Faculty Spotlight

Dr. Mi Ae Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Sport Management Department. Before joining the School of Business at Farmingdale State College in fall 2018, Dr. Lee earned her Ph.D. in Business Administration with a focus on Sport Management from the Fox School of Business at Temple University, where she worked as a research fellow and an instructor. Dr. Lee received a master’s degree in Leisure Studies with an emphasis on Recreational Sport Management at the University of Iowa. She received a bachelor’s degree in clothing and textiles at Inha University in Korea. Prior to entering academia, Dr. Lee worked as a textile merchandiser and a fabric trading agent for Tri-state Trading Limited, an international fabric buying office and garment manufacturer in Korea. Her diverse academic and professional experiences are at the intersection between fashion and sports.

Dr. Lee maintains an active research agenda in the areas of sport consumers’ perceptions and their behavioral responses within the sports context; this creates opportunities to identify fan behaviors in a variety of sport and recreation venues. In particular, she has investigated whether group dynamics, such as group inclusiveness and personal distinctiveness, are significant factors that affect sport consumers’ perceptions and their team apparel purchase decisions.

Her research interest also lies in emerging trends in the sport industry (e.g., sport experience design, service-dominant marketing, and Esports). Sport businesses have been placing increased priority on the design and promotion of the customer experience. She specializes in examining sport fans’ psychological perceptions in various sports areas; designing customer experiences using systematic management tools and value-added elements can facilitate the delivery of experience-focused services. She uses quantitative research designs and methodologies, such as psychometric modeling, to practice her research and publication endeavors.

Through research collaborations with colleagues in sport consumer behavior domains, Dr. Lee has been published in a wide variety of peer-reviewed academic journals including: Sport Marketing Quarterly (SMQ), European Sport Management Quarterly (ESMQ), and International Journal of Human Movement Science (IJHMS). Dr. Lee’s work has been presented annually since 2012 at academic conferences, including the North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM), the Sport Marketing Association (SMA), and/or North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS).

At FSC, Dr. Lee currently teaches a variety of sport management courses (i.e., Intro to Sport Management, Sport Marketing, and Athletic Administration). She tries to apply a learning model that integrates a hands-on practice with learning in the classroom. Through learning integration, our students can be exposed to the latest sports industry tools and practices to give them a competitive edge.

Recently, her attention has been on sport experience design at Division III collegiate athletic events. She has another work in progress investigating the impact of physical and relational factors at college sporting events on spectators’ game experiences. She applies the empirical findings into her sport marketing and athletic administration courses to provide insightful evidence that rich touch points at college sporting events create the experiential value of sports events and influence long-term behavioral reactions. The initial results were presented at the FSC annual Celebration of Scholarship last November, and this work in progress was recently accepted for the NASSM (North American Society for Sport Management) 2020 conference presentation in San Diego, CA in May, 2020.