Pay It Forward Summit Speakers

Find Your Idea Worth Spreading: A TED-Ed Workshop for Scholars

Athena Lao is a Senior Program Manager at TED-Ed, where she designs and launches programs that amplify the voices of students and educators worldwide. A Gates Millennium Scholar (2008), Athena holds a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard, a Master's in International Educational Development from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from Quantic. Before TED-Ed, she spent nearly a decade at the Institute of International Education managing global education exchange programs. She also co-founded a youth civic education nonprofit in Bulgaria. Athena is passionate about using the power of ideas to create more equitable access to education and opportunity.

Trauma-Informed Finance: Where Embodiment Meets Economics

Najaah Yasmine Daniels, aka Priestess Ifaleri Osunnike Osawmimo, is a 2011 Gates Millennium Scholar, a 2026 Influential Women Award recipient, social entrepreneur, and the creator of Trauma-Informed Finance. Over the past decade, she has supported mission-driven leaders, mobilized millions of dollars, and built initiatives that expand access to capital, community, and civic engagement. As Founder & CEO of Twice As Good LLC, Najaah helps businesses, organizations, and communities heal, rebuild, and thrive amid uncertainty by designing trauma-informed strategies, systems, and solutions.

Group #1: From Idea to Entity: Business Formation and Federal Contracting for Minority-Owned Businesses

Naomie Droll is a 2012 Gates Millennium Scholar and an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation. An attorney by trade, her practice focuses on federal Indian law and economic development. She has been involved with Scholars Equity Network since 2024 and is deeply committed to its mission of empowering GMS alumni to give back to the communities they come from. Naomie earned her J.D. from the University of New Mexico School of Law and her B.A. in international relations from Rollins College.

Group #1: From Idea to Entity: Business Formation and Federal Contracting for Minority-Owned Businesses

Alex Rodriguez brings decades of experience in the federal government. He has worked across multiple federal agencies and brings firsthand knowledge of how federal procurement works from both sides of the table. His consulting practice focuses on helping businesses navigate federal contacting, from eligibility and application through contract performance. He works directly with businesses at every stage of the federal contracting process.

Main Character Energy: Building your Personal Brand on Social Media

Tiffani Knowles-Senatus is a PR consultant, a professor of Strategic Communication at the University of Miami, and the co-founder of Millennial Solutions, LLC, the parent company of Global Business Lending, a firm that provides working capital to businesses across North America. For two decades, her career and entrepreneurial endeavors spanned multiple industries. She began her career as a newspaper journalist at The Miami Herald, covering art and culture, education, and immigration. An inaugural Gates Millennium Scholar, she earned her bachelor’s in Broadcast Communication at Barry University and her master’s in Arts and Humanities Education at New York University before becoming a producer for a youth talk show, a radio personality and then a voiceover artist for clients like CNN, Merriam-Webster, Subway, CROCS, and Discovery Channel.

Stop Being the Best Kept Secret: How to Get Seen and Promoted

Lani Shaw is an ICF-certified executive coach and federal attorney with over 20 years of experience in high-stakes regulatory environments. She helps professionals get seen, get selected, and get promoted using clear, practical career strategies. A Gates Millennium Scholar, Lani understands what it means to excel without always having access to the playbook and now teaches that playbook to others. Through her coaching practice, she has helped clients secure multiple job offers and advance into higher-level roles. She is also the creator of the “Ask Coach Lani” career column and a trusted voice on leadership and career growth.

Investing Basics: Make Your Money Work Harder Than You Do

Kayode O. Aje is a Managing Director and Senior Portfolio Manager with over two decades of experience in financial services. He is also the Co-Founder of Cedar Bosk, a values-driven enterprise dedicated to advancing education, innovation, and strengthening communities. Kayode earned his MBA from the Yale School of Management, holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Maryland, College Park, and is a CFA charter holder. In addition to his professional responsibilities, Kayode is involved in his community having served on various boards and his undergraduate advisory council.

Group #2 Build, Protect, Belong: A Practical Workshop on AI for Scholars Who Are Here to Lead

Chau Dang is a Gates Millennium Scholar, Class of 2002, who works on AI security and trust at NVIDIA. She came to the U.S. as a Vietnamese refugee, the daughter of a machinist and a manicurist, and was the first in her family to graduate college. Before tech, she was a solar physicist at NASA; she later launched open-source software at NVIDIA before moving into AI cybersecurity. She serves as Board Chair of the Scholars Equity Network. Her gift is translating AI into plain language and asking who each system is really built to serve.

Group #2 Build, Protect, Belong: A Practical Workshop on AI for Scholars Who Are Here to Lead

Sikander “Sonny” Khan is a nonprofit leader and hands-on AI practitioner, and a Gates Millennium Scholar. A marketer at an AI startup by day, while also running a mission-driven nonprofit with a lean team. He uses AI to stretch limited resources and stay focused on what matters. Through trial and error, he has built a practical playbook for AI adoption in resource-constrained organizations: which tools work, what they cost, what they break, and where the human touch must stay human. He brings the operational reality of leading with AI to scholars running teams and organizations of every size.

Group #2 Build, Protect, Belong: A Practical Workshop on AI for Scholars Who Are Here to Lead

Elizabeth Mendoza works where AI meets the law at Perkins Coie, LLC, a field being written in real time, often without the communities most affected having a seat at the table. As a lawyer and co-founder of Mocel, she focuses on what rights exist around AI, where the gaps remain, and what underserved communities need to know to protect themselves in an AI-driven world. Elizabeth makes a fast-moving, often opaque regulatory landscape legible and actionable, helping people read an AI policy, push back on an algorithm, and advocate for equitable AI in their industry and community.

Group #6 Flourish & Sustain: Positive Psychology Tools for Long-Term Well-Being

Lillian C. Martz, Ph.D., PSC, PCLC, is an Assistant Professor in Counselor Education at Portland State University. She earned her Ph.D. in Counselor Education and Supervision from The University of Montana. She has served students P-20 as a school counselor and clinical clients across the lifespan. Dr. Martz’s research interests focus on promoting wellbeing and positive psychology, crisis response and antiracist school counseling. She has presented on these topics at regional, state, national, and international conferences and co-developed and taught a course on evidence-based practices to improve educator wellbeing. She serves on numerous professional counseling organization boards and committees.

Group #6 Flourish & Sustain: Positive Psychology Tools for Long-Term Well-Being

Dr. John Sommers-Flanagan is the founding director of the Center for the Advancement of Positive Education at the University of Montana, a counselor educator, a clinical psychologist, and author or coauthor of over 100 publications, including ten books and many professional training videos. He has published articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, American Psychologist, Professional Psychology, and the Journal of Counseling and Development. John’s current work primarily involves promoting an evidence-informed strengths-based learning model designed to grow student and teacher strengths, skills, resources, and virtues, rather than growing more mental disorders.

Group #6 Flourish & Sustain: Positive Psychology Tools for Long-Term Well-Being

Dylan Wright is a licensed clinical professional counselor and advocate for positive psychology. He serves as the Community Liaison for the Center for the Advancement of Positive Education at The University of Montana. He shares his expertise through presentations and instruction primarily with school districts and non-profits. He operates a private practice where he sees children, couples, and families. He has an extensive background in theatre and the performing arts and consults with Missoula Children’s Theatre to provide counseling workshops and services to employees. He loves to mountain bike and spend time with his wife and adult children.

You Were Never Empty-Handed: The Mentoring Session Nobody Gave Us

Cinthia Manuel is a Gates Millennium Scholar alumna, TEDx speaker, and CEO and Founder of Autentica Consulting. A proud first-generation, bilingual, bicultural Latinapreneur, she has spent years designing mentoring programs and leadership development experiences across Fortune 500 companies, startups, nonprofits, healthcare systems, higher education institutions, and community organizations. Her TEDx talk Why Is Mentoring Backwards? forms the foundation of her Mentee Mastery framework, a first-of-its-kind approach to preparing mentees, not just mentors, for effective mentoring relationships. She brings the same belief to every room she enters: that the people told they come with a deficit are actually the ones showing up richest.

When Career & Caregiving Collide: From Invisible to Integral

Jessica C. Guthrie, M.Ed, is the founder and CEO of Jessica C. Guthrie Caregiving Consultancy and a caregiving strategist, speaker, and advocate. For more than eleven years she has been the primary caregiver for her mother, who lives with early-onset Alzheimer's — a journey she began at 26 while building her career. A Dartmouth graduate, Jessica draws on lived experience and a decade of education and nonprofit leadership to help organizations move family caregivers from invisible to integral. Her advocacy has been featured by PBS, ABC News, and the United Nations, and she has built a community of 60,000+ caregivers.

Beyond Good Intentions: Building Organizations That Scale

Robert Lee is the Founder & CEO of Rescuing Leftover Cuisine, a nonprofit focused on reducing food waste and food insecurity through surplus food redistribution. A Gates Millennium Scholar and NYU graduate, Robert began his work in food recovery while leading a campus initiative that redirected leftover dining hall food to shelters across New York City. After working at J.P. Morgan, he co-founded RLC in 2013. Under his leadership, RLC has expanded nationally and redirected more than 23 million pounds of food to communities in need through a technology-enabled, operationally efficient model.

Group #7 From Individual to Collective: Community Organizing and Movement Building for Change

Tilifayea Griffin is an educator, policy advocate, and consultant at the intersection of curriculum justice, Black educator advocacy, and leadership development. She is a PhD Candidate in Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University, where her dissertation examines literacy as resistance to curriculum violence. Tilifayea was a 2025–2026 Leadership for Educational Equity Public Policy Fellow, completing her placement with the Black Educator Advocates Network, where she co-organized a statewide advocacy day at the California State Capitol mobilizing Black educators to advance education funding and policy priorities. A 2009 Gates Millennium Scholar, she has presented her research at the American Educational Research Association and brings both scholarly grounding and practitioner experience to her facilitation work.

Group #7 From Individual to Collective: Community Organizing and Movement Building for Change

Jalisa Evans is the founder and CEO of the Black Educator Advocates Network (BEAN). Over a decade, she has worked at the intersection of classroom teaching, grassroots organizing, and policy advocacy — from securing $132 million in school funding in Charlotte to leading a campaign that directed resources to over 14,000 Black students in Los Angeles Unified School District. BEAN advances collective action among Black educators and partners with school systems to build anti-racist schools and workforces. Jalisa holds a Master of Social Work from the University of Southern California and a B.A. from North Carolina A&T State University.

Group #8 Pay It Forward Accelerator Unpacked: the application, the strategy, and the people behind it

James W. Lovell is a civic leader, community developer, and elected official dedicated to advancing Native equity, affordable housing, and youth and family services in the Puget Sound region. An enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians (Belcourt, North Dakota), he was born and raised in Seattle and has lived in SeaTac, Washington, since 2011. Lovell serves as Chief Community Development Officer at Chief Seattle Club, a nonprofit serving Native people experiencing homelessness, where he leads fundraising, grant writing, policy and advocacy, and communications. Previously he was Development Director at Neighborhood House and built his career in youth development and statewide education systems at School's Out Washington, ReWA, and VFA (now Kandelia).

Group #8 Pay It Forward Accelerator Unpacked: the application, the strategy, and the people behind it

Group #8 Pay It Forward Accelerator Unpacked: the application, the strategy, and the people behind it

Change Maker 2025-26

Dr. Karen Isabel Perez is a radio astronomer and the inaugural William J. Welch Postdoctoral Fellow at the SETI Institute, where she is developing real-time, machine-learning-enabled and GPU-accelerated pipelines to detect single-pulse transients and technosignatures using the Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek, California, and observatories worldwide. As a Gates Millennium Scholar, she earned her B.A. in Astronomy with a concentration in Astrophysics from Cornell University (2019) and her Ph.D. in Astronomy from Columbia University (2025). A first-generation Mexican-American scientist, Dr. Isabel Perez is deeply committed to making science accessible to historically underrepresented communities — especially Hispanic families — through outreach, mentorship, and sharing her own path from documentary-inspired eighth-grader to professional astronomer.

Group #8 Pay It Forward Accelerator Unpacked: the application, the strategy, and the people behind it

Change Maker 2025-26

Dr. Nathaniel Ramos Jr. serves as Assistant Library Administrator for the Beaumont Public Library System in Beaumont, Texas, based at the R.C. Miller Memorial Library. In this role he helps lead one of Southeast Texas's principal public library systems, supporting library operations, services, and community programming across its branches. Dr. Ramos earned a Ph.D. in Information from Florida State University's School of Information (iSchool), where his dissertation examined technology adoption within the running community. His academic path also includes study at Colorado State University and the University of Denver. His research has explored lifelong learning and libraries, including the collaborative “iMapLibraries” project mapping opportunities for community learning. Across his career, he has focused on the public library as an engine of literacy, equitable access to information, and lifelong learning.

Group #8 Pay It Forward Accelerator Unpacked: the application, the strategy, and the people behind it

Change Maker 2025-26

Aubrey Skeeter is a Native language revitalization advocate and educator working with the Yuchi Language Project, a community-based nonprofit in Oklahoma dedicated to restoring the Yuchi (Euchee) language and raising a new generation of first-language speakers. A citizen of Muscogee (Creek) and Yuchi heritage, she brings both scholarly training and lived cultural connection to the work of Indigenous language and cultural preservation. Raised in Oklahoma, Skeeter graduated from Colorado College in 2019. As an undergraduate, she partnered with ethnomusicologist Professor Victoria Levine on faculty-student collaborative research (2017) documenting Yuchi shell-shakers and song leaders. On campus she was an active voice in the Native American Student Union, speaking about the role of powwows, ceremony, and storytelling in sustaining Native identity across generations.

Group #8 Pay It Forward Accelerator Unpacked: the application, the strategy, and the people behind it

Change Maker 2025-26

Rod Bravo is an MD Candidate at the University of Arizona College of Medicine–Tucson in association with the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine, a graduate of Harvard and Yale Universities, and a 2012 Bill & Melinda Gates Millennium Scholar. As the first-place winner of SEN’s inaugural Pay It Forward Accelerator, he funded the development of a free community diabetes clinic for underserved patients in Arizona. Passionate about expanding access to care by connecting disparate silos across healthcare, Rod is Co-Founder of Raphi and Bravo Conscious Health, organizations advancing the responsible integration of globally sourced healing modalities into modern medicine.

Group #9 The ADAPT Narrative: Promoting student achievement through counter narratives (This session is extended for an addition 30 minutes to include a documentary viewing)

Quan Neloms is an educator and counselor with 23 years of experience across K–12 and higher education. He is the creator of the Lyricist Society, a nationally recognized program that uses hip hop, storytelling and digital media to promote literacy, cultural awareness, and student voice. Neloms is also the founder of I Am In Demand, an initiative focused on increasing the presence of Black men as educators, mentors and volunteers. He is the producer of The ADAPT Narrative, a documentary exploring identity, media narratives, and postsecondary aspirations among Detroit youth.

Group #9 The ADAPT Narrative: Promoting student achievement through counter narratives (This session is extended for an addition 30 minutes to include a documentary viewing)

KrisTiana Dove is a first-generation college student and emerging STEM leader from Detroit, Michigan. A 2025 graduate of Southeastern High School, she earned a 4.18 GPA and was accepted to every one of the 15–20 colleges she applied to before choosing Johns Hopkins University, drawn by its support for first-generation students and students of color and its strengths in the sciences. At Hopkins, KrisTiana plans to double major in Chemistry and Interdisciplinary Studies, designing a custom degree that blends her scientific ambitions with her passion for photography and film.

Group #9 The ADAPT Narrative: Promoting student achievement through counter narratives (This session is extended for an addition 30 minutes to include a documentary viewing)