Vanessa Ceia

Vanessa Ceia, Ph.D. is an innovation strategy and management consultant, researcher, and policy advisor on responsible tech. She helps large organizations ideate, incubate, and scale new ventures and achieve their blended growth and social goals. She is an expert researcher who uses qualitative and quantitative insights to identify customer, user, and stakeholder needs, validate ideas, bring value to, and grow sustainable ventures across private, non-profit, and public sectors.

Vanessa has 15+ years of experience creating ecosystem partnerships, leading multi-functional projects and teams, integrating innovative technologies and digital solutions into higher education, setting up policy, research, and innovation labs, and expertise in data analysis and visualization, human-centered design, Design Thinking, and social innovation. Her clients include large multinational technology and engineering, academic, construction, arts and culture, international development, non-profit, and telecommunications organizations, including their respective innovation units in Silicon Valley.

Vanessa’s publications include industry and peer-reviewed articles and business case studies on topics ranging from innovation at large multinationals, gender and tech, digital disruption, new business-building, Natural Language Processing, feminist networks on social media, political sentiment on Twitter, and the social impacts of portrayals of women and LGBTQ+ communities in contemporary media.

Vanessa holds a Ph.D. from New York University, an M.A. from McGill University, and a B.A. from the University of Toronto. She also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University and is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese and conversational in French.