Maria C. Binz-Scharf is Assistant Professor of Management in the Economics Department at City College (CUNY), and a Research Fellow at the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies.

She teaches courses on Organization and Management, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Leadership. Her research focuses on the processes of knowledge sharing and change in bureaucratic organizations, with a particular interest in the role information technologies (IT) play in these processes. Using ethnographic methods, she has examined informal communication structures in government agencies as they implement IT to improve their service delivery. Currently, Binz-Scharf has a grant from the National Science Foundation to explore a network of practice of forensic scientists working in government crime labs across the US. Before joining the faculty at City College in 2004, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Prior to her stay at Harvard, she co-founded and managed the Center of Excellence for Electronic Government at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and worked at the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium.

Binz-Scharf holds a Ph.D. in business economics from the University of St. Gallen and a BA/MA from Bocconi University in Milan, Italy.

• Location, Location, Location? (April 19, 2006)