Deborah Strumsky

Biography

Deborah Strumsky is an assistant professor at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe, Arizona. A longstanding research interest is the study of technological change and its relationship to economic growth, with a particular interest in energy systems. She received her BS in economic from the University of Southern Maine and her Masters and PhD in Regional Science from Cornell University. She worked as an Energy Market Analyst at Energy Security Analysis in Boston, Massachusetts before completing a post doc at the Harvard Business School. Deborah taught at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte before accepting a position at ASU in January, 2015.

Deborah was a co-author in Informs 2014 paper of the year “Mobility, skills, and the Michigan Non-compete Experiment” published in Management Science, and co-authored the “Patenting Prosperity: Invention and Economic Performance in the United States and its Metropolitan Areas” with the Brookings Institute. More recently, her focus had been a Department of Energy research grant, “Forecasting and influencing technological progress in solar energy.” This project studies the evolution of solar technologies by deconstructing a product into its constituent component technologies in such a way that they can be modeled as graph of interaction technologies and analyzed using network analysis methods. The goal of the project is to develop an empirically grounded theory and quantitative model of technological evolution in solar technologies that can be expanded to a broader set of technologies. The models will produce better forecasts of technological progress and provide quantitative methods that support better decision making in the allocation of technology research and development investments.