Luis Miguel Barros

Luis Barros is Executive Director of the Media Lab's MIT PATH — Pathways for AI Training and Hiring — an initiative of MIT RAISE and part of MIT4America. He also serves as a Lecturer in the Global Economics and Management (GEM) Group at MIT Sloan, co-teaching and mentoring within Action Learning courses.

He is managing partner of Leading Business Ventures (LBV), a venture education, advisory, and investment firm, and a former director and audit committee member of the ECOWAS Investment and Development Bank (BIDC).

With more than 27 years of experience across science and technology, Barros works at the intersection of education, commercialization, financing, innovation, and ecosystem development — serving, in turn, family- and founder-backed ventures, sovereign and state-backed funds, faculty- and PI-led academic initiatives, entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs) and multinational corporate clients.

As an advisor, Barros concurrently served as venture partner of Portugal Ventures and Co-Director of Innovation and Industry at the MIT Portugal Program and its affiliated entity, Kendall Teams.

Through LBV, his multidisciplinary methodologies have been applied across 44 countries and five continents, spanning government, industry, and academia — including ecosystem effectiveness, communities of practice, public policy, and advisory work, including biopharma and MedTech sectors. LBV also manages a multi-lingual commercial and investor-readiness program for STEAM founders and separately serves/served as a principal advisor to SBIR-funded startups backed by ARPA-H, NIH, DOD, NSF, and Draper Laboratories.

Prior to LBV, Barros was part of founding teams that architected and implemented venture funds, including the $1 billion Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, Lilly Ventures, and IC Sciences (formed by the co-founders of Boston Scientific), and served on the compliance staff of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

As a serial-entrepreneur, Barros held leadership roles in early-stage venture-backed entities, including an AI, visualization and interactive bioinformatics company and an application virtualization platform, both respectively acquired by publicly traded companies and/or secondary market transactions.

He began his career in sales and marketing roles spanning surgical and clinical pharmacology within global healthcare companies, including Johnson & Johnson.

Barros holds a Doctorate and MSEd. from the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from MIT Sloan, and a BBA from UMass Amherst's Isenberg School of Management, and is a graduate of Harvard's Executive Program on Board Governance.