Ellen Patterson

Ellen Patterson has spent her career at the intersection of education, technology, and social impact. Since 2012, she served in various executive leadership positions at EVERFI -- a digital platform that offers free, self-paced educational resources for students and employees -- including as Chief Revenue and Partnership Officer, Chief Operating Officer, President and Chief Impact Officer. In August 2024, she was named President and General Manager.

Throughout her various leadership roles at EVERFI, Patterson has been instrumental in architecting the underpinnings of growth, scale, and transformation through many of the company’s most critical moments.

A former educator, Patterson brings more than two decades of business development experience and operational excellence in consumer technology. She began her career teaching and counseling youth in K12 schools across underserved areas in the Gulf Coast, Boston, and San Francisco. She later spent four years in Silicon Valley at both a digital media startup and AOL (now part of Verizon) where she held P&L responsibility and incubated consumer products as they took their online form – photos, video, retail, and app stores – shaping how we socialize, share, shop and engage today.

Patterson is an active community member of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women, serving as an inaugural Ambassador and is a Founding member of the Fortune Impact Initiative. She has been recognized for her leadership and innovation, including as Washingtonian Magazine’s “Tech Titan” in 2022, 2023 and 2024 and a Washington Life “Innovator and Disruptor” in 2021. She serves on the Community Advisory Board for Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Patterson received a BA in Psychology from Georgetown University and an MA in Counseling Psychology from Boston College, where she served as graduate assistant to Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Harvard child psychology scholar Dr. Robert Coles. She also earned an MA in Teaching as a pioneering graduate from the University of Notre Dame’s ACE program and served as an AmeriCorps volunteer during that time.