Neeraj Sonalkar, Phd Email & Phone Number

Neeraj is a founder/researcher/operator with 15 years of experience building organizations and systems that nurture innovators. He is currently leading the innovation initiative in healthcare delivery at the San Mateo Medical Center.Previously, Neeraj co-founded the human capital formation program at Stanford University. The program helps aspiring startup founders and operators build self-awareness, entrepreneurial fitness, and trusted relationships within the venture ecosystem with the aim of achieving exponential impact. Neeraj and his team have built a community of more than 80 founders and influenced how startups are being built in biotech, AI, energy, education, health, and space domains.Neeraj was the Executive Director of Human Innovation Design in the DesignX group at Stanford University, where he led research funded by the National Science Foundation on high-performance teams. His research portfolio included diagnostics for innovation performance and Virtual Reality simulations for crisis situations faced by innovators. The research resulted in several peer-reviewed publications and was directly applied to corporations and startups.Based on his research at Stanford, Neeraj co-founded Flourish, a leadership-tech startup. As the Head of Product at Flourish, he led the development of a diagnostic platform for scaling companies to highlight organizational priorities and evaluate executive performance. The platform enabled venture-backed CEOs to make leadership changes that improved operation speed, financial runway, and employee morale.Neeraj has experience working internationally. He co-founded accelerators for high-potential founders in Nigeria and India. Neeraj ran the India accelerator operations as co-director focusing on program and ecosystem development. During his tenure, the accelerator coached more than 65 high-potential founders, many of whom went on to create several companies including Apna, one of India's fastest-growing unicorns.Neeraj has a strong foundation in engineering product development with a Ph.D. in Design Innovation and a Master's in Engineering Design from Stanford University. He has worked on products that range in complexity from a modular satellite deployment system to a low-cost treadle pump for farmers in Myanmar.In his spare time, Neeraj can be found hiking in the Bay Area, experimenting with photography, or simply marveling at the creativity of his preschooler.

Listed skills include User Centered Design, Design Thinking, Research, Entrepreneurship, and 22 others.