Jinane Abounadi

I started my career as an academician, teaching and researching in the fields of communication networks, large scale optimization, and reinforcement learning. Subsequently, I joined the travel industry by joining a local travel technology start-up and managed projects and products that were leading the industry in the areas of airline search and airline reservation systems. That led me to the position of global head of product for a large multinational travel technology provider and enabled me to develop a strategy for bringing innovation from outside, managing our relationships with 3rd party partners and start-ups across the world. In my current role, I am able to leverage my past experiences to enable the next generation of founders to launch impactful companies. As the executive director of MIT Sandbox, we fund early ideas (about 500 per year) resulting in the launch of about 50 tech focused companies per year.