Banu Ozkazanc-Pan

Barrett Hazeltine Professor of Practice, School of Engineering

Banu Ozkazanc-Pan, Ph.D., is the Barrett Hazeltine Professor of the Practice of Engineering at the School of Engineering and the Founder and Director of the Venture Capital Inclusion Lab at the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship at Brown University. 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 organizational culture and inclusion in venture capital and innovation ecosystems. Based on her expertise, Banu was invited to provide testimony on women and minority investors and entrepreneurs at the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship hearing on SBIC program reauthorization and has been a speaker on topics related to inclusion and innovation at the Harvard Business School, Brookings Institution, and Oxford University among others. Recently, Banu contributed her expertise to a Brookings Institute publication on why the CHIPS and Science Act won’t build inclusive innovation ecosystems on its own. She is currently a member of CNBC’s Disruptor 50 Advisory Council Member and the NASDAQ Venture Equity Project.

Banu has served as joint editor-in-chief at Gender, Work & Organization, the top academic journal within women’s studies and is a prolific academic researcher and scholar. She is the author of Transnational Migration and The New Subjects of Work: Transmigrants, Hybrids and Cosmopolitans. She has two books with Cambridge University Press titled Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: A Critical Gender Perspective (2021) and A Transnational Approach to Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (forthcoming). She earned her MBA from Loyola College in Maryland and her Ph.D. in Organization Studies from the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst.