Team

Bill Romani, PT, PhD

Dr. Romani leads Innovate Carolina’s Design and Innovation for the Public Good team’s mission to create new ideas, products and ventures that solve the most challenging problems in the state of North Carolina and beyond.  This includes the Graduate Certificate in Innovation for the Public Good and providing the design framework supporting the Carolina NEXT Strategic Plan.  At Loyola University of Maryland Bill was the Founding Entrepreneur in Residence and directed their interdisciplinary minor in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He has served as an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and has held visiting appointments at Johns Hopkins University’s Whiting School of Engineering and in the Temple University Klein College of Communication.

His teaching and research interests include Design Thinking and Innovation, values-based storytelling, and developing equitable, community-based criteria for impact investing. He has been a Principle Investigator on several federal, state and foundation level grants and is a widely published author in peer reviewed journals. Outside of his academic roles Dr. Romani has worked for the AARP Foundation and led non-profit ventures focused on improving equity and access to quality education, housing and healthcare.  His current project, Stories, Context, and Lived Experiences of the Black Entrepreneur, is a collection of firsthand accounts of Black entrepreneurs who are disrupting long term anti-black structural inequities in redlined communities.