Vida Vanchan is a professor at SUNY-Buffalo State. She holds a doctorate in international economic and business geographies and a master’s degree in international trade from University at Buffalo.

She founded Southeast Asia (SEA) Week and has organized this annual event on Buffalo State campus since 2012. The SEA Week events feature lecture series, student presentations, panel discussions and performances involving Southeast Asian countries and beyond. In addition, she has worked on educational development and capacity building projects in Cambodia for many years.

Vanchan teaches courses in nonprofit human resource management; globalization, technology, competition, and service economies; geographies of development, human geography, world regional geography, principles of economic geography, industrial geography, geography of Asia, introduction to urban geography, and corporate applications in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Her research interests include reshoring and development; local to regional development; trade and investments (FDIs); industrial competitiveness and competitive characteristics of firms; cross-cultural management and negotiation; Southeast Asia, and emerging economies.