Faculty

Program Co-Director 

Jen van der Meer an Associate Professor of Strategic Design & Management at Parsons School of Design where she co-directs the MFA in Transdisciplinary Design. 

Jen is a financial architect and business model designer with 25 years of experience structuring capital across equity research, venture capital, development finance, and impact investing. At Reason Street, she advises impact funds, foundations, and health and climate ventures on business model design, blended capital structures, and outcomes-based financing. Her expertise includes designing capital stacks that align concessionary and commercial capital, and business models that attract institutional funders while delivering shared outcomes.

Her research and practice centers on systemic finance: how financial structures encode assumptions about who creates value, who captures it, and who decides - and how those structures can be redesigned. Finance is not neutral infrastructure. It is designed. Grant terms, fund structures, payment mechanisms, governance arrangements - these are all design decisions that determine what becomes possible. They were made by people and can be made differently. The question is whether financial structures maintain the conditions for ecological, social, and economic systems to persist, or deplete them.

Her career began at the Japan Development Bank, where she analyzed technology markets and development finance policy, and at Needham & Company, where she covered semiconductor capital equipment and the Netscape IPO. At frog design, she led a successful turnaround of the East Coast service business and formed the firm's Design Thinking practice. As Chief Strategy Officer at Luminary Labs, which led innovation challenges through public-private partnerships with government, corporations, and venture investors. She organized the acquisition of a social data & events company by Powered, Inc., which merged into Dachis Group (a social data strategy consulting and software company where she served as EVP and Managing Director), which was subsequently acquired by Sprinklr.

Her nonprofit work includes co-founding the Designers Accord, which enrolled 400,000 designers in sustainable design commitments, and o2NYC, a distributed organization advancing ecological design practice. She has served as a judge and mentor for NYC Big Apps, Innovate NYC Schools, NYC Media Lab, and Urban X.

Her practice spans development finance, tech finance, and impact investing. She advises on fund structures, portfolio construction, and investment thesis development for impact vehicles across health, climate, and economic development, translating between institutional investors, foundations, and government funding sources to design structures where different capital requirements align.

She serves as Research and Practice Lead at FEST (Financing Ecosystems for Systemic Transformation), coordinating research and practice across systemic investors, practitioners, field builders, and institutional actors. At Parsons, she teaches thesis synthesis and courses in business models and finance design. She formerly co-directed the Impact Entrepreneurship Initiative. She serves on the University Faculty Senate, the University Budget Committee, and Co-Chairs the Advisory Committee for Investor Responsibility.

Jen has a BA in comparative religion from Trinity College, and an MBA from HEC in Paris.