Vanessa Kaskiris

Vanessa Kaskiris is the Head of People, Finance, and Administration at Stanford Impact Labs. In this role, Vanessa is responsible for SIL’s budget and finance decisions, establishing controls and policies in accordance with university requirements and stewardship needs, and leading finance, human resources, and operations.

Prior to joining the SIL team, Vanessa staffed and managed teams at the University of California, Berkeley across numerous departments including Advancement, IT, Research, and Faculty and Student Facing Services. She also spent a number of years working for the Department of Energy in IT and Administration leadership positions and was a successful entrepreneur who developed, managed, and sold a brick and mortar learning space. 

Vanessa is deeply committed to higher education equity and opportunities for underserved communities and historically marginalized populations. As a leader in higher education, Vanessa focuses on creative solutions to solve real problems. She previously designed, managed, and scaled the first custom cloud-based learning analytics platform for UC Berkeley—something that had not been done before, was received with skepticism, and is now an award-winning platform in use across the entire campus’  undergraduate advising population. She has a Master’s degree in Information Systems from the University of California, Berkeley.  

Vanessa identifies as Latinx and is dedicated to remedying the IT landscape in higher ed for women and people of color. She has a number of publications and references citing her work in this and other areas.