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
E-mail sp8533@stern.nyu.edu
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)