Alexia Petersen

Alexia Petersen is a native of Toronto, Canada and resident of Aachen, Germany for over 30 years. She is an independent consultant, lecturer, and trainer in the field of applied intercultural communication, intercultural competence and diversity management. With over 20 years of experience in the field, she specialises in developing learning models and tools tailored to training technical and business professionals. She has worked closely over the years with companies from diverse professional fields such as Sony Germany, Cognis, Kuehne + Nagel, Dr. Oetker, Kraft Foods Germany, Ford Research, Philips APM/PLDS, Lumileds, and Shell Chemicals, to train middle to executive level managers, focusing on cross-cultural negotiation, conflict management, cross-cultural leadership, and optimising multicultural teams. In addition to teaching many target groups at RWTH Aachen University, she has been affiliated with the RWTH Business School and Executive MBA degree program since 2005 and is currently the principle lecturer of the module “Intercultural & Diversity Management”. Additionally, she teaches at various international graduate schools of numerous universities throughout Germany, Europe, and Japan, as well as in many independent research programmes of the Max Planck Institutes. She holds degrees from the University of Toronto and Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, and is currently working on a doctoral dissertation on her training model and tools at Goethe University in Frankfurt.