Seyedeh Zahra Hejrati

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2021 - 2022 Academic Year

How Can Digital Platforms and Data-Driven Algorithms Foster Entrepreneurship Among Refugees?

In 2018, the UN registered 25.9 million refugee cases. In addition, the majority of refugee hosting countries such as Ethiopia, face national challenges such as high unemployment rates and social unrest. To couple this, integrating these refugees in host communities while increasing their self-sufficiency has been a major challenge for policymakers. Despite these challenges, many refugees have higher entrepreneurial aspirations than locals yet face greater challenges in starting and growing their business. We aim to tackle these challenges by analyzing how entrepreneurial education and digital technologies, such as platforms and matching algorithms, promote entrepreneurship among the refugee population.

Seyedeh Zahra Hejrati, Department of Management Science and Engineering

Seyedeh Zahra Hejrati is a PhD student at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program in Management Science & Engineering Department. Hejrati's research interest is at the intersection of entrepreneurial venture formation and data-driven algorithms. More specifically, she is interested in how the latter affects entrepreneurial processes such as team formation, idea recognition, and resource acquisition and whether it improves entrepreneurs' chance of success. Prior to attending Stanford, Hejrati worked at a massive open online course startup in her home country of Iran as an early employee. She holds a BS in physics and a minor in economics from Sharif University of Technology, Iran.

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