Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen completed her doctoral work at the University of Georgia. Her research interests are transdisciplinary in the fields of international business, innovation ecosystems, and urban-regional restructuring. In international business, she has worked on the spatial and temporal dynamics of foreign direct investment, internationalization of pharmaceutical companies, and the importance of collaboration in innovation in the bioeconomy. She was one of the first group of visiting faculty members at the School of Business, Economics and Law at Gothenburg University, Sweden. She is currently a member of the International Academic Advisory Council at the School of Business, Economics and Law.
She has undertaken NSF-funded research on various aspects of high technology industries. One of her first NSF-funded research projects was on understanding the importance of clusters and collaboration in innovation within small and medium companies in the biotechnology industry. An extension of this research was to study the evolution of ecosystems in biopharma in India and the United Kingdom. This was followed by another NSF-funded study of renewable energy firms and their competitive (innovation and collaboration) strategies. One of her interests has been to study energy transition patterns across the developing world to explore policy-practice mismatch.
In the area of high technology’s impact on society, her collaborative NSF research on workforce development in the United States was one of the first to offer an understanding of women in cybersecurity. In recent years, she has been studying urban and regional restructuring in the United States with a focus on the role of demographic, economic, and technological shifts. She published a book, based on collaboration with her students, entitled Shrinking Cities: An Understanding Urban Decline in the United States. Her recent work is focusing on a comparative analysis of growing and declining regions across the United States.