Daniela Papi-Thornton is an expert in helping young people along educational pathways to high impact careers. She has been on the teaching team at a range of prestigious global universities, including Yale School of Management, Watson Institute, and Oxford’s Saïd Business School, where she was also the Deputy Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship.

Daniela served for many years on the selection committee for Oxford's prestigious Skoll Scholarship, after receiving the scholarship herself when completing her MBA. She has helped a great many students hone their essays—and more importantly, their ambitions—with regards to their careers and studies. 

Daniela is an educator, facilitator, coach, and author whose work focuses on systems-led leadership: an approach to social innovation that centers on systems understanding. Daniela is currently a lecturer at University of Colorado, Boulder, and a consultant with a range of education organizations, foundations, and companies looking to contribute to systems change. She has been hired by various universities to help redesign their social impact and social innovation strategies, as well as to help design new coursework. For example, she co-designed and teaches on the certificate courses she helped create at Chicago Booth’s Hong Kong Campus, Dartmouth College, and Mount Royal University. 

Daniela designed a systems understanding tool, the Impact Gaps Canvas, which is now used at accelerator programs and social impact education initiatives around the world. Through that work, she launched Map the System, a contest now running at 50+ global institutions, inviting participants to map and present their learning about the impact gaps they have found in complex social and environmental systems. 

Daniela’s work builds upon six years of emerging market entrepreneurial experience in Cambodia, running a hybrid social enterprise educational organization where she managed a non-profit which, at its height, had over 50 employees. She co-authored three books: Learning Service, a guide to rethinking international volunteer travel, and two books on systems understanding, both coming out later in 2025. She also authored an influential report on "Tackling Heropreneurship" as well as many articles in publications such as the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and her TEDx talk on Reclaiming Social Entrepreneurship highlights some of her thinking.