Dr. I. Elaine Allen has been appointed Chair of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Research Committee by the Global Entrepreneurship Research Association (GERA).

Professor Allen is the Research Director of the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship and an Associate Professor of Statistics and Entrepreneurship at Babson College. She is also Co-Director of the Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG).

Prior to joining Babson, she held executive positions in the healthcare and biotechnology industry, including at Centocor, ARIAD and MetaWorks, Inc. She also held faculty appointments at the University of Pennsylvania and at Rutgers University.  Her entrepreneurial activities include starting StatSystems, a medical device company; ARIAD Pharmaceuticals, a publicly held biotechnology company; and Pondview Associates, a high tech consulting firm.

She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the American Society for Quality. She has published widely in statistical, clinical, and managed care journals on statistical issues in meta-analysis, data mining, clinical and biological research methodology and statistical computing. 

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) research program is an annual assessment of the national level of entrepreneurial activity. A partnership between London Business School and Babson College, it was initiated in 1999 with 10 countries, expanded to 21 in the year 2000, with 29 countries in 2001 and 37 countries in 2002. GEM 2006 conducted research in 42 countries.

In 2005 the national teams, London Business School and Babson College established an independent, not-for-profit company called the Global Entrepreneurship Research Association (GERA) to oversee the operations of GEM.  For more information, visit www.gemconsortium.org.