Angelina Frolova, PhD candidate at EPFL's Entrepreneurship and Technology Commercialization (ENTC) lab and a close collaborator of the EPFL Space Center, recently completed a six-week research stay at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, hosted by Professor Shufan Wu at the School of Astronautics and Aeronautics.
Shanghai has emerged as a hub for China's thriving commercial space industry; an ideal setting for Angelina's doctoral research on space entrepreneurship. Her stay was driven by a cross-cultural research question at the heart of her PhD: which patterns in entrepreneurial behavior hold across very different institutional and cultural contexts? Rather than drawing comparisons between European and Chinese startups, she was looking for the deeper constants: the entrepreneurial fundamentals that transcend geography.
The university extended a warm welcome, and the six weeks proved to be a rich and productive time for research. Beyond her own work, Angelina also gave a guest lecture to PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in space engineering and astrophysics on the topic of space sustainability, a subject she considers still underexplored, despite its growing importance for the future of the sector.
Angelina's profile bridges the technical and the managerial: she previously served as Financial Director of the EPFL Spacecraft Team's CHESS mission and has presented research at major venues including the International Astronautical Congress (IAC). Her ongoing work on technology commercialization and technology spillovers from the space sector continues to enrich the broader EPFL space community.