Dr Alena Pivavarava

Alena Pivavarava was a Post-Doctoral Researcher on the ERC funded project Global Correspondent Banking 1870-2000 (Mar 21-Mar 24).

Her particular interest is in creating new large-scale datasets and applying advanced modelling and social network analysis (SNA) to historical data, and her future aspiration is to develop methods for scraping historical data for archival research.

She completed her PhD at Aston Business School, where she developed quantitative research into the effect of state-business relations on the internationalisation of Russian firms over two historical periods: after the immediate collapse of the Soviet Union and the power transition in the 2000s.

Previously, she also held research positions at the Cambridge Judge Business School (at the CAF and CBR), modelling firms’ investment decisions and growth. At the Department of Politics and IR at Oxford, she was responsible for the data analysis on a project investigating the change in the global governance of capital markets since the 1930s. She also created SQL datasets (scraping web-data in Python) on innovation networks of hi-tech firms at the Centre for Business Network Analysis (University of Greenwich), among other research positions at King’s College London.

Research interests

Her research and teaching interests are inter-disciplinary, bringing data science into the fields of firm internationalisation and geopolitics. She is particularly keen on developing novel modelling strategies and creating large-scale longitudinal datasets for the social sciences. She is currently working on SNA methodologies to capture the evolution of global innovation networks, corporate structures and political strategies of MNEs, and constructing cross-country datasets for this research.