Bio
Gordon founded the Social Entrepreneurship Collaboratory (SE Labs) at Stanford, Harvard and Princeton. He teaches about the design, development and leadership of innovative social impact ventures in global health and environmental sustainability.
At Stanford, Gordon is director of the Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Lab (SE Lab)- Human & Planetary Health and is a faculty fellow of the Center for Innovation in Global Health. He is a Lecturer in the School of Medicine, Division of Primary Care and Population Health/Dept. of Medicine, and an advisor in the Distinguished Careers Institute (DCI), and the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program, and cofounder of the Stanford Sustainable Societies Lab.
At Harvard, Gordon taught jointly on the faculties of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health (Health Policy & Management) and the Harvard Kennedy School (Management, Leadership & Decision Sciences) and served as an Expert-in-Residence (EiR) at the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-Lab), and affiliated faculty at the Center for Primary Care, Harvard Medical School (HMS). He was faculty director of the Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Lab (SE Lab) for US & Global Health, an incubator course taught in a new interdisciplinary, collaborative model based at the i-Lab. He has also served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (2013-2014) at Harvard Business School in the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, on the Faculty of Arts & Sciences in the Sociology Department, at the Harvard Kennedy School, on the Leadership & Management faculty, and as a principal of the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations (2004-2007). Gordon served as one of the founding faculty of the $10 million Reynolds Fellows Program in Social Entrepreneurship, a Center for Public Leadership and Harvard President’s interdisciplinary fellowship initiative that paid full tuition and stipend for graduate students from the Harvard Kennedy School, School of Public Health and Graduate School of Education.
At Princeton, Gordon served as Dean’s Visiting Professor in Entrepreneurship in 2009-2010. Working together with the School of Engineering & Applied Science, the [Woodrow Wilson] School of Public & International Affairs, and the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, he launched a new set of programs and prizes in social innovation and entrepreneurship in collaboration with students, faculty and alumni.
At Stanford in 2001-2002, Gordon created the SE Lab, a Silicon Valley and technology–influenced, interdisciplinary incubator for social impact ventures and global problem solving. Gordon taught on the Public Policy Program and Urban Studies Program faculties (School of Humanities & Sciences) and served as a faculty affiliate at the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a Program Officer at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Many of the talented students and fellows in Gordon’s SE Labs have won the top awards of prestigious idea and business plan competitions, including those at Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and MIT.
Gordon is a co-author in the edited volume Frontiers in Social Innovation (N. Malhotra, ed., Harvard Business Review Press, 2022) and Social Entrepreneurship: New Models of Sustainable Social Change (A. Nicholls, ed., Oxford University Press, 2006/2008) and served as a founding member of the Oxford/Ashoka led University Network for Social Entrepreneurship. His interest in entrepreneurship is informed by work in both the private and nonprofit sectors in the U.S. (New York, Cambridge, Palo Alto), Europe (London, Paris) and Asia (Hong Kong), as CEO of a medical technology company (EDAP Technomed, USA) and in international strategy consulting (Bain & Co. Ltd.).
Gordon is married to Sara Singer- they on occasion teach together at Stanford, have a daughter Audrey and son Jason, and live in the Frenchman's Hill residential section of campus.
