Carol Dahl
Board of Trustees & Officers
Carol Dahl has over three decades of experience cultivating science and technology-based discovery and innovation, innovation ecosystems, and innovation talent in support of addressing critical challenges such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), fostering economic growth, and creating high quality jobs. She currently chairs the Program Advisory Council of Grand Challenges Canada and the Nomination Evaluation Committee for the US National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and serves on the Boards of VentureWell, VertueLab, the Washington Research Foundation, and WiSys. In addition, she serves on the Invention, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Advisory Committee (IIEAC) to the Administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA), the Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM), and the External Advisory Board of the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering of the University of Washington.
As the Executive Director of The Lemelson Foundation from 2011 to 2021, Dr. Dahl led the Foundation’s work to use the power of invention to improve lives, by cultivating inclusive programs and systems to inspire and educate the next generation of inventors and innovators to solve crucial challenges and thrive in the innovation economy, and providing inclusive support for inventors and entrepreneurs to create value from their ideas in the form of products and businesses. While there, she paved the way for the launch of the Invention Education and Engineering for One Planet movements, with large and growing communities of researchers focused on innovation talent for a sustainable future.
Prior to joining The Lemelson Foundation, Dr. Dahl served as founding Director of the Global Health Discovery Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and led development of the Grand Challenges in Global Health and Grand Challenges Explorations programs, innovation programs which have been replicated in countries around the world.
Previously, Dr. Dahl worked at the NIH National Cancer Institute, at the National Center for Human Genome Research, at a start-up diagnostics company, the Advanced Technology Program at NIST, and was on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh. She received a bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa, master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Wisconsin, and postdoctoral training at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and the University of Minnesota.