Stephanie Marrus is Director of the Entrepreneurship Center. Her mission is to help start companies from UCSF science and technology and to build the entrepreneurial ecosystem at the University. Since joining in 2012, she has developed a robust suite of programs that have contributed to a vibrant entrepreneurial community at UCSF. In addition to heading the Center, she teaches and mentors startups and is Senior Lecturer/Course Director for UCSF’s entrepreneurship classes.
During a 25-year plus business career, she has worked with over 1000 companies in science and technology based industries as member of the management team, business consultant or mentor. Many of these companies have their technological roots at Berkeley, Stanford, UCSF, MIT and Harvard. She has had roles as CEO, COO and VP Business Development for public and private venture capital backed companies, led partnering and M&A transactions, headed corporate development, strategy, marketing, communications and investor relations. Her sector experience is in information technology and life sciences/healthcare.
In addition to her business career, she served as Deputy Secretary of Economic Affairs for Massachusetts governor William F. Weld, leading economic development and business policy, She also chaired an environmental cleanup fund board and became the fund’s Executive Director. She was President of a medical research foundation and served on the Advisory Board of a social venture startup accelerator. She mentors entrepreneurs globally through the US State Department and other programs.
She has translated her business experience to the classroom and teaches experiential courses in entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and globally. She has been affiliated with entrepreneurship programs at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University’s Technology Ventures Program. She has taught and presented at conferences in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. She frequently presents to international groups at UCSF.
Her academic titles have included Senior Lecturer at UCSF, Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley’s Center for Entrepreneurship in Technology, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and Entrepreneur–in-Residence for the Global Entrepreneurial Marketing Course at Stanford, She is National Science Foundation Certified National Faculty for Innovation Corps (I-Corps), its highly successful training for entrepreneurs. She led the creation of Lean LaunchPad for life science/healthcare under an NSF grant, now taught nationally by the NIH. She has been a guest lecturer at Singularity University.
Her global titles have included Adjunct Professor, St. Petersburg State University Graduate School of Management, Russia; Entrepreneur-in-Residence, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; faculty at the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo Startup Academy in Russia and in Silicon Valley. She attended the US Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission meeting on innovation in Moscow. She has been a guest speaker in Saudi Arabia under the sponsorship of Princess Sitah Bint Abdullah Al-Saud, daughter of King Abdullah; the US Consulate General and the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce, and taught at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). She has taught at Tsinghua University, Beijing, at ESADE Business School Barcelona in Argentina Chile Mexico Vietnam and Morocco. She taught for the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Vietnam Ministry of Science and Technology in Vietnam, presented to local and US officials at the US Embassy in Hanoi and keynoted the Peace through Entrepreneurship conference in Morocco.
She participates in the State Department’s International Speaker Program and led a panel at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES 2016) in Silicon Valley.
Her views on entrepreneurship in emerging markets have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Moscow News and AmericaEconomia. She has been interviewed by Russian television, the BBC and Argentine radio.
