Jaishree Deshpande

Biography

Jaishree Deshpande is a Trustee of Deshpande Foundation along with her husband Desh. Jaishree is also the Treasurer of Sparta Group LLC, a family investment office.

Jaishree currently serves as a Trustee for the Museum of Science and is involved with HESTIA Fund – a fund established to support after school programs for low-income children in Massachusetts. Jaishree Deshpande worked for the Indian Space Research Organization in Bangalore, India until 1980 before moving to Canada. After moving to Massachusetts in 1984, she worked for several companies and taught courses in computer.

The Deshpande Foundation strengthens ecosystems that create significant social and economic impact through entrepreneurship and innovation. The Foundation set up a Technological Innovation Center at MIT in 2002.

Leveraging the experience gained at the MIT Center, the Deshpande Foundation has facilitated the setup of five other centers; Deshpande Center for Social Entrepreneurship in India, EforAll in Lowell/Lawrence Massachusetts, Pond-Deshpande Center at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, Dunin-Deshpande Center at Queen’s University in Canada and Gopalkrishnan-Deshpande Center at Indian Institute of technology in Chennai, India. Deshpande Foundation also provided the founding grant for MassChallenge in Boston, National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps™), and the UPOP program at MIT.

Jaishree received a Master of Science in Physics in 1975 from the Indian Institute of Technologies (IIT), Madras, India. She also received a Master in Computer Science in 1989 from Boston University