMA Research Evaluation Baseline—a globally recognized academic evaluation standard. This standard has been widely adopted by institutions around the world as a framework for research quality assessment, highlighting the growing influence of Chinese scholars in shaping international academic standards.
