His musings led to a six-month, grant-funded expedition to steel towns in India, Korea, Japan and Brazil, and eventually to a book, The Global Restructuring of the Steel Industry . He then became interested in the auto and high-tech industries in the region, especially the rapid growth of the technology sector in his native India, which has the world's second-fastest-growing economy.

In the past, leaders in India were concerned about educated citizens leaving the country for more lucrative work in the U.S. Today, though, India draws businesses and workers from other countries. Companies like Microsoft are moving portions of their business overseas. India is becoming a major player in the world's lucrative software market, but the growth is creating a divide between the educated workforce and the poor. Nearly half of the country's population lives in poverty, and education is not yet available to the masses.

"I am concerned about issues of the poor in countries where these industries are growing," D'Costa said. "In the end, all of my studies have something to say about the people who are not well connected to the high-tech sector and economy."

D'Costa has written two books, one on Indian industrial transformation and one on the global steel industry, and edited two volumes of essays on the global software industry. He has also written hundreds of scholarly articles on these topics and is in demand internationally as a lecturer and instructor - which creates a hectic schedule of teaching and travel.

A founding UW Tacoma faculty member who teaches full time, D'Costa spends several months each summer performing research abroad. Recent travels have taken him to India, China and Norway, where he spent a summer as a visiting professor. He will spend the upcoming summer in Singapore with his wife and two children, ages 8 and 11, who often travel with him.

At home in Tacoma, he juggles teaching and research with a well-structured schedule - he's at his desk by 9:10 every morning, he says, and stays up until 1 a.m. writing papers or working on his next book, an examination of how the world economy is changing as the high-tech workforce moves around the globe.

"You have to have energy and enthusiasm for the research and be willing to put in a lot of sheer hard work."