Primary Job Title Chair and Faculty, Global Grand Challenges and Leader, Social Impact Strategy Primary Organization Singularity University
Location Mountain View, California, United States Regions San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, West Coast Gender Female
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Darlene Damm is Principal Faculty for Global Grand Challenges with Singularity University where she works on how exponential technologies can solve the world’s most urgent social problems. Much of her recent work focuses on helping schools and companies understand the skills humans will need in a world of accelerating change, robotics, artificial
intelligence and augmented and virtual reality.
Darlene is a social entrepreneur. She previously served with Ashoka, the world’s largest organization of social entrepreneurs, where she was critical to the launch of their changemaker education initiative now active in schools in over 30 countries. She led Ashoka’s efforts in the Silicon Valley, creating major partnerships with Google, Facebook and LinkedIn to engage millions of parents and teachers in a movement to ensure all children learn empathy and changemaking as skills for a world of change. Her research uncovered trends showing that as robotics and artificial intelligence come online, humans will transition into work requiring high levels of social emotional intelligence focusing on social innovation.
Darlene is also the founder of the space company DIYROCKETS, which crowdsources and democratizes the development of space technology. She was an early co-founder of Matternet, one of the world’s first commercial drone companies.
Early in her career she launched and served on education and poverty alleviation initiatives that helped Vietnam, Myanmar and Indonesia transition into the global economy. She received her bachelor’s degree in History from Stanford University, her master’s degree in International Affairs from Johns Hopkins SAIS and studied exponential technologies at the Singularity University.
