Nicole Shanahan is an attorney and tech entrepreneur in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work on behalf of honest governance, racial equality, regenerative agriculture, and children’s and maternal health has put her at the forefront of many of the country’s most urgent needs.
“Healthy planet, healthy humans” is how Nicole describes the throughline of her career, which has long been centered around people, health, and the environment. She is the founder and president of Bia-Echo Foundation, a private foundation that invests in innovative changemakers who are tackling some of the world’s greatest challenges – reproductive equality and longevity, criminal justice reform, a healthy and livable planet, and more.
Early in her career, Nicole founded and was CEO of ClearAccessIP, a patent management company utilizing AI and automation to support the innovation economy. She is a fellow at Stanford Law School’s CodeX, where she launched a multidisciplinary criminal justice reform effort with the San Francisco District Attorney Office that inspired a powerful partnership with the Stanford Computation Policy Lab (now at Harvard). Her work, particularly building innovative algorithmic tools to guide high-stakes decisions, leverages advances in data science that allows for policy impact to be studied at unprecedented scales.
Among other achievements, Nicole is the recipient of the CALI Excellence For The Future Award and Santa Clara Law School’s Young Alumni Rising Star Award. She has been recognized as a Top 50 Femtech Healthcare Influencer & Longevity Leader and a San Francisco Business Times’ 40 Under 40 leader for her work as a trailblazer running organizations at the forefront of ethics in AI and access to justice. She has long been committed to issues at the intersection of tech, law, and justice and regularly helps facilitate high-level forums with global leaders, including Stanford Law’s Future Law conference.
As part of her involvement with regenerative agriculture and carbon sequestration efforts, Nicole supports organizations committed to promoting soil health and making farming carbon neutral. She was the executive producer of the groundbreaking 2020 film Kiss the Ground and the 2022 film Evolver.
In 2019, Nicole founded the Bia-Echo foundation and concentrated her efforts on philanthropy. Initial investments and projects led by Bia-Echo include the launch of the world’s first Center for Reproductive Longevity and Equality at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, as well as the Stanford Computational Policy Lab to drive social impact on criminal justice reform via data analysis and technical innovation.
While in law school, she founded and was CEO of ClearAccessIP, an AI patent analytics company focused on the balance between the power of modern-day computing technology with the realities of how lawyers practice.
As a fellow at Stanford Law School’s CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, Nicole launched the Smart Prosecution project, a multidisciplinary effort focused on criminal justice reform.
Nicole was brought up through the Oakland public school system before securing an athletic scholarship to attend Saint Mary’s College High School in Berkeley. At the University of Puget Sound in Washington, she studied Asian Studies, Economics, and Mandarin Chinese while running varsity cross country and working for a children’s non-profit. She attended law school at Santa Clara University, where she was an exchange student at the National University of Singapore.
Raised in Oakland, California, Nicole faced adversity early on. Her mother, a Chinese immigrant, struggled to make ends meet before becoming an accountant, and her father struggled with mental health and substance abuse issues. But growing up with very little helped Nicole learn to overcome challenges by harnessing the human spirit’s power to heal. It also made her creative and resourceful, with a strong work ethic; her first job was bussing tables at a local burger joint at age 12.
Nicole, who speaks conversant Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese, is an avid outdoorswoman and loves to surf, hike, and snowboard. She is a devoted mother to daughter Echo and, together with fiancé Jacob Strumwasser, nurtures a home dedicated to healthy living, growing their own food, and enjoying time in nature as much as possible. They also have two dogs – one named Higgs for the theoretical particle that holds all matter together and the other named Bowser adopted from the Malibu farmers market.
