Marina Watanabe

Marina Watanabe, PhD is the Associate Director of Mosaic, the student entrepreneurship support organization and community. She is passionate about empowering student innovators to enact positive change and making entrepreneurship accessible.

Before joining Northeastern, Watanabe was the Creativity and Entrepreneurship Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship. She helped design and implement student startup incubators, pitch competitions, and entrepreneurship course curricula. Additionally, she was an Education Innovation Fellow with the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching, where she mentored and distributed funding to Harvard and MIT startup teams working to improve the field of education.

Watanabe earned her PhD in Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Harvard University. Her graduate research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital focused on discovering novel combination therapies in the treatment of HER2+ breast cancer. When not on campus, she can be found volunteering with the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN) to advance cancer legislation, choreographing comical dance routines, trying out whimsical exercise classes, and working toward her next storytelling event.