Shulamit Kahn has been at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business since 1987. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in Economics in 1983, and taught at the University of California, Irvine in the intervening years. Her specialty is labor economics and human resources. One stream of her recent and ongoing research studies careers of scientists. This includes work is on gender differences in academic sciences (biomedicine, economics, social sciences, etc.), the impact of postdocs on scientific careers, how engineering careers develop, and more. Much of this work has been funded by National Institutes of health.

In a second stream of current research related to science, Professor Kahn is studying the contributions of foreign Ph.D. students to global knowledge creation and diffusion, entrepreneurship and innovation. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.