Andrea Carafa

Andrea Carafa is an academic, entrepreneur, and angel investor based in Silicon Valley. He currently serves as QB3 Entrepreneur in Residence as well as Director of the Blackstone Launchpad powered by Techstars and Rachel Carson Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been named a member of the University of California Office of the President’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative, the Review Committee for the National Science Foundation America's Seed Fund, and the Fast Company Impact Council — a group of entrepreneurs, academics, investors, civil society leaders, and top executives of companies such as Google, Pfizer, NASDAQ, and Apple. He has also been named a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 Ambassador and Judge, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, Member of the Partnership on AI, and Delegate to the UN Science, Technology & Innovation Forum for the Sustainable Development Goals. His focus is on technologies and ventures for planet and societal health, with shared prosperity in mind from day one.

Prior to his current roles, he served as Founding Emergence Fellow at Stanford, founded a consumer tech startup and a sustainability design venture, and conducted research and lectured about entrepreneurship, human-centered design and technology innovation at Stanford, the University of Milan Bicocca, CERN, the European Commission, Bocconi and more. Carafa chaired the Impact Entrepreneurship Initiative at President Obama's Global Entrepreneurship Summit and advocated for climate tech and the creation of the Sustainable Development Goals at the UN. He was an EU Marie Curie Fellow in emerging technology for sustainable development and health, and helped shape Future Earth, a global sustainability research and innovation initiative announced at the UN Rio+20 Summit. He also co-created an EU Knowledge Alliance aimed at spurring innovation and entrepreneurship in European universities, and inspired CERN to launch CollSpotting, a data analytics platform helping science labs and companies to increase their technology transfer to society. He has been a speaker at institutions such as the World Economic Forum, European Commission, Expo, and UN, and his work and ideas have been featured by publications such as Reuters, Fortune, Fast Company, and the Huffington Post.