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Francis is an environmental engineer, a professor of Environmental Engineering, Microbiology, and Biotechnology at NC State University, a teacher and researcher, a University Faculty Scholar, and a coordinator for a non-profit organization helping to lift developing countries out of poverty. His research and teaching focuses on wastewater treatment, engineering and microbiology of contaminant removal from solid and liquid wastes, molecular microbial ecology, and water and sanitation for developing countries. Francis obtained a BS in Agricultural Engineering from the University of the Philippines-Los Banos, a MS in Civil Engineering from Iowa State University, and a PhD in Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois. He has received national and international awards for research, including the NSF CAREER Award (“the highest science award given to young faculty) and a Distinguished Alumnus Award from UPLB. He has worked with government agencies, municipalities, universities, and companies in the US, China, Montenegro, the Philippines, Belgium, South Africa, India, and Malawi as consultant or visiting scientist. As the NC Triangle Area Coordinator of Gawad Kalinga, a non-profit movement with the aim of transforming slums in developing countries to colorful villages, he has coordinated efforts to establish 3 villages in the Philippines, helping to rebuild the lives of 90 families. He is a marathoner and enjoys Taekwondo.

I am an award-winning international Global Health Researcher and Leader based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I focus on infectious diseases, especially neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). I was the first black African woman appointed to a professorship in Scotland. I conduct and leads basic scientific research that has had an extraordinary impact on the policy, practice and implementation control measures against infectious. I have contributed to shaping national and global NTD policies by working closely with the WHO, African Union, and local governments in affected countries, impacting millions of lives. My work on paediatric schistosomiasis (bilharzia) made a major contribution to the WHO recommending screening and treatment of pre-school children in 2012 giving access to treatment to approx. 50 million children across Africa. I have received several awards for the impact of my work in bilharzia including the David Livingstone Medal from the Glasgow Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. My research on COVID-19 contributed to hospital infection control policy in Zimbabwe and I am a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Post Covid-19 Futures Commission established to support Scotland in emerging as positively as it can from the current pandemic. I am helping shape research and training in Africa through independent advisory boards. I sit on several advisory bodies including; the WHO Africa Regional Director’s Advisory Board; the UK Government’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (formerly DFID) Science Advisory Group; the UK Research, and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund Strategic Advisory Group; the board of Uniting to Combat Neglected Tropical Diseases; Wellcome Trust Global Monitor External Advisory Board and; Royal Society/African Academy of Science Future Leaders – African Independent Researchers Fellowships steering committee. I am a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, the Zimbabwe Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. I was a founding member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Young Academy of Scotland. I am also a 2021 Aspen New Voices Fellow. I am also an accomplished visual artist ( see details on section ‘People don’t know I am good at’) and have just embarked on an additional career as a nonfiction author. I am the founding director of Mwenje Wedu Trust whose aim is to enable children and youth in Zimbabwe to reach their full potential through providing scholarships, training, social enterprise and creating an enabling learning environment.

Fred Swaniker is passionate about Africa and believes that Africa’s future will be determined by the quality of its future leaders. He has thus devoted the last several years to building an institution that aims to transform Africa by developing its next generation of leaders: African Leadership Academy, (www.africanleadershipacademy.org). Before founding African Leadership Academy, Fred founded Global Leadership Adventures, a leadership development program for youth throughout the world, and also helped launch Mount Pleasant English Medium School, one of the top-performing private elementary schools in Botswana. Fred began his career after college in the Johannesburg office of McKinsey & Company, where he advised management teams of large companies across Africa. Fred has an MBA from Stanford University, where he was named an Arjay Miller Scholar, a distinction awarded to the top ten percent of each graduating class. He also holds a BA degree magna cum laude from Macalester College.

Frederick Balagadde received his PhD in Applied Physics from Caltech in 2007 and became a TED Fellow in 2009. While he was a graduate student, Frederick invented the microchemostat: a first-of-its-kind microfabricated fluidic chip for continuous bacterial cultivation. The microchemostat invention was featured on NPR, and published in the prestigious Science Magazine. In 2012, he pioneered the development of the first microfluidics Large Scale Integration (mLSI) research facility in Africa at K-RITH, where he was a Principal Investigator for 5 years. In 2015 he was awarded the Young Alumni Outstanding Achievement Award by Manchester University. His latest invention, ITHERIAL Systems LLC, is a software development company that develops innovative progressive web applications (Web Apps) and Data Analytics solutions.

Gabriel Barcia-Colombo is a mixed media artist whose work focuses on collections, memorialization and the act of leaving one's digital imprint for the next generation. His work takes the form of video sculptures, immersive performances, large scale projections and vending machines that sell human DNA. His work plays upon this modern exigency in our culture to chronicle, preserve and wax nostalgic, an idea which Barcia-Colombo renders visually by “collecting” human portraits on video. Gabriel was commissioned to be the first digital artist to show work at the New Fulton Terminal Stop with the MTA Arts & Design program in New York City. His work has been featured in the Volta, Scope, and Art Mrkt art fairs, Victoria & Albert Museum as well as Grand Central Terminal and the New York Public Library. He recently received an Art and Technology grant from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where he created The Hereafter Institute; a company that questions the future of death rituals and memorials and their relationship to technology. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gabriel served as a member of the artist advisory board at the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the education committee member at the Museum of Art and Design. In 2012 Gabriel gave a TED talk entitled Capturing Memories in Video Art, and in 2014 he gave another entitled My DNA Vending Machine and was awarded a Senior TED fellowship. In 2016 Gabe founded Bunker.nyc a pop up gallery showcasing emerging art made with technology. Bunker became the first pop up digital art gallery to open in the Sotheby's Auction House in New York Summer 2017. Gabe is a New York Foundation for the Arts grant awardee and faculty member at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

Gangadhar Patil, is founder of 101Reporters. In 2017, he was elected as one of the Ashoka fellow from India. He quit mainstream media to pursue his interest in investigative journalism by building a strong network of grassroots journalists. His last assignment was with India's largest business daily, The Economic Times as Senior Correspondent mainly covering Taxation, Investigative agencies, Law Ministry, financial frauds and major corporates. After being trained in journalism from Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media, Bangalore, in 2010, he began his journalism career with The New Indian Express, Chennai. During one year stint with Express, he also served as Express correspondent in Coimbatore and reported briefly for Bangalore bureau. After completing a year with Indian Express, he joined Mumbai edition of DNA newspaper in 2011 as part of its Investigations Bureau and worked there for two years. In mid-2013, he moved to New Delhi and towards the end of the year he joined the political bureau of The Economic Times.

Gaurav Mishra help organizations and changemakers use design, technology and community to craft better futures. Gaurav is currently working on FutureCrafting, which helps early adopters use technology to make more intentional choices, grow more positive habits, and become their best self. Previously, Gaurav studied at IIM Bangalore, held senior marketing roles at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University as the 2008-09 Yahoo! Fellow, launched Ushahidi-based crowd-sourced election monitoring platform Vote Report India, co-founded social business consulting firm 2020 Social (acquired by Publicis Groupe), and created global insights and innovation offerings for MSLGROUP/ Publicis Groupe. Gaurav is widely considered to a leading writer, speaker and maker at the intersection of crowd co-creation and social innovation. He has written and edited book chapters, reports, op-eds, a weekly newspaper column, a quarterly magazine, and an award-winning blog. He has spoken at conferences, guest lectured at universities, led workshops for clients, joined award juries, and coached entrepreneurs all over the world. He has helped create a crowdsourcing software, a social analytics software, and a social curation software, apart from several crowdsourcing-driven social platforms for clients. Gaurav has been a 2008-09 Yahoo! Fellow, a 2009 SNCR Fellow, a 2009 TED Fellow, and a 2013-14 THNK participant.

I have varied interests ranging from music to technology to media to sport and I do my best to keep myself active in all these areas. I am currently the Director for OML Digital, a division of Only Much Louder (OML - http://oml.in) which aims to create products and offer services that target the Indian entertainment industry especially the Indian Indie music scene. Music Music has always been second nature to me but it became a serious career only late last year when I quit my IT career to pursue music and music business full time! I started out as a rock musician with my college band ‘Phenom’ and from there moved to more solo sessions as a serenader at restaurants to trying various interesting opportunities in Music like singing telegrams etc. For the past 4 years, I have been playing the bass guitar with “The Raghu Dixit Project†(http://raghudixit.com), an Indo-World-Folk-Rock band with a very fresh and original sound. Since the release of our first album 2 years back, the band is counted as one of the most popular bands in its genre in the country. I work with the CAUSE Foundation, Bangalore and am part of the musicals that they stage every year in Bangalore. I have been working with them as a Music Director for the past 2 years. I am currently working with 2 more music projects, a band called ‘Allegro Fudge’ (http://allegrofudge.com) which is working on its debut EP and another project tentatively titled ‘The Fear of Missing Out’. I also play sessions bass guitar for various jingles and recently with Raghu Dixit for his debut Kannada movie score which was quite the rage all over Karnataka. Technology / Entrepreneurship I graduated in 2004 with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science Engineering from PESIT, Bangalore (Part of the Vishveshwaraya Technological University) and from there joined NetScaler (which then became Citrix) as a software developer. I then moved into some other domains in the company before finally settling down with Technical Writing. I currently head OML Digital, a venture by the Bombay based ‘Only Much Louder’ (http://oml.in) that aims at creating products and providing services to the Indian entertainment industry. Our first product, NH7 (still being developed) is a one stop portal for Indian Indie music that will effectively integrate the active Offline music scene with the Internet effectively! We are also working with various companies and bands to help grow and maintain their online presence Media I was drawn to the Internet and its ability to manifest itself as a publishing platform and more importantly, an alternative platform to mass media quite early in my career and thus, a lot of my thinking and beliefs are moulded around it. This originally manifested itself in the journal I began to maintain online for about 5 years which I largely used for publicity for my band. My understanding of the entire New Media space took a huge leap forward, when “Phenomâ€, my band released our ï¬rst EP (extended play) on the Internet for free under the Creative Common’s license. From there, I joined a friend of mine and started what was then, the ï¬rst of its kind Online Radio station (http://radioverve.com) which focussed only of Independent Indian Music. Today, RadioVeRVe is a very popular name in the Online Radio Scene in India. I am currently involved in the creation of Fuzzbox (http://fuzzbox.in), a first of its kind, aggregator of short and long form content (both audio and video) that specifically targets the Internet and Mobile as channels of distribution.

I started out as a lawyer with a focus on Intellectual Property Laws. Post that, I have been an entrepreneur in the food industry, an agriculturalist of sorts, worked as a small wheel in the cogs of a large company and now work in the non-profit field within the folds of education and publishing. During this time, I have also been fortunate to advise a few small startups in the legal, food and social entrepreneurship space.

Gautam is the founder of Internet of Elephants, a social enterprise with a mission to change the way the world engages with wildlife and its conservation. He got to this place by combining a long career in IT consulting, mostly at Accenture, where he led large systems delivery projects, with a deep love for animals and a passion for wildlife. Gautam never intended to be an entrepreneur, but now he's in charge of a company that makes playful games and mesmerizing digital experiences about wildlife and gets them to the world in creative ways. Leading a team to catalyze a whole new approach to telling wildlife stories is the only job he will ever want. Gautam believes that games and digital experiences can and should make a huge difference in wildlife conservation his objective is to speed up that reality and do it right. He is always happy to chat with other individuals or organizations in the conservation, game, media, or corporate world that are interested in wildlife, whether its to think about a potential great collaboration, or just to geek out on gibbons and leafy sea dragons. Gautam is a National Geographic Fellow and when the magazine did a full page feature on him, his parents finally understood why he decided to do what he did. His company, Internet of Elephants, was selected as a Fast Company Most Innovative Company in 2018 and has been featured in CNN, BBC, TechCrunch and even GQ and Runners World of all places. He lives in Nanyuki, Kenya with his wife and daughter.

Gavin Sheppard belongs to a class of people that skipped class.

Genevieve von Petzinger is a PhD student studying European Ice Age rock art (10,000–40,000 years ago) at the University of Victoria in Canada. Genevieve’s previous research in France included creating the first full typology of abstract rock art (30 distinct signs have been identified to date), and building the largest database of geometric imagery in the world (146 sites with over 5,000 separate images). She found that many of the signs remained in use for over 20,000 years, and appeared throughout a broad geographic region. This continuity suggests the signs were being used with purpose and were meaningful to their creators. It also implies that this could be a very early form of graphic communication. Genevieve’s current work includes expanding her database to incorporate all other Ice Age rock art sites in Europe, and exploring the cognitive and symbolic capacity of our distant ancestors.

Geoffrey is currently a research assistant professor at the Center for Research Computing and the Eck Institute for Global Health, University of Notre Dame, IN, USA. His research focuses on accelerated and equitable innovation using emerging computational technologies such as artificial intelligence, programmable biotechnologies such as CRISPR/Cas systems and frameworks for scientific discovery at a global scale such as open innovation challenges. Previously, he was a lead researcher at IBM Research Africa and a co-founder of Helix Nanotechnologies, a DNA nanotechnology company. His work has been featured in several media including CNN, USA Today, Fast Company, Ozy, among other media.

Gerry Douglas is the founder of Baobab Health, a non-profit organization based in Malawi that is revolutionizing healthcare in lower-income countries. Baobab's cornerstone is using medical informatics to improve healthcare delivery in Malawian hospitals and clinics. Their cutting-edge touchscreen clinical workstation appliance has generated significant interest amongst the international healthcare community. By empowering clinicians with robust, low-power, inexpensive clinical workstations at the point of care, they have significantly decreased documentation errors and vastly improved continuity of care for the patients, particularly with HIV/AIDS. Baobab is committed to a philosophy of creating free and open source software and building in-country capacity to develop and support local systems. While currently operating solely in Malawi, Baobab provides technical support and knowledge transfer to international organizations working throughout the developing world. Mr. Douglas first came to Malawi in 1996, to organize medical data for the Ministry of Health. The issues he encountered spurred him to pursue graduate work in medical informatics, which involved significant field work. In 2000, he founded Baobab with his wife, a Peace Corps physician who was equally dedicated to improving healthcare in the developing world. Prior to Baobab, Gerry Douglas spent several years as an avionics technician in Canada. Gerry and his family split their time between Malawi and Pittsburgh, USA. He holds a Diploma in Electronics, BS (hons) in Computer Science from the University of Victoria, an MS in Information Science and a PhD in Biomedical Informatics from the University of Pittsburgh.

Germán Santillán is a Social Entrepreneur - Taco Lover, Founder and CEO of Oaxacanita chocolate, social company that through the production of artisanal chocolate contributes to the social, economic and environmental development of proudly indigenous communities of the Mixtec Region of Oaxaca, the poorest region of Mexico. By the creation of a productive and a collaborative chain Germán's social company involves de work of cocoa farmers, traditional cooks and palm artisans who are involved from the cultivation of cocoa to the put in the market of the chocolate. Germán Santillán has a Business Science Degree by the Technological Univesity of the Mixtec (México) and a Leadership Diploma by the University of Notre Dame (USA). In 2016 Former President Barack Obama and the U.S. Government named Oaxacanita chocolate one of the best social projects of Latin America and the Caribbean in the Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative - YLAI, entrepreneurial initiative with impact in all the continent where Germán Santillán is a Former Alumni Advisory Board Member where he represented the North America region. Currently he is the only Alumni Advisory Leader for the Initiative in all the continent. In 2018 Germán Santillán and Oaxacanita chocolate were awarded with the Laureate Global Fellowship of the International Youth Foundation and Laureate International Universities considering the project as one of the best social entrepreneurial initiatives in the world and also becoming part of YouthActionNet. Germán Santillán is also Founder Member and Board Member of the Association of Chocolatiers of the State of Oaxaca, a non-profit that works for the boost of the chocolate industry in Oaxaca State and which represents more than 10 chocolate companies. As Oaxacanita chocolate develops its work in communities of rural Mexico, the need of social media and internet was very important to reach new costumers, this was the main reason the social company decided to focus their sales efforts via social media, principally Facebook. 4 years after this choice, Facebook selected Oaxacanita chocolate as its Succees Case Worldwide in the Facebook Communities Summit 2019. By 2021, Germán and Oaxacanita chocolate were the winners of the TIC Americas competition of the Young Americas Business Trust InnovAction Challenge, an initiative powered by the Organization of American States, the Summit Americas Secretariat and the Inter-American Foundation, putting the work of Oaxacanita chocolate as one of the best initiatives to solve the recovery of marginalized communities after COVID. He was invited by the Westwerwelle Foundation to be one of their 9 Global Ambassadors promoting entrepreneurship in emerging markets. By 2022, after preseting his first TED Talk in Monterey, California, Germán attended to TED2022 to give the "Farm to la Copa: a cacao experience" Discovery Session and also attended to TED2023 as Ambassador of the TED Fellows Program participating in the Re-Imagination process of the program Selected as the representant of Mexican Youth during the IX Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles and World Intellectual Property Organization success story. In 2024 he was considered a World Economic Forum UpLink Top Innovator and Next Gen Changemaker of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Oaxacanita chocolate's work and social impact has also been awarded by national organizations like the Premio UVM for the Social Development Award, the Premio Razón de Ser Award of Fundación Merced and the 3 Goula Awards, as Industry Leaders, by the Food Agency Goula. Thanks to the efforts of Germán's team they were a participants of the International Visitor Leadership Program - IVLP of the U.S. Department of State. Graduates of the GSBI Boost Program of the Miller Center of Social Entrepreneurship of the University of Santa Clara. Graduates of the Mexican Alumni Capacity Building through Social Entrepreneurship and Leadership Program of the U.S. Embassy Mexico. Graduates of the ACCELERATE 2030 Program named as one of the best 10 social companies of Mexico by the Impact Hub Monterrey, Impact Hub Geneva and the United Nations Development Program - UNDP. Particpants of BBVA Momentum Program and Trascender Irrazonable Program of Unreasonable Mexico and CitiBanamex. Oaxacanita chocolate is member of entrepreneurial organizations like 1MillionStartups where they sign the First Global Entrepreneurship Declaration at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization UNIDO, of YouthLead of USAID and of the "Boost With Facebook" Leaders Network. Oaxacanita chocolate's work is part of the Premios Latinoamérica Verde Ranking as one of the best socioenvironmental projects of Latin America. Participant of the OC3 Program of the MIT D-Lab and Connector for Ashoka in Oaxaca State. Allies of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network - SDSN Youth Mexico . Part of the TOP 2030 of the International Youth Agency for Iberoamerica. Considered one of the 20 social projects that is changing Mexico by Entrepreneur Mexico Magazine and one of the Business Promises of Expansión Magazine. Germán's vision for a better world stands by the principle of "the best way to think of myself is to think of others" and they're core values are humillity, honesty, responsability, professionalism, order and transparency.