Fiona is the Associate Dean of Innovation at the MIT School of Management and the William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship. She is the Faculty Director of MIT’s Office of Innovation and the MIT Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship. Fiona is an associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She received her BA ’89 and MA ‘90 from the University of Oxford in chemistry. She subsequently moved to the United States and earned an AM ’92 and PhD ’96 from Harvard University in applied sciences.
Fiona is Vice Chair of the NATO Innovation Fund and has served on the British Prime Minister’s Council on Science and Technology. She was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) and appointed Dame Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (DCMG) by his majesty King Charles III for her services to innovation and entrepreneurship in the United Kingdom. She is also a member of the Ministry of Defence Innovation Advisory Panel and the European Innovation Council Joint Expert Group. She also sits on several Boards including Prime Coalition and MassChallenge.
Murray is an international policy expert on the transformation of investments in science and technology into deep-tech start-up ventures that solve significant global challenges and create national advantage. Her work includes understanding new funding approaches for innovations that arise from scientific research, and educating the next generation of technical leaders to build effective ventures. She has focused on the particular issues faced by ventures who have dual-use (commercial and government) solutions and work in contexts characterized by complex global power competition. She also works with large public and private sector organizations to effectively drive their strategic goals by linking to external innovation ecosystems especially universities, start-ups, and risk capital.
Through her leadership role in the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program, Murray has engaged across many global regions in designing and evaluating the policies and programs that shape vibrant innovation ecosystems.
In her recent scholarship, Murray has emphasized the ways in which women and under-represented minorities are engaged in or excluded from innovation. Her research has explored the ways in which different approaches to evaluating early-stage ideas can overcome the unconscious bias that she has documented in entrepreneurial funding. Her work is widely published in Science, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, American Journal of Sociology, Research Policy, Organization Science, and the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
She teaches IDEA Week (Innovation-driven Entrepreneurial Advantage) to the MIT Executive MBAs, a series of Executive Education programs in corporate innovation, and has taught public sector executives to effectively lead innovation in their organizations. Most recently, Fiona developed a new course joint with the MIT School of Engineering to educate the next generation of scientists and engineer to become CTOs taking ideas from inception to impact.
