Jeffrey Snell, PhD

Jeff’s leadership and start-up experiences span the for-profit (biopharmaceutical), non-profit (social enterprise), philanthropic (private foundation), and higher education (senior advisor) sectors. Most recently, he was a Innovation and Commercialization Specialist at UW–Madison’s Discovery to Product (D2P). He aslo served as Entrepreneurial Mentor for the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program and his mentored start-ups (~100) have garnered best new business awards by chambers of commerce, receipt of the Morgridge Force for Positive Change award in Wisconsin, and individual national recognition, including honors from the Manhattan Institute, selection as a Fellow for Ashoka, and receipt of a MacArthur “Genius” Award. As founder of Midwest Social Innovation, LLC (2014), he co-created a partnership with the New York Times to develop a platform that equips educators with social innovation learning modules (selected by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as one of 10 winners in a field of 1,000 proposals from 15 countries). For his work in social innovation, Jeff was elected in 2011 to Alpha Sigma Nu, the international honor society for Jesuit colleges and universities; appointed in 2018 as a Fellow at the Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity at Southern Methodist University; and appointed in 2019 as Senior Fellow in Social Innovation at ASU’s Lodestar Center.