But come Boxing Day afternoon, she will be winging her way across Foveaux Strait, back to her beloved Stewart Island.
Travel is nothing new for Prof Rose. This is a woman who spent four years commuting between Stewart Island and Helsinki. She is used to spending time in either airport — or at 36,000ft.
"I love being other places. I’m a little over the process of getting there," the professor of International Business and Associate Dean (International) at the Otago Business School quipped.
For someone who initially wanted to study Russian history and work for the United Nations, it has been a career with a few "twists and turns" along the way.
American-born Prof Rose did her undergraduate degree in civil engineering — "I think bridges are massively cool" — at Princeton University.
After working for the Ford Motor Company as a product design engineer for three and a-half years, she decided she wanted to head back to school.
The desire to become an academic arose while at university. She obtained a master’s degree in civil engineering at the University of Michigan and was going to do her thesis on statistical approaches to structural design.
But she realised quite early on that she was better at statistics than at the structural element. She ended up getting a masters in mathematical statistics and a PhD in business administration, with a focus on statistics and management science.
Her first academic position was teaching at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
She found her research interests much more directed towards international business and strategy, a field that was quite open to having people with different backgrounds.
Prof Rose and her husband, a retired automotive engineer, moved to Auckland in 1997, where she joined the department of international business at Auckland University.
It was the job, rather than the country, that lured her at that stage.
"I’m American, I’m geographically challenged. I did know where New Zealand was but didn’t know much about it."
The couple figured they would probably stay a couple of years but they ended up getting citizenship as soon as they could.
New Zealand was now home and, in particular, Stewart Island had stolen her heart.
The couple went to Stewart Island for a holiday for their second Kiwi Christmas. They saw kiwis while out tramping and were hooked. They bought a home with the intention of using it for holidays and retirement.
In 2002, Prof Rose had some medical issues and the house became the couple’s permanent home from then until she got her job at the University of Otago in 2013.
"We get kiwis that come around at night. They come outside our bedroom window and screech. There’s no better way to get woken up in the middle of the night," she said.
Joining Otago ended a four-year period of commuting between Stewart Island and Helsinki, where she was Professor of International Business at the Aalto University School of Business (previously known as Helsinki School of Economics).
She was the first foreign full professor at the school and she enjoyed the job.
"They really value international business there. Nordic countries are a real hotbed of international business research. I learnt a tremendous amount being there," she said.
She retained a visiting appointment at Aalto, as visiting professor of international business, and usually had about two two-week stints in Finland a year.
But her work-related travel was not just limited to Finland. This year it has included trips to the United States, Africa, Germany, Australia and India. Part of her heart was now definitely in India — she is an adjunct professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Udaipur — and it had become her "happy place".
"I’m getting quite embedded in India. It’s confronting, it’s full on, it’s chaotic. There’s just a liveliness there. It’s quite amazing," she said.
Prof Rose now had some very good connections in India through work she had done with the Academy of International Business.
She was involved in creating linkages between Indian universities and secondary schools and Otago counterparts, to try to increase the Indian population here.
Earlier this year, she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, which was an "amazing honour".
"Basically, it recognises you as being a world-class scholar," she said.
She was the only fellow in New Zealand and it was a career highlight that had her "walking on air".
Her research dealt with various aspects of how firms undertook business across national borders, especially with respect to how firms made decisions about when and where to internationalise, and how they competed with each other in various parts of the world.
Her work has been published in a variety of top-tier international journals, including the Journal of International Business Studies, Management International Review, and Strategic Management Journal.
"There’s an endless supply of really interesting things to look at in this broad field of international business," she said.
While she acknowledged she had no work-life balance, she enjoyed what she did.
"I love doing research, I like teaching," she said.
