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Jessica Hastings, Entrepreneurship Faculty

Jessica is a design educator, empowering students, entrepreneurs and corporate executives with tools for complex problem-solving. She believes in the power of a human-centered design methodology to address the world’s toughest challenges. In fact, she initiated a group at her company, IDEO, that tackles problems like clean water transport in India and crop irrigation in Kenya. This work took her to Ethiopia, Kenya, and Cambodia to create toolkits to help local organizations to identify entrepreneurial opportunities with farming customers. Jessica graduated from Stanford University and hails from Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurship runs rampant. This environment breeds expansive thinking, risk-taking and a lifestyle of prototyping, all of which she will apply at ALA. Jessica’s passions extend to dance, theatre, building things, and travel.