About
John Robichaux is an award-winning executive and educator who builds and turns around mission-driven institutions — guided by the conviction that leadership is defined by the choices we make when multiple paths emerge.
Over 25 years he has led complex education, research, and leadership organizations — portfolios of up to $100M+ and more than 1,000 faculty and staff across dozens of locations globally — from nonprofits to executive consulting, to large portfolios at Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and Columbia. The through-line is building: new institutes, new program models, new organizational units, several of them designated the first of their kind. At Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI, where he was the inaugural Director of Education (2020–23), he designed the education portfolio from scratch. When Stanford built the Doerr School of Sustainability — its first new school in seventy years — the school's design committee recommended that portfolio to the University's President and Provost as its external-education model.
Today he is Executive Director of Berkeley's Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership, the premier engineering and technology leadership Institute in the U.S. — a $33M portfolio with roughly 100 faculty and staff.
Across the record, the results are unusually measurable: at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI, the education portfolio he built reached 83,000+ learners from 40+ countries; at Columbia, 40% revenue growth in two years; at Stanford, an 8-fold increase in online and hybrid enrollment (2012–16); and, across his career, a 95% lifetime approval rating in confidential 360 executive reviews.
Alongside the operating record: field research across eight countries on four continents, and graduate study at Harvard. In the classroom, he taught human rights, international relations, ethics, political science, and leadership for years before AI entered the syllabus — and now teaches the same subjects through it: the ethics of AI, AI and international relations, AI for policymakers, what AI does to the ethics of healthcare, AI for nonprofit leaders and grant-makers. The old questions came first. He has worked on AI since 2010 — years before ChatGPT — and is neither a doomer nor a hype merchant. His question is the older one that technology keeps making new: who benefits? — and what the answer reveals about how organizations lead, decide, and serve.
He has worked with leaders from organizations including the United Nations, The White House, the World Health Organization, Google, Microsoft, NASA, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, among others.
He knows what education can open because it was his own way through: he grew up rural-poor, and top institutions changed the trajectory. He has spent the career that followed holding that door open for others — refusing, as he puts it, to let it close behind him.
John lives in Palo Alto, California.
Currently: Executive Director, Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership, Berkeley’s College of Engineering · Teaches "Leadership in the Age of AI" and "Ethics and AI"
Views expressed here are John's own, in his personal capacity — he does not speak for Berkeley or the Fung Institute.