Senay Agca

Şenay Ağca is the chief diversity officer and a professor of finance at the George Washington University School of Business (GWSB). As the chief diversity officer, she chairs the Dean's Diversity Council and leads the school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion activities. Senay has been working as a mentor for women in finance and economics associations. She has been invited as a speaker on diversity, equity and inclusion both in the U.S. and Europe. She has worked as a program director for the Science of Broadening Participation program at the National Science Foundation (NSF), advancing research on understanding the factors that advance and the barriers that limit ability of participation in science. She is also currently working as an advisory committee member on an NSF supported National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER) project to promote and mentor researchers for external funding opportunities in institutions with statistically underrepresented groups in science.

Her research interests are corporate-government dynamics, macro-finance, credit risk, bioeconomy, and supply chains. She has worked as an economics program director at the NSF. Her roles at the NSF included working in developing and managing strategically important research programs for the U.S. She was the lead program director in managing COVID-19 rapid response proposals in economics and finance, and was awarded a certificate of excellence for these accomplishments from the NSF. She was a steering committee member for the bioeconomy program, and a program director of the Future Manufacturing program on cyber-, eco- and bio-manufacturing areas. She has also worked in running idea labs for Harnessing the Data Revolution, as well as in programs on Graduate Research Fellowship, Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison for Industry (GOALI) and the 2026 NSF idea machine. She has also worked as a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund and Sciences Po at various periods since 2006.

Senay has published in major finance and economics journals, and her papers including those with her Ph.D. students have been nominated for best paper awards. She has won diverse grants such as the National Science Foundation Grant, the J. Wendell and Louise Crain Research Fellowship, GW-CIBER research grants, an American Consortium on European Union Studies grant, a GW Institute for Corporate Responsibility grant, and a Dean’s Scholarship. She was one of the key members who worked on developing and launching the IFC-Milken Institute Capital Markets Program at GW.