Elise Bates is an advisor to Xfund and the Director of the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, where she leads the School’s core initiatives supporting founders, joiners, and investors across the HBS and Harvard ecosystem. She oversees a portfolio of more than 46 entrepreneurship courses, 49 faculty in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit, and flagship programs including the New Venture Competition, Rock Summer Fellows, and Rock on the Road.

A seasoned operator and repeat founder, Elise brings more than two decades of experience building and scaling companies across health care, consumer products, and technology-enabled services. After beginning her career at HBS as a research associate in Entrepreneurial Finance and Business Strategy, she held early leadership roles in multiple startups before earning her MBA as a member of the HBS Class of 2000. She later joined the Monitor Group, where she led growth strategy engagements for clients in health care and consumer markets.

In 2014, following her daughter’s life-threatening allergic reaction to peanuts, Elise founded End Allergies Together (E.A.T.), a nonprofit that catalyzed early-stage scientific research and accelerated the FDA pipeline for food-allergy treatments—an area affecting more than 250 million people globally. She subsequently co-founded Attane Health, a mission-driven company delivering nutrition equity to low-income patients with chronic conditions through nationwide healthy-food delivery, multilingual tele-nutrition support, and outcomes reporting for Medicaid plans and community health organizations. She continues to support Attane as an investor and board member.

Elise brings to the Rock Center a founder’s empathy, an operator’s rigor, and deep experience navigating the entrepreneurial journey from zero to one. She works closely with faculty co-chairs Shikhar Ghosh and Julia Austin to expand the Center’s programming, including the new AI Lab field course and annual Rock Demo Day.

Elise holds a BA from Colgate University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She lives in the Boston area with her husband, Greg (HBS MBA 2000), their two children, and two Wheaten Terriers.