Ben Nelson

Ben Nelson is Founder and CEO of Minerva Project, Founder of Minerva University, and a visionary with a passion to reinvent higher education. Nelson started Minerva in 2011 with the goal of nurturing critical wisdom for the sake of the world through a systematic and evidence-based approach to learning. Over the past decade, Nelson has built Minerva University into the most selective, innovative (ranked #1 according to WURI rankings), and effective university in the world, and has developed a business – Minerva Project – to share Minerva's unique approach with other like-minded institutions. Minerva Project has since accelerated the creation of groundbreaking new programs, new colleges, and entirely new universities worldwide.

Nelson has been running companies in Silicon Valley for over 25 years. Prior to Minerva, Nelson spent 10+ years at Snapfish, where he helped build the company from startup to the world’s largest personal publishing service. Nelson’s drive for reforming undergraduate education was first sparked in college where he created a blueprint for curricular reform in his first year of school. Nelson went on to become the chair of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education (SCUE), a pedagogical think tank at the University of Pennsylvania. Nelson holds a B.S. in Economics from University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

Ben Nelson is the co-author of Building the Intentional University (MIT Press, 2017) and has advised Ministers and Secretaries of Education in over a dozen countries.