Elizabeth Ghaffari

Founder, Champion Boards President, Technology Place Inc.

Elizabeth Ghaffari is President and CEO of Technology Place Inc. a California corporation founded in 1989 to deliver strategic technology advisory services to U.S. and international business clients. Previously, she was a manager of IT at major financial institutions in California and a consulting economist to major development firms here and abroad.

Ms. Ghaffari is founder of Champion Boards, through which she conducts research, writes, and speaks on emerging trends in governance, generally, and the changing roles and responsibilities of women company directors, in particular. Through her monthly blog and statistical reports, she regularly tracks, with Alice Krause’s NewsOnWomen.com, the progress of women entering the boardrooms. She has authored two books on aspects of how women advance to leadership in the modern economy. The latest, Women Leaders at Work: Untold Takes of Women Achieving their Ambitions (Apress: 2011) consists of her interviews with 18 women in leadership in business, science, medicine, law, academia, government, and nonprofits. Earlier she wrote Outstanding in their Field: How Women Corporate Directors Succeed (ABC-CLIO: 2006), including interviews with 15 women directors and analysis of the careers and backgrounds of 114 women on the boards of California Fortune 1000 firms.

Since 2011, Ms. Ghaffari has co-chaired Women in Los Angeles Venture Association (WinLAVA - a strategic interest group of LAVA), dedicated to increasing the number and enhancing the quality of deals brought forth to the angel/venture investment community by women-owned/co-owned entrepreneurs. In 2009, Ms. Ghaffari was named a director of Pacific Coast Regional-SBDC, certified by the US Treasury as a Community Development Finance Institution. She was recognized as a Governance Fellow in 2011 by the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) as a continuing education achievement.

Ms. Ghaffari received her MS, Management from the University of California, Los Angeles (Anderson School of Business) and her BS, Political Science from The American University, Washington, DC.