Charles Eesley

Chuck Eesley is a professor and W.M. Keck Foundation Faculty Scholar in the department of management science and engineering at Stanford University. He is faculty director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and a faculty affiliate at the Stanford Center for AI Safety (SAFE). His research explores the intersection of artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship, and platform governance, with recent work examining how AI/ML algorithms influence opportunity access and entrepreneurial performance on digital platforms, as well as how these platforms finance and spread misinformation.

Prof. Eesley’s broader research examines how institutional and university environments influence high-growth, engineering-driven entrepreneurship. He studies how education and policy can better support the economic and entrepreneurial outcomes of engineering students and alumni. His recent projects often apply text analysis/NLP, machine learning, randomized field experiments, or software platform development—as in the case of NovoEd.com, which spun out of his and Prof. Amin Saberi's Venture Lab at Stanford.

His field research spans China, Japan, South Korea, Chile, Bangladesh, Uganda, Ethiopia, Thailand, and Silicon Valley, and has received awards from the Schulze Foundation, the Technical University of Munich, and the Kauffman Foundation. He was recently awarded a Stanford Social Impact Labs Design Fellowship for his work training refugee entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa.

He serves on the Steering Committee for the Stanford King Center on Global Development and the Advisory Committee for the Stanford Center at Peking University. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions and the Woods Institute for the Environment, and he serves on the Editorial Board of the Strategic Management Journal. His work has been published in Nature, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, and Biological Psychiatry, among others.

A former entrepreneur and investor, Prof. Eesley has been a mentor and advocate for immigrants and rural communities as well as first-generation, low-income students in STEM and entrepreneurship. He earned his Ph.D. at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and a B.S. in neuroscience from Duke University.

King Center Supported Research

2024 - 2025 Academic Year | Global Development Research Funding Grant

Empowering Refugees Through Entrepreneurship: Training, Microfinance, and Market Access in Uganda

This project aims to improve refugee livelihoods in Uganda through a bundled intervention that combines entrepreneurship training, mentoring, and microloans. Building on prior pilots and new evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa, we test a scalable “graduation model” designed to enhance opportunity development among refugee entrepreneurs. The project will use a rigorous evaluation design with local partners to assess impacts on business outcomes and livelihoods. By bridging entrepreneurship theory with development practice, this research contributes to both academic literature and practical policymaking for economic inclusion in displacement settings. Results will inform future program design across similar low-resource contexts globally.