Meredith Meyer Grelli
Managing Director & Interim Exec Director, Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship; Assistant Dean of Entrepreneurship Initiatives, School of Computer Science; Director, Project Olympus; Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship, Tepper School of Business
Meredith Meyer Grelli is the Interim Executive Director of the Swartz Center. She also serves as the Managing Director of the Swartz Center; the Assistant Dean for Entrepreneurship Initiatives in the School of Computer Science and the Director of Project Olympus, a Swartz-affiliated Center focused on commercializing advanced technologies. Meredith is also an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business.
In her roles, Meredith leads a team that supports student, staff, faculty and alumni founders through an extensive architecture of programs and early stage funding. Carnegie Mellon affiliated startups have exits with a cumulative value of more than half a trillion dollars. CMU startups have raised more than $90B in funding.
Prior to her work in academia, Meredith was an entrepreneur and operator. She founded, scaled, and sold one of CMU’s top 100 affiliated exits. She has also founded and led non profits and real estate developments. Throughout all of her work, she has maintained a deep commitment to community-driven economic development.
Meredith has been recognized for her contributions to entrepreneurship and innovation with a number of awards, including the 100 Women to Watch in the U.S. by the Business Times, the Gerald Leland Bach Teaching Award, Canfield-Roseman MBA Entrepreneur of the Year; the Tepper Alumni Award; and two-time James Beard Semi-Finalist Award for Outstanding Wine, Spirits, and Beer Professional. She is an advisor to Fortune’s ‘Most Innovative Companies’ rankings, serves on the Executive Committee of the Carnegie Science Center Board, and has been a board member of multiple private and nonprofit organizations.
She holds a B.S. from the University of Chicago, studied cuisine at Le Cordon Bleu Paris, and earned her MBA from CMU’s Tepper School of Business, where she was a Forte Fellow Merit Scholar and a Swartz Fellow.