Catherine Beaudry

Biography

Catherine Beaudry, Rhodes Scholar, has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Oxford where she also obtained an M.Phil. in economics. From her first degree in electrical engineering specialised in satellite technology and her participation at the summer session of the International Space University, she has kept a strong interest on technology, science and innovation. She is an associate professor at the Mathematics and Industrial Engineering Department of École Polytechnique de Montréal. She is also an adjunct professor at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), a member of the Centre for interuniversity research on science and technology (CIRST) and a researcher at the Centre for interuniversity research and analysis of organization (CIRANO). Before moving to Montreal, she was a postdoctoral fellow followed by a Leverhulme Research Fellow at Manchester Business School where she worked on clusters. She is a principal investigator on a number of grants and is responsible for the Governance group of the Nanotechnology Ethical, Environmental, Economic, Legal and Social (NE3LS) Network in Quebec.Her main research interests are the analysis of innovation networks, collaboration, partnerships and alliances, industrial clusters, innovative firm performance and survival. As such, she is interested in the interaction between the geographical space (i.e. clusters and regional systems of innovation) surrounding firms, scientists and inventors and the technological space (i.e. networks) within which firms, scientists and inventors find collaborators. Her current research focuses on the impact of university funded research in biotechnology and nanotechnology as well as on the mapping of knowledge proximity within nanomedicine and nanobiotechnology. In addition, she has recently worked on knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) firms, and is in the process of developing a research program with the Canadian Space Agency on the measurement of outcomes and impacts of space research.