AnnaLee Saxenian has made a career of studying regional economics and the conditions under which people, ideas, and geographies combine and connect into hubs of economic activity. Her latest book, The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy (Harvard University Press, 2006) explores how and why immigrant engineers from Silicon Valley are transferring their technology entrepreneurship to emerging regions in their home countries—Taiwan, Israel, China and India in particular—and launching companies far from established centers of skill and technology. The “brain drain,” she argues, has now become “brain circulation”— a powerful economic force for the development of formerly peripheral regions that is sparking profound transformations in the global economy.

Saxenian is the dean of U.C. Berkeley’s School of Information and a professor in Berkeley’s department of city and regional planning. Her prior publications include Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard, 1994), Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs (Public Policy Institute of California, 1999), and Local and Global Networks of Immigrant Professionals in Silicon Valley (PPIC, 2002). She holds a PhD in political science from MIT, a master’s in regional planning from U.C. Berkeley, and a BA in economics from Williams College.

Website: AnnaLee Saxenian