Maura O’Neill, MBA, PhD

Maura O’Neill, MBA, PhD serves as a strategic advisor to Coopersmith Law + Strategy on energy, technology, business strategy, and gender equity.

Maura is the former Chief Innovation Officer at USAID and the former Senior Advisor for Energy & Climate at the US Department of Agriculture.

At USAID, Maura was responsible for leading innovation for the US in development and foreign assistance. She introduced new entrepreneurial imagination and business rigor into foreign assistance by co-creating what is now the Global Innovation Fund, where the methods of venture capital and drug development were applied to deliver change in a smarter, faster, cheaper way, such as the use of mobile payment apps that provided funds directly to intended recipients.

An early pioneer in digital transformation in energy, Maura founded companies that drove electrical efficiency and the development of smart grids.

Maura has MBAs from Columbia University and Berkeley and a PhD from the University of Washington. She teaches a course in entrepreneurship at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley.