Professor Banu Ozkazanc-Pan is the Barrett Hazeltine Associate 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 was started in 2018 with funds from a $260,000 Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation grant examining 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 gender, inclusion, culture and innovation in organizations and entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Banu contributed her expertise to 2021 UNGPs10+ consultation on the gender dimensions of business and human rights, which is intended to inform the work of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights' UNGPs10+ 'next decade' project. She also contributed her expertise to the 2021 gender dimensions of business and human rights project via the Danish Institute for Human Rights. Her piece in The Conversation, focusing on the intersections of gender, inclusion and tech, has over 46,000 reads and offers ideas and steps necessary for the tech sector to become inclusive. It was chosen as an essential reading in relation to sexual harassment and discrimination in tech, particularly regarding the Activision Blizzard lawsuit. 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, Cambridge University, and Oxford University among others. Her research has been covered in CBS Boston, NPR All Things Considered, NBC News, and Boston Magazine among other media outlets. Banu is the winner of the Women in Academy of International Business (WAIB) top article in international business and migration on the 20th anniversary of the organization and is featured on #thinklist30, which is a list of influential female scholars on social media around issues of responsible business
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.