George Yerousis

Change agent, Entrepreneur, Environmentalist, Scientist, Technologist

George is currently leading the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Unit in Birzeit University. The unit is a bold vision that fosters an active campus of innovators (students, faculty, and staff) – one that this competitive in promoting research commercialization and knowledge transfer and exchange, and at the same time, that provides a rich and engaging student experience through skills enhancement and meaningful, structured and reciprocal university-community engagements. The Innovation and Entrepreneurship Unit has pioneered Birzeit University’s flagship training program called Leadership and Active Citizenship Program. The program provides an open innovation platform and a hotbed for students, faculty and staff, and community partners to co-create social innovations and to collaboratively work on new ideas and design and implement initiatives that tackle Palestine’s most pressing problems. Besides spearheading the IEU, George is passionate about entrepreneurship for sustainable development and his chemical, environmental, and water engineering backgrounds and expertise underpin and fuel this passion. He has had a career spanning 11 years working in entrepreneurship development programs and social change projects – co-creating them with entrepreneurs, civil society, government actors, and angel investors. George is an inspiring mentor and facilitator, and has for more than a decade, been mentoring and supporting university students and entrepreneurs to innovate. He coaches, mentors and trains and empowers youth to spot and uncover opportunities that others do not see, iterate ideas forward turning them into long-lasting impact, and helping them to use divergent design thinking methodologies in order to solve problems that are intricate and complex. In his spare time, George has a zeal for academic research. He has been working with an international research group on exploring and studying the interplay between social informatics and human-computer interaction and has published several papers.

Chemical Engineering, Engineering, Entrepreneurship, Environmental Engineering, Incubation, Innovation