Banu Ozkazanc-Pan, Ph.D.

Banu Ozkazanc-Pan is 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 was interviewed by NBC News about equity and entrepreneurship. In June 2019, she was invited to testify at the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship hearing to re-authorize the SBIC program to speak about the importance of women and minorities as investors and as entrepreneurs for the economy. She has also contributed her expertise on gender and inclusion to the 2018 UN Report on “Gender Lens to the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Rights” (see RMIT 1, 2 and 3 reports). Her research has been covered in CBS Boston, NPR All Things Considered, NBC News, and Boston Magazine among other media outlets. Her piece in The Conversation, focusing on the intersections of gender, inclusion and tech, has over 24,000 reads and offers ideas and steps that are necessary for the tech sector to become inclusive.

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 (2020) and A Transnational Approach to Entrepreneurial Ecosystems(2021).

Her TedXBrownU talk with Emily Wanderer on inclusion in the social entrepreneurship field will be live streamed on November 19, 2020.