Education Futures

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...

Christine Braun is the Chief Creative Officer of Cresconova , the education charity behind Cresconova Labs, a hands-on studio for ages 8–16 in Chelsea, London. She holds a BFA from the University of the Arts and a Master of Artisanry from the University of Massachusetts, a grounding in material-making that runs through everything she's built since. Her path began with founding Robots for Kids Too,...

Gouri Gupta is Senior Project Director for EdTech at Central Square Foundation (CSF), one of India's leading education nonprofits, based in New Delhi, where she has led the EdTech portfolio for nearly a decade. A Chartered Accountant (rank holder) and IIM Bangalore MBA, she began her career at the Boston Consulting Group before helping build the National Skill Development Corporation, a Government...

On building safe, pedagogically sound AI for young people and the fellowship we built to do it. This fellowship is for builders of AI x education products or anyone thinking to do so in the future. https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship https://educationfutures.substack.com/

Dr. Tyler S. Thigpen is the co-founder and Head of School at The Forest School: An Acton Academy , a self-directed K3–12 microschool in Trilith, near Atlanta, Georgia, and co-founder of the Institute for Self-Directed Learning . He holds a doctorate in Education Leadership (Ed. L.D.) from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a Master's in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School,...

Robin Lake is Director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), based at Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. For more than two decades she has been one of the most respected systems thinkers in American education — researching charter schools, district–charter collaboration, portfolio strategy, and urban school reform, and testifying before the U.S. House Educ...

Kumar Garg is President of Renaissance Philanthropy, the science-and-technology philanthropy he co-founded with Tom Kalil in 2024 to help donors invest in high-impact research across AI, climate, and education. He holds a BA from Dartmouth and a JD from Yale Law School, and cut his teeth over eight years in the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he led the administrat...

Maureen Russo Rodriguez is coming up on her 20th year as an educator and teaches language and literature — primarily Spanish, with occasional turns in English — at St. Mark's School, a small boarding school outside Boston. With a background in comparative literature and a stint in higher ed, she co-founded AI Co-Lab, a teacher-led, peer-to-peer network for building AI literacy. What began with a s...

Dr. Mathilde Cerioli is a cognitive neuroscientist working at the intersection of child development, AI, and public policy. She holds a Master's in child psychology from Paris and a Ph. D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Université de Montréal, where her research focused on using board games and video games to improve cognitive functioning in children and adolescents, including those with learn...

Henry Scott studies at the London Interdisciplinary School ( lis.ac.uk ), pursuing a Bachelor of Arts and Science in Interdisciplinary Problems and Methods, and will be part of the school's third graduating class. Dyslexic since childhood, he turned early to AI dictation tools to help articulate his thinking — a habit he credits with sharpening his own unassisted writing over time. At LIS he took...

Oksana Matiiash is the CEO of WINWIN EdTech Center of Excellence, Ukraine's national hub for technology and innovation in education. Launched in December 2025 under Ukraine's Global Innovation Strategy, the Center generates evidence through research and foresight and pilots education technologies, including AI, while Ukraine navigates a full-scale war. It also brings together government, educators...

MacKenzie Price is the co-founder of Alpha School and the AI-driven 2 Hour Learning model that powers it, a Stanford-trained psychologist who left the traditional path the day her daughter came home from second grade and said, simply, "school is boring." In 2014, working alongside the colleague she still calls "the OG, the Original Guide," Price opened the first Alpha campus in Austin, Texas, bett...

Jenny Anderson is an award-winning journalist and author with 25 years in the field, including a decade covering finance at The New York Times — where she won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2008 for her coverage of Merrill Lynch ahead of the 2008 financial crisis. She later pioneered coverage of the "science of learning" at Quartz, and now contributes to The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washingto...

Bethany Koby-Hirschmann is a designer, social entrepreneur, and co-founder and Chief Vision Officer of Fam Studio , a research and design practice based in Somerset, England. She holds a BA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice from the University of Bath, and is completing a PhD on youth co-creation and the uses of enchantment. In 2012, after fi...

This special episode is a recording of a live panel discussion from the AI & Education Meetup series, hosted by Education Futures at the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS). Svenia is joined by four guests at the intersection of AI and learning: Ash Brockwell, LIS associate professor and lead of the new Education Futures master's; Niccolò Pescetelli, LIS associate professor leading the AI &a...

Justin Reich is an Associate Professor at MIT and Director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab , author of Failure to Disrupt (Harvard University Press), host of the TeachLab podcast, and the force behind The Homework Machine — a landmark 7-part podcast series investigating what's really happening with AI in classrooms across the US. We asked him, one of the most respected education technology researc...

What does it actually take to know if an AI tutor is helping kids learn? Bibi Groot , Chief Impact Officer at Eedi Labs , has spent her career answering exactly that question — first at the Behavioral Insights Team (aka the Nudge Unit, co-founded with Nobel laureate Richard Thaler), then in classrooms across the UK and Latin America. In this episode, Bibi walks us through how Eedi's diagnostic eng...

Anne-Sophie is the co-founder and Executive Director of everyone.ai , a Silicon Valley nonprofit bridging artificial intelligence and developmental neuroscience. She is also the Chief Program Officer of iRAISE (International Research-driven Alliance for AI Serving Every child), the global coalition she launched at the Paris AI Action Summit alongside 11 governments, UNESCO, UNICEF, and companies i...

Kashyap "Kash" Rajesh is 20 years old, a Junior at Cornell University studying Information Science and Government with a minor in AI, and he's been working in AI policy since he was 14. He supported the founding of Encode, a non-profit originally founded by young people, focused on how AI is impacting the public and particularly the next generation, which grew to 40 states and every inhabited cont...

What if AI education wasn't just for engineers and computer scientists, but for every student, regardless of their field? That's exactly the bet Camille Salinesi is making at one of the world's most iconic universities. Camille is a full professor of computer science at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne , where he has been based since 1999. A specialist in requirements engineering and ap...

In this episode, Svenia Busson sits down with Dr. Alex Carter , Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, and Director of Creativity Research at the Centre for AI Interaction. Alex holds a PhD in philosophy from Essex — with roots in Wittgenstein and the philosophy of language — and has become one of the UK's most provocative thinkers at the intersection of...

Dr. Asyia Kazmi, OBE spent 12 years teaching mathematics in some of London's toughest schools, and she loved every minute of it. She went on to advise the UK government, work at PwC, lead Global Education Policy at the Gates Foundation, and is now CEO of WISE (World Innovation Summit for Education, https://www.wise-qatar.org/ ), a Qatar Foundation initiative that convenes the world's leading minds...

Linda Liukas spent her early career surrounded by engineers in Silicon Valley, working at Codecademy and dreaming of a different kind of computer science education — one that felt tangible, joyful, and human. In 2014, she launched a Kickstarter for Hello Ruby , a children's storybook teaching the big ideas of computer science through characters and storytelling. She asked for $10,000. She got near...

What skills will remain irreplaceable as AI takes over more and more of the work we do? That's the question that led Rahim Hirji to write SuperSkills — a book about the human capabilities that will define who thrives in the age of AI. Rahim has spent over two decades at the intersection of technology and education. He ran Maths Doctor, one of the UK's first online tutoring businesses. He co-founde...