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Research Team


Principal Investigators: 

Principal Investigator: Andrew Moreo,  Ph.D. 

Andrew Moreo, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and Director of Research for Florida International University’s (FIU) Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management (CSHTM), where he has been a member of the faculty since August 2016.   During his tenure at FIU, Dr. Moreo has taught undergraduate courses face to face, hybrid, and online. These courses include: Senior Seminar in Hospitality Management, Restaurant Management, and graduate level Strategic Management, Restaurant Development, and Internship. Dr. Moreo’s primary research area involves employee and consumer behavior in the food and beverage segment of the hospitality industry. Specifically, the impacts of emotional labor on customer perception of delivered service, as well as the impacts of individual employee characteristics and organizational culture on employee behavior. His efforts seek to understand and provide practical suggestions to help food and beverage organizations make their culture more positive to improve the employee experience.  Such solutions serve to benefit both the employees and patrons of the hospitality industry, as well as society as a whole.

Co-Principal Investigator: Lisa Cain, Ph.D. 

Lisa Cain is an Associate Professor in the Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Florida International University. Dr. Cain currently serves as the Immediate Past-President for the SECSA-ICHRIE and serves as an Associate Editor for both the International Journal of Consumer Studies and International Hospitality Review. Her research interests fall within the broad topics of organizational behavior and marketing, with an emphasis on understanding internal and external customer experiences. She was recently awarded a $300,000 grant on Hospitality and the IoT and a $265,000 grant on Foodservice 2030 and beyond. She has published in the areas of work-life balance, substance abuse among hospitality workers, gender issues, technology, and loyalty in the hospitality industry, and continues to develop research in these topics.


Research Team Members: 

Imran Ahmad, Ph.D. 

Imran Ahmad is a Research Assistant Professor at the Food & Agriculture Biotechnology Innovation Lab., at Florida International University (Miami, FL). He earned his doctorate in Management Technology from SIIT (Thailand). He researches in the area of Food Science, Technology, and Engineering. Before joining FIU, Dr. Ahmad served as an affiliated faculty member at the Biosystems Engineering Program Asian Institute of Technology (Thailand), where he lectured and developed new food, agriculture, and bio-system engineering courses. He has a keen interest in applying modeling and simulation techniques to biological systems. He has authored a number of papers on the application of the evolutionary algorithm in quality prediction and simulation of fresh produce quality. He is a professional member of the Research Chef Association (RCA) and the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT).