Thabo Lenneiye

Staff

Managing Director of the Sustainable Agriculture Fund

Thabo Lenneiye is the inaugural managing director of the Carl H. Goldsmith Sustainable Agriculture Fund at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, where she leads research at the intersection of agriculture and energy policy. She is also a senior fellow with the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the Wharton School, and an Associate Scholar at the Center for Global Health at the Perelman School. Her work focuses on building a research and policy agenda that explores how agriculture can address the challenges of the global energy transition. 

Prior to her appointment at the Kleinman Center, Lenneiye was managing director of Penn Praxis, overseeing strategic planning, business development, and operations for the University of Pennsylvania’s applied research center focused on social impact. Before that, she worked as an architect and project manager at Gensler, a global design firm, where she led the establishment of the firm’s Africa practice, and was the firm’s support staff on the Obama Administration’s Presidential Advisory Council for Doing Business in Africa. She also served as inaugural secretary of the Board for the African Union Pan-African Diaspora Women’s Association from 2017 to 2018, has founded several social ventures, and has taught urbanism studios at Penn and the University of Maryland.

Lenneiye holds an MBA from the University of Cambridge, where she was awarded the Africa Regional Scholarship, as well as dual master’s degrees from the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and the School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.