Shama Patel

Faculty Fellow

Joined Stern 2024

Leonard N. Stern School of Business
Kaufman Management Center
44 West Fourth Street, KMC 8
New York, NY 10012

Biography

Shama Patel joined the Stern School of Business as Assistant Professor/Post-Doctoral Fellow upon receiving the NYU Provost Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2024.

Shama is a scholar, educator, and practitioner working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, digital strategy, and organizational change. She teaches Digital Strategy to MBA students and is developing a new course on AI Ethics in Business and Society to equip leaders with the skills to navigate the social, technical, and regulatory dimensions of intelligent systems.

Her research investigates how AI and digital media influence civic engagement, institutional change, and organizational decision-making. Building on her PhD work on "affective contagion" in global movements, she studies how algorithmic infrastructures shape culture, participation, politics and power dynamics. As a member of the Post-Doctoral Council at NYU, she advocates for career flexibility, interdisciplinary collaboration, and visibility beyond traditional pathways.

Alongside her academic work, Shama brings two decades of leadership in digital transformation and organizational change across Fortune 500 and entrepreneurial environments. As the founder of Drive Change, she has assisted business leaders in driving technological change from ideation to implementation. Additionally, she has held leadership positions at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Accenture and United Airlines where she delivered large-scale digital transformation initiatives.

Patel holds a Ph.D. in Digitalization from the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark and an M.S. in Computer Science from Northern Illinois University, USA.

Research Interests

Digital Media
Affective Contagion
Artificial Intelligence
Memes/Memetics
Socio-Political Change
Digital Transformation

Courses Taught

Digital Strategy

Academic Background

PhD, Digitalization
Copenhagen Business School

MS, Computer Science
Northern Illinois University

BS, Geology
Delhi University

Selected Publications

Patel, Shama (2025)
Memetic contagion in the organizing of a political campaign: A study of Kamala Harris memes.

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2025(1), 12567.

Patel, Shama (2023)
The Summer of 2020: Situating Digital Media in Scaling Affective Contagion: A Case of the George Floyd Video
PhD Dissertation, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Digitization, Copenhagen, Denmark

Knudsen, Britta Timm and Shama Patel (2023)
Digital Media Revitalising Colonial Heritage: The George Floyd Video Translocalized in Denmark
International Journal of Heritage Studies 29 (10): 1041–60

Patel, Shama and John Postill (2023)
How to Do a Digital Epidemiography
In An Ethnographic Inventory: Field Devices for Anthropological Inquiry, 1st ed., 62–72 London

Patel, Shama and Mattias Tinghøj Hansen (2022)
Material-Affective Assemblage Thinking in Researching Scalar Phenomena
In International Conference on Information Systems

Patel, Shama, Abayomi Baiyere, and Christian Garmaan Johnsen (2022)
Beyond Practice: Assemblage Thinking in Sociomateriality Research
In European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS)

Patel, Shama and Ionna Constantiou (2020)
Human Agency in the Propagation of False Information - A Conceptual Framework
In European Conference on Information Studies (ECIS)