A short bio

I was recently featured in the Hanken Newsletter. Here is the text.

Carlos Diaz Ruiz in Auckland New Zealand.

When Carlos Diaz Ruiz started as Associate Professor at Hanken in January 2022 he was already very familiar with Finland since he also did PhD in Hanken. At present he works at the Department of Marketing in Vaasa teaching consumption, markets and culture.

Carlos was born in Mexico City but fell in love with Finland when he did his master’s degree in Jyväskylä. The idea of focusing on education and the Nordic values was something he brought back to Mexico and started working for Mexican Airlines, where he applied social research methods.

“We discovered for instance, that the migrant workers in the US fly back for holidays in Mexico, but when they fly back, they also need to travel by land to other parts of the country and they don't like to travel by night. When we realised this, we introduced midnight flights from the US that would arrive to Mexico very early in the morning so they could continue to their final destinations. These flights were always full and a great success.”

Carlos was so inspired from the research he did for the airline company, that he decided to do a PhD and to do it in Finland because of the Nordic values.

“The reason I chose Hanken for my PhD was because Hanken academics like Christian Grönroos or Tore Strandvik have a distinctive way of thinking. It's clear that they are not following everyone else. They were doing something of their own which is very unique, and I wanted to learn to do that.”  

After he got his PhD, Carlos moved on to work for KEDGE Business School in Bordeaux, France. He enjoyed working there and stayed on for three years, but the researchers that he was mostly collaborating with, for example Kaj Storbacka and Suvi Nenonen from Hanken, were all moving to New Zealand to create a market shaping hub.

“This was very attractive for me, so when they asked me to join, I moved there because I wanted to work with these highly inspiring people. It was a fantastic time, but then the pandemic hit and kind of dismantled everything, so we decided to come back to Finland and Hanken again in 2022.”  

Since the pandemic, Carlos’ work has changed a lot. He is now focusing on disinformation and what makes its circulation profitable online. The topic interests also journalists and policy makers and he has published frequently in several outlets and has received attention in media and policy. He also teaches students on both bachelor and master level.

“I really like teaching Finnish students. They are very interested in developing their own world view and their thinking. The fact that we have the possibility to have small groups allows us to have much more interaction. That gives the student the opportunity to think and reflect rather than just coming to listen to something.”

In his free time, Carlos spends a lot of time with his five-year-old daughter, his partner Ksenia Kosheleva, who is a doctoral researcher at Hanken, and he also enjoys dancing salsa, which he learned in Finland, not Mexico.

“In Mexico, everyone knows the same 5-6 salsa steps. They follow the rhythm and it's like a folk dance. But when I went to a salsa party in Finland where people actually knew the dance, I was completely shocked and realised that I could not do any of it. So, I started to take salsa classes and it turns out that a Finnish engineer taught me how to dance salsa!”

Text: Marlene Günsberg
Photo: Private, taken outside of Auckland, New Zealand