Seungah Sarah LEE

Seungah Sarah Lee is an Assistant Professor of Management and Human Resources at HEC Paris. Her research broadly 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 broader 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 has a secondary interest in the organization of higher education. In this line of work, she studies organizational change and expanding actorhood of higher education institutions in response to globalization, social movements, and changing labor market demands from global, comparative perspectives.

Her work has been funded by the Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship, Sheikh Saud bin Saqr Al Qasimi Foundation for Policy Research, and the Stanford Abbasi Program on Islamic Studies and published in journals such as Organization Studies, Social Forces, World Development, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Scientific Reports, in numerous book chapters, as well as policy research reports. 

Prior to joining HEC Paris, Seungah was a Visiting Senior Lecturer at New York University Abu Dhabi. Prior to academia, she led organizational strategy and design for newly established education nonprofits and provided policy research and advisory services. She also worked as the interim director of a corporate philanthropic foundation, overseeing foundation strategy, board governance, and development of grant projects. She now serves the foundation as a Board Member.

She received her PhD in Organization Studies from Stanford University.