Banu Ozkazanc-Pan is Professor of Practice at the School of Engineering and Academic Director of the IE Brown EMBA program. She is also the Founder and Director of the Venture Capital Inclusion Lab at the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship. The Lab was started in 2018 with funds from her $260,000 Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation grant examining the decision-making and network behaviors of VCs. The Lab focuses on understanding and solving funding inequities in the VC industry through data-driven research, education and advocacy. Banu’s research interests are mainly in the areas of diversity and inclusion in organizations and in entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Recently, Banu contributed her expertise to the 2021 UNGPs10+ consultation on the gender dimensions of business and human rights, which is intended to inform the work of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights’ UNGPs10+ ‘next decade’ project. She also contributed her expertise to the 2021 gender dimensions of business and human rights via the Danish Institute for Human Rights. Her piece in The Conversation, focusing on the intersections of gender, inclusion and tech, has over 33,000 reads and offers ideas and steps that are necessary for the tech sector to become inclusive. It was chosen for essential reading in relation to sexual harassment and discrimination in tech particularly in regards to the Activation Blizzard lawsuit. She is currently a member of CNBC’s Disruptor 50 Advisory Council Member and Academic Director at Brown University for the IE Brown Executive MBA.
Banu is currently Joint Editor in Chief of Gender, Work & Organization and the author of Transnational Migration and The New Subjects of Work: Transmigrants, Hybrids and Cosmopolitans. She has two forthcoming books with Cambridge University Press titled Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: A Critical Gender Perspective (2021) and A Transnational Approach to Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (2022). She can be reached at banu_ozkazanc-pan@brown.edu.
Her TedXBrownU talk with Emily Wanderer on inclusion in the social entrepreneurship field was live-streamed on November 19, 2020.
