M. Kathleen Burke, PhD, is an entrepreneurship scholar with a deep interest in how place attachment shapes social impact and regional development. She earned her PhD in Business Administration from the Stockholm School of Economics, where her research explored entrepreneurial ecosystems, including the evolution of mining entrepreneurship in Chile and the emergence of university-driven entrepreneurship across researchers in West Africa and Northwest England.
She is an affiliate researcher at the House of Sustainable Society at the Stockholm School of Economics and the Centre for Innovation Research and Competence in the Learning Economy at Lund University in Sweden. Her subsequent research and postdoctoral work have examined sustainable forestry and natural-resource management in Sweden, social-impact entrepreneurship in Turin, Italy, and semiconductor manufacturing and regional development at the University of Buffalo. She served as Program Manager for Social Entrepreneurship at Dartmouth College’s Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship and as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Global Engagement at MIT Open Learning, working at the intersection of entrepreneurship and global education.
Her scholarship has been supported by competitive funding from EU Horizon 2020, UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund, and the Wallenberg Foundation, and published in peer-reviewed journals such as Entrepreneurship and Regional Development Journal, the Journal of Technology Transfer, and the Handbook of Sociology of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Burke also teaches using future-scenario-based strategic planning methods, helping students explore how organizations and communities can navigate uncertainty and create sustainable futures. She is currently Executive Director of Business Programs at D’Youville University in her hometown of Buffalo, New York.
