AnnaLee (Anno) Saxenian is Dean of the School of Information and she holds a joint faculty appointment in the School of Information and the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarship focuses on regional economies and the conditions under which people, ideas, and geographies combine and connect into hubs of economic activity. She is a member of the Apple Academic Advisory Board, and has served as Chair of the Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation Division of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (NSF-SBE).
She is author of the internationally acclaimed Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard, 1994) which argues that Silicon Valley’s adaptive capacity derives from it decentralized industrial and social structures that support rapid information exchange and innovation. She is also the author of The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy (Harvard, 2006), 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 has published widely in journals of economic geography, regional economic development, and industrial change. She holds a Ph.D. from MIT, a Master's from U.C. Berkeley, and a BA from Williams College.