ABOUT BINA

Bina Venkataraman is an executive, journalist, and science & innovation policy expert whose leadership roles have spanned The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Broad Institute of Harvard & MIT, and the Obama White House. She is the author of The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age (Riverhead, 2019), named a top business book by The Financial Times and a best book of the year by National Public Radio.  Her leadership is motivated by a deep commitment to public service and a strong ethic to embolden and mentor others.

Bina served as Editorial Page Editor of The Boston Globe from 2019-2022, overseeing the news organization’s opinion coverage and editorial board during two presidential impeachment trials, the 2020 election, the COVID-19 pandemic, the death of George Floyd, the Capitol insurrection, and Boston’s 2021 mayoral election. During her tenure, the Globe penned two Pulitzer finalist series in editorial writing and forged a historic partnership with Boston University. She then became the inaugural Columnist of the Future at The Washington Post and the first Editor-at-Large for strategy and innovation on the Post’s masthead.

Bina formerly served as Senior Advisor for Climate Change Innovation in the executive office of President Obama, supporting community resilience efforts and bringing problem-solvers together from across the public and private sectors. She also built cross-sector partnerships on issues from disease outbreak response to K-12 education as the former Director of Global Policy Initiatives at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and as a policy advisor to President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology.

Bina is a frequent public speaker whose appearances have included the TED mainstage — where she closed the 2019 conference — NPR, Aspen Ideas, CNN, and university campuses around the world. She delivered the 2021 Commencement address at the University of Southern California, and received an honorary doctorate from USC in 2022. That speech — on courage — was featured as a top commencement address of the year by The New York Times and appears in the anthology Speaking While Female: 75 Extraordinary Speeches by American Women.

An alumna of Brown University and Harvard’s Kennedy School, Bina has received the New America national fellowship, a Fulbright scholarship, a Princeton in Asia fellowship, a Metcalf fellowship, and a James Reston fellowship at The New York Times. She was named a Global Young Leader by the French-American Foundation in 2015 and a US-Japan Leadership Program delegate in 2023.

Bina currently serves on the Advisory Board of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Media, Politics & Public Policy; on the Getty Museum's PST ART advisory council; and on the MIT Corporation’s Visiting Committee on the Humanities. She has previously served on numerous nonprofit and academic boards including the President’s Leadership Council at Brown University, Pleiades Network, and Earthwatch. She was a juror for the 2021 and 2024 Goldsmith Prizes for Investigative Reporting.

Bina has worked in Alaska, India, Cuba, Mexico, Vietnam, and Guatemala; she grew up in a small town in Ohio. Her early endeavors abroad and at home included translating Spanish and English in emergency rooms, teaching writing to Harlem high school students, working the graveyard shift at a hotel in the Arctic wilderness, lobster fishing in Baja California Sur, and cataloguing films for a cinema critic in Havana. 

Since 2011, Bina has taught in the program on science, technology, and society at MIT; she also teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School.