Shashi Buluswar

Dr. Shashi Buluswar is a scientist and a serial social entrepreneur working on a range of areas including global health, energy access, water and food security.

He is the Founder and President of the Institute for Transformative Technologies (ITT), incubated at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as a special initiative of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy under the Obama administration. With a mission to build technology solutions for sustainable global development, ITT launched India’s largest infrastructures for off-grid solar power and natural sanitation, which collectively serve hundreds of thousands of the country’s poorest citizens. In response to COVID-19, Shashi also led ITT’s launch of Oxygen Hub, which has become Africa’s largest medical oxygen franchise with operations in Kenya, Nigeria and Ethiopia.

In 2021-22, Shashi took a leave from ITT to build serve as the founding CEO of Global Health Labs, a new nonprofit created by Bill Gates to develop technology breakthroughs in global health, in partnership with the Gates Foundation. Prior to creating ITT, Shashi was a Partner at Dalberg Global Development Advisors, a mission-driven strategy consulting firm, and served several international NGOs, foundations, governments, social entrepreneurs, the World Bank, and a number of UN agencies.

Shashi is a recognized thought leader in the broader global equity and justice movement.

Doug Leeds

2017-2018 Social Impact Fellow

Doug was a Social Impact Fellow at CSSL developing ways to incorporate multi-sector leadership and social impact into the curriculum and advance our thinking about executive leadership and social purpose. Doug is now a member of Berkeley Haas’ Professional Faculty, teaching Leadership by Persuasion and co-teaching Creativity and Leadership. Doug is also CEO of EAT Club, the country’s leading B2B food delivery service, and recently led the company’s sale to Compass Group, PLC (LSE:CPG). He has held many executive positions at multiple companies prior to EAT Club.

Jill Vialet

2021-2022 Visiting Scholar

Jill Vialet is a serial social entrepreneur. She is the founder of Playworks, the co-founder of Substantial, and the co-founder of Oakland’s Museum of Children’s Art. Vialet was elected as an Ashoka Fellow in 2004, named by Forbes as one of 30 social entrepreneurs on its ‘Impact 30’ list in 2011, and received a James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award in 2013. Jill joins CSSL as a Fellow in 2021 to develop entrepreneurial ways to strengthen democracy by pairing new democracy entrepreneurs with experienced social entrepreneurs, to accelerate democracy entrepreneurship.

Jane Wei-Skillern

2015 To Date: Haas Senior Fellow

Jane is a recognized expert on the topic of collaboration in social enterprises, and she brought her network leadership research into her general social entrepreneurship courses and publications. During her time as a fellow, she narrowed her focus specifically to network leadership, developing research, articles, and cases on the topic. Jane convened groups of dozens of successful network leaders from around the world to share and develop best practices, thus advancing knowledge from the practice of network leadership to inform the theory of same. Jane Wei-Skillern has served as a Haas Senior Fellow since 2015, developing her focus on the practice of network leadership in social enterprises.

Laura Callanan

2013-2014 Visiting Scholar

Laura Callanan is the founding partner of Upstart Co-Lab, a national collaboration connecting artists, impact investors and social entrepreneurs to create more opportunities for artists to deliver social impact at scale. As Scholar in Residence at UC-Berkeley/Haas School of Business Laura authored three business school case studies featuring artist social entrepreneurs. She was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship and invited as a Visiting Scholar to the American Academy in Rome to continue this work. As a visiting fellow, Laura edited the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s 2015 Community Development Investment Review on the topic of creative placemaking. She was previously a consultant with McKinsey & Company, a Senior Adviser at the United Nations Development Programme, Executive Director of The Prospect Hill Foundation, and Associate Director at The Rockefeller Foundation. Laura Callanan served as a Visiting Scholar at CSSL in 2013-2014, studying the new field of arts as social entreprenership.