Purnima Chawla, PhD

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Purnima Chawla is an entrepreneur, educator and changemaker, who has helped more than a hundred entrepreneurial organizations achieve ambitious goals.

At UT San Antonio, her goal is to build a world-class entrepreneurship program that is specifically tailored to the needs of our students and the local community. Her focus is on equipping students to lead businesses that bring needed goods and services to the local and regional community. More broadly, Chawla teaches entrepreneurial skills that are essential for successfully navigating today’s rapidly changing business and professional environments. A psychologist by training, her teaching style is informed by her understanding of individual motivation, student learning styles and group dynamics. She is skilled at creating educational experiences that engage students, yield insightful and relevant learnings and build students’ motivation and confidence to delve deeper into the material.

Chawla started her career in strategic communications and held senior executive positions at Porter Novelli, Inc. and Equals Three Communications in Washington, D.C. In 2004, she founded her own firm, the Center for Nonprofit Strategies, which helps organizations scale up their impact, and she has provided organizational, programmatic and marketing counsel to a wide variety of nonprofits, foundations, social businesses, coalitions and government agencies. During this time, she also led programming for the Sustaining Family Forest Initiative, a joint program of Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Family Forest Research Center at the University of Massachusetts.

Chawla is active in the San Antonio community and beyond. She currently serves on the Board of FairVote, a D.C.-based organization that advocates for election reforms. She is also an executive mentor at the Global Social Benefits Institute at Santa Clara University and participates as a mentor and evaluator with the CleanTech Foundation.