Emily Harburg is passionate about building technology that helps people feel more connected, supported, and motivated. She is the CEO and co-founder of PairUp, a B2B SaaS platform that helps connect and support staff across organizations. PairUp matches employees using a research-backed pairing algorithm and then helps staff get the ongoing support, learning, and connection that they need to thrive and grow at work.
Emily’s background spans industry, startups, and academia. She has worked at Walt Disney Imagineering where she designed technology for the Disney theme parks, at Facebook (Meta) where she worked as a User Experience (EX) researcher, and at Education First (EF) where she led the Emerging Tech and Innovation team designing tech to support millions of students around the world. In 2015, Emily co-founded Brave Initiatives, an organization dedicated to helping women build tech skills and confidence in coding for social impact. She also co-founded Youth Lead the Change, a global youth leadership program for high school students, in partnership with Harvard University.
Emily’s academic research lies at the intersection of technology and social behavior, and the role that technology can play in building self-efficacy and confidence. Her research has been published and shared in global conferences, academic journals, case studies, and news publications -- including the Harvard Business Review, TEDx, Computer Human Interaction (CHI), CNN, and more.
Emily graduated with a B.A. in Social Anthropology and Psychology from Harvard College, and with a Ph.D. in Technology and Social Behavior from Northwestern University. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, skiing, photography, playing volleyball, and gathering for Thoughtlucks.
I had the great pleasure of being welcomed warmly into the home of the extraordinary Fred and Suzie Harburg family when their son Ben entered Tufts University, and I was his mentor as the director of the Neubauer Scholars Program, a prestigious award he won.
There I had the added pleasure of meeting Emily. I recently had the great opportunity of attending Brookline High School’s Sports Hall of Fame she was inducted for her captaining the Women's Varsity Volleyball and Crew teams and ran indoor track.
I vividly remember Emily, When she was the Vice President of the Leadership Institute at Harvard, I was pleased to expose her to the Institute's Synaptic Scholars and Empower and helped advise her on her petition to create an innovation major at Harvard, which subsequently emerged as Harvard's iLab.
While some details of her extraordinary Brookline, Harvard, and subsequent professional career are below, what impresses me most about her is her warmth, compassion, and generosity of spirit.
