Past Member

Nathan N. Eagle

Former Lecturer
Contact Information:
Groups
  • Human Dynamics

Nathan Norfleet Eagle is an investor, CEO, and entrepreneur.  Eagle is currently the founder of Granted AI, a platform that makes the grant proposal writing process less tedious, more equitable, and more successful for everyone. He is also a  Limited Partner in the Longevity Fund which invests in gene editing, small molecule therapeutics, and novel methods to treat disease.  Eagle served as the CEO of Jana for twelve years, raising $100 million to scale the company from an early-stage start-up into the largest provider of free internet in emerging markets.  With operations in over 100 countries, 50 million people have used Jana's products to gain affordable access to the internet.

Eagle also served as faculty at MIT and the Harvard School of Public Health, where he developed machine learning-based methods trained on massive global datasets about human movements, financial transactions, and communication patterns to model the spread of infectious disease.  Eagle has authored several patents and over 100 peer reviewed publications in journals including Science and Nature, accumulating more than 10,000 citations.  Eagle’s book from MIT Press, Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World, won the American Publishers PROSE Award.  Eagle also served as a Fulbright Professor at the University of Nairobi and a Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. 

A regular participant at Davos as a Technology Pioneer for the World Economic Forum, Eagle was named one of the '50 people who will change the world' by Wired magazine.  He has been elected to Advertising Age’s 40 under 40 and MIT’s TR35, a group of the world’s top innovators under 35.  In recognition of his work with the World Bank on mobile crowdsourcing, he was awarded the prestigious Kiel Global Economy Prize alongside Daniel Kahneman and the President's Medal by Market Research Society.  Eagle has been regularly featured in the popular press including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Financial Times, NPR, BBC, CNN, and The Atlantic.

Eagle holds a BS in mechanical engineering and two master’s degrees in management science and engineering and electrical engineering from Stanford University.  His PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory founded the field of 'Reality Mining' and was declared one of the '10 technologies most likely to change the way we live’ by the MIT Technology Review.

A lifelong meditator, Eagle was ordained as a monk in the Wat Ram Poeng temple in northern Thailand.  More recently, he can be found with his sons (age 7 and 9), attempting to genetically modify E. coli with CRISPR/Cas9 in their living room's makeshift wet lab.