Marina Apaydin is a professor of management at the Onsi Sawiris School of Business at The American University in Cairo with more than a decade of teaching experience in the Middle East and North Africa. She holds a PhD in strategic management and innovation from Western University, an MBA in finance and international business, an MA in Islamic studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and an MS in unmanned aerial vehicles from Leningrad Electrical Engineering University.

Before joining academia, Apaydin served as deputy director for management at UNESCO's World Heritage Center in Paris, following two decades of professional experience in finance, business consulting and marketing across Europe, the Middle East and the United States. She developed and published the 3A framework for critical thinking, which formed the basis for the Contemporary Management textbook by McGraw-Hill and inspired an alumni association created by her students.

Her teaching covers strategic and cross-cultural management, innovation, international business, decision-making, change management, team building and business communication. She has also delivered workshops on case writing, teaching and learning at universities in Canada, Turkey, China, Egypt and Lebanon, both in person and online. Apaydin has published in academic and practitioner journals and teaches in English, French, Italian, Russian and Arabic.