Stacey Childress

Stacey Childress serves as Deputy Director of Education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She leads the Next Generation Models team, which supports the creation and proliferation of technology-enabled content, tools, and learning models that support personalized paths to success for middle and high school students in the United States.

Prior to joining the foundation, Stacey was on the faculty of the Harvard Business School where she wrote and taught about entrepreneurial activity in public education in the United States. Her work encompassed the behavior and strategies of leadership teams in urban public school districts, charter schools, and nonprofit and for-profit enterprises with missions to improve the public system. During her time at Harvard, she wrote three books and more than thirty cases and articles about education entrepreneurship. She also won teaching awards from her students and the HBS dean for her elective course on education entrepreneurship, which was taken by more than 1000 students between 2004 and 2010.

Before working in academia Stacey was a co-founder of an enterprise software company and spent ten years in a Fortune 500 company in sales and general management. Early in her career she taught in a Texas public high school. She is a graduate of Baylor University and Harvard Business School, where she was the first woman in school history to be elected by her classmates to deliver the class day graduation address.