Dr. Marina Saitgalina is a tenured Associate Professor of Nonprofit Management at the School of Public Service, Strome College of Business. She teaches core courses in the MPA and PhD programs and oversees Nonprofit Management & Governance concentration in the MPA program. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor at Oakland University, Michigan, where she taught both accredited MPA courses as well as undergraduate courses in the Political Science department. She holds her MPA degree from the Academy of Public Administration in Russia, and a Ph.D. in Public Administration and Management from the University of North Texas.

Her research interests intersect multiple topics including nonprofit-government collaborations, professional associations, volunteering, emergency management and environmental aspects of nonprofit work, and social entrepreneurship. She has published in such journals as International Journal of Public Administration, Administration & Society, Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs, and Nonprofit Policy Forum among others.

Her commitment to linking the academic world to the world of practitioners and her dedication to nonprofit management is evident in student engagement in service-learning projects in her courses. Multiple local nonprofit organizations have benefited from this work. Her focus is on cross-disciplinary, applied, and community-engaged research, which supports her commitment to open-access research and education projects that maximize the benefit to the public, communities, and government work.