Yusi Turell

Yusi Turell is a Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy. She researches social innovation, public policy, and institutional entrepreneurship. Yusi’s current project is a multilevel institutional analysis of Ashoka Fellows who both led a market-based organization and also worked to change a law or other government policy. Her research examines the hybridized tensions and synergies between these social entrepreneurs’ 'organization-level' business models and their 'field-level' policy advocacy.

Yusi also hosts the Carsey Policy Hour, the Carsey School’s online monthly discussion series that engages policymakers, public service professionals, and active citizens and organizations in the issues and policies that affect the people and places of New Hampshire.

Yusi has worked at the University of New Hampshire in a variety of roles, most recently directing the development of a new climate finance training program with the Carsey School’s Center for Impact Finance. Yusi served as founding co-director of the Center for Social Innovation and Enterprise, a joint venture of UNH’s Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics and the Carsey School offering experiential learning opportunities for students at the nexus of individual entrepreneurship and sustained social change. She has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in Social Enterprise and Business, Government, & Society and worked with a team to launch the Carsey School’s master’s program in Community Development Policy & Practice.

Prior to joining UNH in 2011, Yusi worked as a national program director for Citizen Schools, where she led the national expansion of a Boston capstone program to 25 campuses in five states and chaired a steering committee that updated the organization’s theory of change. She also served as a senior consultant at Ernst & Young’s Center for Business Innovation and as a researcher at Harvard Business School. Yusi holds a B.S.E. in Civil Engineering and Operations Research from Princeton University and an M.Phil. in Technology and Innovation Management from the University of Sussex, U.K. through a Marshall scholarship. She is a Ph.D. candidate at UNH. Yusi lives in Durham, NH, with her family.