Moustafa Abu El Fadl, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Finance and Innovation

The business department here is growing, and I’m excited to be a part of that. With the accounting classes or the finance classes — we need to have a structure. We need to build them in a way where you build up management, marketing, and other skills and add those all together so that when someone says, “I have a bachelor’s degree in Business from UNE,” you have all that you need to compete for jobs. That potential drew me here to UNE, especially when I met the people who work in the Makerspace.

The way that they work with students to try to innovate with new techniques is impressive. I see opportunity there in ways that could be linked to business. You can link business applications to the Makerspace where we can then sell products. We see students who want to create or innovate a project, we give them the tools and help them, and then we show them the application and market for it. I would be happy to see those links happen at UNE.

Interprofessional Education

The fact that we have a campus in Morocco and a new program in Iceland adds a whole other element for our students. Also having a medical school is extremely unique. It’s the only one in Maine. Having that on the same campus with undergraduate students is very special. There is opportunity there to leverage business in medical applications as well.

You see these other schools that are really good in one thing — engineering, business, communication, medical — and then you have UNE, which is great in many areas and so is in a league of its own.