Education Futures

Bukky Yusuf FCCT FRSA is a deputy headteacher and science lead at a small, deliberately low-sensory special school in London for 14 to 19 year olds. She is also a leadership development coach and education consultant. She trained as a secondary chemistry teacher through a school-based PGCE after her master’s. In 2019 the Department for Education appointed her co-chair of its EdTech Leadership Grou...

Daniel Emmerson is the founding Executive Director of the Good Future Foundation, a UK-based charity helping schools around the world adopt AI strategically and responsibly. He is also Academic Affairs Lead at Goodnotes. Before moving into AI and education, he spent 14 years in schools as a teacher and senior leader. Most notably, he was Director of Global Education at Felsted School, where he bui...

Louis de Diesbach is a technology ethicist, author and PhD candidate in Business & Technology Ethics at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics & Management (ULB). He studied Latin and Greek in high school, then management sciences at Solvay, and later went back to earn a Master’s in Ethics and Philosophy at ULB. A mentor, the corporate philosopher Luc de Brabandere, showed him that philos...

Dana Suskind is Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics at the University of Chicago and a pediatric cochlear implant surgeon. She earned her BS and MD at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and joined UChicago in 2002, where she founded the Pediatric Hearing Loss and Cochlear Implant Program. Her patients sent her in a new direction. Two children could get identical implants and still have wildly...

Dr. Sven Schütt is CEO of IU Group, home to IU International University of Applied Sciences, the largest university in Germany. He trained as a neuroscientist, studying physics and philosophy in parallel and finishing both in the standard time. He then earned a PhD on learning at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology during the “AI winter.” After McKinsey, he became Managing Director at Germany...

Isabelle C. Hau is the Executive Director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning . It’s a Stanford-wide effort hosted at the Graduate School of Education, and it brings together more than 100 faculty affiliates to connect learning science with practice and policy. She grew up in rural southern France and studied at Sciences Po Paris and ESSEC before earning her MBA at Harvard Business School. Sh...

Alison "Ali" Gellett leads The Big AI Project at the Oasis Big Education Institute . The project aims to give every school in the UK and the Republic of Ireland what it needs to approach AI safely, ethically and strategically. Ali has 30 years of experience in educational leadership across teaching, multi-academy trust (MAT) executive leadership and local government. She is a Fellow of the Royal S...

Dr. Ola Ozernov-Palchik is a cognitive neuroscientist who studies how the brain learns to read and, more and more, how AI should (and shouldn't) be used to help it. She is a Research Scientist at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research , a Research Assistant Professor at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development , and Associate Director of Translational Research i...

Dr. Nicholas "Nick" Zufelt is Instructor in Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science at Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts. He was recently appointed Resident Scholar in AI and Education at the school's Tang Institute . He trained as a mathematician, earning a graduate degree and completing a postdoc, then decided research wasn't his path and chose the classroom over a data-science car...

Merlia Shaukath is the Founder and CEO of Madhi Foundation , a Chennai-based nonprofit working to end the foundational learning crisis in India's public schools. She studied Economics at Stella Maris College in Chennai, then earned an MSc in Area Development Studies from the University of Oxford and an MSc in Governance and Management from the London School of Economics. Her grandfather was a soci...

Dr Malak Sadek is Course Director and Teaching Associate at the Centre for Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence (CHIA) at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches the Conversational AI module of the MPhil in Human-Inspired AI . She holds a PhD in Design Engineering from Imperial College London's Dyson School of Design Engineering. Her thesis, Designing Responsible AI: Integrating Human Val...

Pegor Papazian is Chief Development Officer at the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies, the innovative after-school programme for teenagers that was founded in Armenia and has now become a global phenomenon. He trained and practised as an architect before switching to computer science at MIT, where he was a member of the AI Lab. He founded a Barcelona firm doing computational GIS and urban plann...

Zoe Weil is the co-founder and president of the Institute for Humane Education (IHE), which she launched with Rae Sikora in 1996 after teaching environmental and animal-protection courses to twelve- and thirteen-year-olds at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. She holds an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School and an M.A. and B.A. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Over n...

Dr. Dhir Jhingran is the Founder and Executive Director of the Language and Learning Foundation (LLF), one of India's leading organizations working on foundational literacy and numeracy. Before founding LLF in 2015, he spent three decades in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), India's premier civil service, including senior policy roles in the Ministry of Education, before taking voluntary re...

Julia Freeland Fisher is Director of Education Research at the Clayton Christensen Institute, the nonpartisan think tank built on Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation, where she has spent 13 years making the case that who students know matters as much as what they know. She holds a BA from Princeton and a JD from Yale Law School — a credential she cheerfully calls "a very expensiv...

Laura Zimmermann, Ph. D., is the Director of Youth AI Research at Common Sense Media, where she leads research within the newly launched Youth AI Safety Institute — the first independent safety lab dedicated to testing how AI products affect children. She earned her Ph. D. in Psychology at Georgetown University with a concentration in Human Development and Public Policy, and was an Institute of Ed...

John Roberts is the Chief Executive of Oak National Academy , an NGO publicly funded by England's Department for Education to build a free, fully digitised national curriculum for England's schools. A former secondary school teacher and senior leader in the North West of England, he built his first reputation outside the classroom by founding Edapt in 2011, an independent edu-legal support service...

Dr. Maria Mercedes "Didith" T. Rodrigo is a Professor in the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, where she directs the Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences (ALLS) and co-heads the Ateneo Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality Laboratory. For over two decades she has studied what students actually do and feel while learn...

Zia Akhter Abbas is President & CEO of The Citizens Foundation (TCF), one of the world's largest privately-run networks of formal schools for low-income children and the largest private employer of women in Pakistan. He came to education sideways: an IB diploma at Lester B. Pearson United World College in Canada, an MBA from LUMS , then seventeen years in senior business and risk roles at Citi...

Dr. Obiageli "Oby" Ezekwesili is Founder and President of Human Capital Africa , an accountability and advocacy organization devoted to Africa's foundational learning crisis — getting every child reading, writing and counting by age 10. An economic policy expert and chartered accountant by training, she was a co-founder of Transparency International and later served in the Nigerian government as M...

Dr. John Mugo is the Chief Executive Officer of Mizizi Elimu Afrika, the African-led education organization based in Nairobi, Kenya, formerly known as Zizi Afrique Foundation. He holds a Doctorate and a Master's degree in Special Needs Education from the University of Hanover, Germany, and a Bachelor of Education (Music) from Kenyatta University, where he went on to chair the Department of Special...

Dan Effland is the Chief of Staff & Strategy at Summit Public Schools, where he leads the continued evolution of Summit's school model. He holds a Master's in Special Education from Dominican University and a Master's in Public School Building Administration from Columbia University's Teachers College. Before entering education, Effland spent over a decade as a professional musician in Chicago...

Dr. Sonia Tiwari is a children's media researcher based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Director of Research at Oki Pie Lab. She holds a PhD in Learning, Design, and Technology from Penn State University, along with an MFA in Animation and a BS in Film, credentials she first put to work as a character designer in the video game industry before turning to research on how children bond with charac...

Ian Cho graduated from St. Mark's School in Southborough, Massachusetts, and heads to Yale University this fall to study cognitive science. Frustrated that AI had quietly become a "taboo subject" wrapped in cheating anxiety, he founded what is now called Sailing (Student AI Literacy Interscholastic Navigator Group), a peer-led initiative that gives students across schools a space to talk openly ab...

Dr. Rukmini Banerji is one of the world's most influential figures in grassroots education. Trained as an economist — a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and a PhD from the University of Chicago — she chose classroom-level work over academia, returning to India in 1996 to join Pratham , one of the world's largest education NGOs, where she served for over a decade as CEO before recently stepping into the ro...