Marketing professor Valarie Zeithaml is an internationally recognized pioneer of services marketing. She has devoted the last 20 years to researching, consulting and teaching service quality, services management and customer equity.

Dr. Zeithaml is the David S. Van Pelt Family Distinguished Professor of Marketing and an award-winning teacher and researcher. She has researched customer expectations in more than 40 industries. She also has consulted with service and product companies, including IBM, Kaiser Permanente, GE, John Hancock Financial Services, Aetna, AT&T, Sears, Metropolitan Life Insurance, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan Bank, Allstate, U.S.West, BellSouth, Pacific Bell and Procter and Gamble.

The Marketing Science Institute (MSI) presented Dr. Zeithaml with the 2003 Robert D. Buzzell Best Paper Award for her paper, "Driving Customer Equity: Linking Customer Lifetime Value to Strategic Marketing Decisions," with Roland Rust (MBA '77, PhD '79) of the University of Maryland and Katherine N. Lemon of Boston College. The award honors authors who have made the most significant contribution to marketing practice and thought and signals the kind of writing and research that is of lasting value to corporate marketing executives.

Zeithaml and her co-authors also won the prestigious, inaugural Berry-American Marketing Association Book Prize for their book, Driving Customer Equity: How Customer Lifetime Value is Reshaping Corporate Strategy. She also co-authored the best-selling Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations and the textbook, Services Marketing.

She is the former associate dean of the MBA Program, former senior associate dean for academic affairs and former chair of marketing at UNC Kenan-Flagler.

She received her DBA and MBA from the University of Maryland and her BA from Gettysburg College.