Seungah Lee
Seungah Sarah Lee is an Assistant Professor of Management and Human Resources at HEC Paris, based on the Doha campus.
Her research explores how organizations adapt global ideas and institutional norms to address complex challenges and drive sustainable development, social impact, and entrepreneurial growth. Her work examines how governments, corporations, and social-sector organizations navigate social, economic, and technological change, and how they build the leadership and organizational capacity needed to foster entrepreneurship and innovation in diverse local contexts.
She also studies the organization of higher education, focusing on organizational change and the expanding actorhood of universities in response to globalization, social movements, and changing labor market demands. In this line of work, she examines how universities position themselves internationally, how global models are translated across national contexts, and how fundraising and development offices have spread across higher education systems.
Her recent research includes studies on internationalization across more than 500 universities in 89 countries, and on the global diffusion of university development and fundraising practices. In the Breakthroughs podcast, she discusses how geopolitics, student mobility, global rankings, and emerging South-South cooperation are reshaping higher education, as well as why professional networks appear to matter more than market forces alone in the spread of university fundraising.
Her work has been funded by the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, the Sheikh Saud bin Saqr Al Qasimi Foundation for Policy Research, and the Stanford Abbasi Program on Islamic Studies. Her research has been published in journals including Organization Studies, Social Forces, World Development, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Scientific Reports, and Social Justice Research, as well as in book chapters and policy research reports.
Before joining HEC Paris in 2024, Seungah Sarah Lee was Visiting Senior Lecturer in Social Research and Public Policy at New York University Abu Dhabi. Prior to academia, she led organizational strategy and design for newly established education nonprofits, provided policy research and advisory services, and served as interim director of a corporate philanthropic foundation. She holds a PhD in Organization Studies and International Comparative Education from Stanford University and a master’s degree in social sciences from Harvard University.
Last Articles
Could Universities Become the New Face of Soft Power?
New research explores how geopolitics, student mobility, global rankings, South-South cooperation, and university fundraising are reshaping higher education.