My professional experience is closely tied to my two passions: science, inspired by my Dad, and business, which has been a part of my life since early childhood thanks to my Mom – a remarkable businesswoman. In pursuing both an academic career and entrepreneurial endeavors, the theoretical knowledge I acquired has also been immensely valuable to me. After earning a Master’s degree in Finance and Banking from the Warsaw School of Economics (SGH) in Poland, I continued my education in the United States, focusing on business and management, and completed several executive education programs at Harvard Business School and the Wharton School. Completed over the course of two years, these programs equipped me with the expertise and strategic perspective necessary to build a business career spanning over two decades, during which I served as the founder and CEO of several successful start-ups in IT consulting, real estate development, and international trade. The ability to quickly learn new business sectors, together with strong organizational and leadership skills, has allowed me to adapt to rapidly changing market conditions and operate in diverse cross-cultural  environments.

 

As part of my entrepreneurial ventures, I have undertaken extensive international travel, visiting more than 90 countries worldwide. These included both large economies and small ones. The smaller ones drew my particular attention, and I decided to study them in greater depth. The culmination of this research was my doctoral thesis, which focused on the participation of the smallest economies in the world—collectively generating only 1% of global GDP—in globalization processes. I defended this dissertation at the Warsaw School of Economics (SGH) in Poland. Driven by a profound desire to further expand my knowledge on this group of countries I pursued postdoctoral studies at the Polytechnic University of Leiria in Portugal, with a primary focus on the tourism sector in these 93 nations. Concurrently, I independently continued to expand my expertise on them by exploring the geographical conditions, cultures contexts, political systems, and historical backgrounds, economic and demographic trends of these 93 economies. This extensive research resulted in the publication of academic books, which were distributed by Palgrave Macmillan to nearly all universities and academic libraries worldwide. My current research, in turn, focuses on poverty in the smallest economies in Africa, which I am conducting at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Switzerland, within the Department of International Economics.