Sherif El Tawil is the Director, Partnerships & Innovation at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He brings over 16 years of experience in innovation ecosystem building, partnership development, and entrepreneurship programming. Over the course of his career, Sherif grew a student-based incubator into a globally recognized program operating in more than 15 countries — supporting entrepreneurs with access to customers, investors, and community, and helping hundreds of ventures scale from idea to market. He has built and led teams across domestic and international operations, and mobilized funding from government, industry, and institutional partners.
Sherif's partnership experience spans sectors and scales. He has designed innovation frameworks as an expert-in-residence embedded within Canada's largest airport by passenger volume, identifying opportunities for researchers and entrepreneurs to solve complex operational challenges. He has built multi-stakeholder consortia that bring government, industry, academia, and investors together to address Canada's housing supply crisis and urban mobility challenges and developed programs for municipal governments across Southern Ontario. Internationally, he has worked in development contexts in the Middle East and Southeast Asia and partnered with universities in Japan to build programs that help faculty commercialize their research.
A committed advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion in innovation, Sherif has launched dedicated programs to ensure that entrepreneurship opportunities reach underrepresented founders and communities.
Sherif holds an LL.M. in Business Law from Osgoode Hall Law School and a degree in Engineering.
→ Contact Sherif at sherif.eltawil@utoronto.ca.