WISERTrade Team

Steve Coelen has been in academe for most of his professional career, a professor of Economics and Business at Penn State University, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Massachusetts. Work in international trade focused on development of WISERTrade, producing unique monthly information on the size, growth and competition in major world markets by detailed commodity groups. Professor Coelen left UMass as Professor Emeritus in 2004 to focus even more heavily in international trade, believing that small and medium-sized companies could not catch up internationally without access and understanding of the data on world markets. He serves on the advisory council to the University of Connecticut's CIBER Center, is developing a graduate level course that will be offered with distance ed technology to groups of four Universities simultaneously around the world to students and to company employees. He is building a Center of Excellence for African Economic Development and an African International Trade Hub. Professor Coelen is both the chief U.S. international advisor and an adjunct Professor at the University of Fort Hare, the oldest historically black higher education institution in South Africa, the institution in which Nelson Mandela and many other African leaders were educated.

Not to leave a perception that his work is one dimensional, Coelen is also working on: school accountability with student unit record data bases (focusing on the nine Northeastern U.S. States); carefully maintaining student and family privacy rights (for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education); and improving the means of accountability with student test data (for New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts Departments of Education. Coelen believes that the major overlap between trade and education is that a successful U.S. economic future will require more involvement in international trade without losing jobs and incomes as a consequence by constant substitution of higher level, higher educational creativity for more low paying and more manual labor.

Carla Miller is Manager of Trade Data Operations at WISER. She has worked with foreign trade statistics since 1987 when the U.S. Census released its first Customs based data on state exports. At that time Carla developed the original version of WISERTrade to provide states with easy access to the new data. Since then, Carla has expanded the database to cover global trade flows and works with the WISERTrade programming team on the WISERTrade web software.

Carla oversees WISER's database maintenance and development group which performs updates and revisions to the WISERTrade database and analyzes and formats new country datasets for addition to WISERTrade. Carla shares her trade data expertise in providing technical support and training to existing and prospective clients. She also produces customized annual state export reports and summaries for state government international trade offices.

After a stint as an Assistant Professor at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and fourteen years as the owner/manager of an international trade related business, Catherine joined WISERTrade in 2011. Her duties involve the assessment of integrity of new country datasets, their formatting and integration into WISERTrade. Catherine also contributes to the development of analytical and policy oriented tools and reports that require the integration of macro socio-economic variables.

Catherine holds an MSc., MBA and PhD in Management Sciences with minor in Economics. Catherine is a dual citizen of the USA and France and serves as liaison for European customers.

Jack works with the operations manager in updating export and import data uploaded monthly onto WISERTrade system by using Oracle programming through which the data is alternatively utilized by state trade development agencies, foreign consulates, school libraries, trade consultants and manufacturing companies. He conducts training and regularly showcases the WISERTrade system to international parties.

Jack's tasks include negotiations on behalf of the group with countries in Southeast Asia for rights to re-disseminate their statistical data in WISERTrade. He also provides technical support and training to WISERTrade prospects and existing clients. Prior joining WISER, Jack was a Project Manager for MML Investors Service, Inc., one of the MassMutual Financial Group companies. He was also a Financial Advisor in the private client group at Morgan Stanley. Jack earned his B.A. degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.