Smita Satiani

Smita Satiani is an Indian-Pakistani American social innovation strategist who has spent the last decade at the forefront of the innovation economy. She is currently serving on the policy team at Google[x], a moonshot factory inside of Alphabet, Inc. designing products to make the world a better place.

Previously, Smita was a Deputy Director of the White House's Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program, a technology shop inside the federal government that is tackling some our nation’s biggest challenges with a user-centric approach. She lead portfolio curation, external evangelism, and engagement with over 20 U.S. government agencies.

Before that Smita spent nearly four years at Ashoka, the largest network of social entrepreneurs across the world, working in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, South Africa, Germany, France, Senegal and Kenya. She has also worked at the William J. Clinton Foundation managing an entrepreneur mentoring program for women and minority small-business owners across 5 cities in the U.S., and at the Los Angeles Commission on the Status of Women.

Over the last 6 years, she has staffed and advised over 20 Heads of State and First Ladies as the Director of the Global First Ladies Alliance (GFLA). She received a B.A. in Criminology and Political Science at UC Irvine, a Master of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, and completed international policy and secret intelligence programs at Georgetown University and at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. Her work has been been featured on Forbes.com, TechCrunch, The Huffington Post, and she was awarded USC's Remarkable Woman Award.

She has tried to spend the greater part of her life discovering the world through experiences that include: great white shark-diving in South Africa, sailing the the Sicilian and Tunisian coastlines, training rats to sniff out landmines in Tanzania, skiing the French Alps, leading a cross-country train journey across the U.S., swimming in Vieques’ bioluminescent bay, and road-tripping from the north to the south of Brazil. She can be reached at ssatiani@gmail.com.