Juan Enriquez

Juan Enriquez is a business leader, bestselling author, investor, and academic widely recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on the economic, political, and societal impacts of technology, the life sciences, and brain research.

He is the co-founder of Excel Venture Management, a venture capital firm that invests in life sciences, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Together with his partners, Enriquez has co-founded or been an early investor in companies responsible for pioneering breakthroughs, including the world's first synthetic lifeforms, programmable cells, desktop RNA printers, stapled peptides, and rapid, portable brain-reading technologies. He advises global CEOs and national leaders on technology, innovation, and competitiveness, and played a key leadership role in advising organizations and governments during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was the founding director of Harvard Business School's Life Sciences Project and served as a Research Affiliate at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.

Enriquez is known for his remarkable ability to identify and invest in transformative technologies years before they become mainstream. In 2000, he published the bestselling As the Future Catches You: How Genomics and Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth, which anticipated the profound impact that the life sciences would have on business and society. In 2005, he authored The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future, arguing that excessive leverage and real estate speculation would trigger a global financial crisis and predicting that its long-term consequences would include deep political polarization and fragmentation around the world.

He later co-authored Evolving Ourselves: Redesigning the Future of Humanity—One Gene at a Time, exploring how Charles Darwin might reinterpret evolution in light of modern genetic science. His most recent book, RIGHT/Wrong: How Technology Transforms Our Ethics, examines how scientific and technological advances continually redefine society's understanding of right and wrong. He is currently co-authoring a new book with Ed Boyden on how emerging technologies that map and manipulate the brain will reshape humanity.

A native of Mexico, Enriquez previously led Mexico City's urban development corporation, where he directed the transformation of the Santa Fe district and oversaw the development of landmark projects including the Papalote Children's Museum, the National Auditorium, the National Zoo, Proyecto Alameda, and numerous other urban initiatives. He also served on the Peace Commission that negotiated the Zapatista ceasefire.

Enriquez serves on numerous boards and advisory bodies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Museum of Science in Boston, GBH, the Visiting Committee of Harvard University's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, QuestBridge, and two National Academies blue-ribbon commissions examining the impact of artificial intelligence.

He earned both his BA and MBA, with honors, from Harvard University and has received numerous academic and national awards in recognition of his contributions to science, technology, innovation, and public policy.