Sanyin’s mission in life is to enable greatness in others. She lives out this mission as an educator, parent, mentor, author, CEO coach and advisor.

She is the founding executive director of the Coach K Leadership and Ethics Center (COLE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and a professor at its Pratt School of Engineering. The COLE center is a leadership laboratory with programming for all of Duke’s Daytime MBA students and convenes think tank gatherings across sectors to explore today’s complex leadership challenges and create positive impact for society.

She works with Generals, Olympians, Fortune 500 and nonprofit CEOs, multigenerational family business leaders, tech startup founders.  Her experience in strategic planning, partnerships, and coaching coupled with an understanding of the millennial and Gen Z mindsets, has helped organizations and executives identify gaps and lead more effectively in a rapidly changing marketplace and talent space. She revels in convening interdisciplinary and diverse teams towards finding and implementing new approaches for complex problems.

Her thought leadership has appeared in Forbes, Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal. She is a LinkedIn Influencer with more than 1 million followers who was named to LinkedIn’s 2017 and 2018 Top 20 Global Influencer Voices.  She is also a 2018 Thinkers50 on the Radar Recipient and a member of the 86th Joint Civilian Orientation Conference.  She has spoken to audiences ranging from The White House to The Global Sports Summits.

Sanyin is an advisor for GV (formerly Google Ventures), and tech startups.  Passionate about children’s education, her board service past and present includes the Museum of Life & Science where she chairs its Governance & Nominating Committee, The Emily Krzyzewski Center, and the National Advisory Board of the Duke University Children’s Hospital.  With a background in STEM, she has served on the editorial boards of Remedica’s Clinical Researcher Journal, the American Bar Association’s Science & Technology Law Section Newsletter and American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Professional Ethics Report and was co-chair of the Info-Structure Security Dialogue.

She is the author of the award winning best-seller The Launch Book: Motivational Stories for Launching Your Idea, Business, or Next Career, which inspires readers through stories of different leaders and gives them an action plan for leveraging change using behavioral science concepts.

Sanyin received her MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and her BSE in biomedical engineering from its Engineering School where she was an Angier B. Duke Scholar.