Mila Atmos
Mila Atmos is the founder and host of Future Hindsight, a podcast that aims to inspire civic engagement through in-depth conversations with citizen changemakers. She explores the factors that support humanity and foster vibrant, democratic societies, including education, public policy, and the arts. Mila has been a contributor to HuffPost and Quartz, among other publications. She earned a B.A. in history from Columbia University and a masters degree in international affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia.
David Beard
David Beard is a writer, editor and strategist who specializes in audience engagement. He is a former Associated Press foreign correspondent, assistant managing editor of the Boston Globe, director of digital content at the Washington Post and executive editor of Public Radio International (pri.org). He has consulted with the AP, the Knight Foundation, the Pulitzer Prizes and Mother Jones and is a contributing editor to the Poynter Institute. He is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School and was a 2017 research fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center.
Joshua Benton
Joshua Benton is director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, a project to help journalism adapt to the demands of the Internet age. Before coming to Harvard in 2007 as a Nieman Fellow, he spend seven years as an education reporter for The Dallas Morning News, during which he won five first-place awards in the National Awards for Education Reporting, in investigative reporting, beat reporting, and opinion writing. He also won the Philip Meyer Journalism Award from Investigative Reporters & Editors and the Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting. He is a native of south Louisiana.
John Branam
Jon Branam is executive director of Get Schooled, an organization that offers tips, tools and advice to help people succeed in education. John is a former middle school teacher and Peace Corp volunteer with more than fifteen years of experience in the education field and was previously a partner with The Learning Accelerator, an education consultancy focused on accelerating blended learning. He also served as director of programs for the Higher Achievement Program, a rigorous out-of-school academic enrichment program and deputy director for Grantmakers for Education, a national nonprofit whose mission is to promote excellence in education philanthropy. He earned his B.A. in political science from Washington and Lee University and a J.D. from the University of Oregon School of Law.
Nick Chiles
Nick Chiles is a best-selling author and an award-winning journalist. He is the author or co-author of 19 books, including New York Times best-sellers he wrote with the R&B icon Bobby Brown, the civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton and the gospel legend Kirk Franklin. He is the co-author with Robbin Shipp of Justice While Black: Helping African-American Families Navigate and Survive the Criminal Justice System, which was a finalist for a 2015 NAACP Image Award. Chiles has served as a newspaper reporter (mostly covering education), magazine writer and magazine and website editor in chief during more than three decades in journalism, winning nearly 20 major awards—including a 1992 Pulitzer Prize as part of a New York Newsday team. Chiles was a member of the board overseeing the Atlanta Neighborhood Charter Schools; he is also a member of the board of the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship, affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has served as a professor at Columbia Journalism School and at Princeton University as a recipient of the Ferris Fellowship. He is a consultant for the William Julius Wilson Institute at the Harlem Children’s Zone. He currently teaches journalism at the University of Georgia. Chiles, a graduate of Yale, lives in Decatur, Georgia, with his wife Sadiqa Chiles.
Jonah Edelman
Jonah Edelman is co-founder and executive officer of Stand for Children, a non-profit education advocacy organization that champions evidence-based policies and targeted investments to reach the classroom and help children and empower families to effectively support and advocate for their children’s education. Jonah’s personal stand for children began during college, when he taught a six-year-old bilingual child to read. He then founded a mentorship program for middle school students and later served as an administrator of an enrichment program for children living in public housing. Jonah comes from a long family line of service to the community. His parents — Marian Wright Edelman and Peter Edelman — have stood up for civil rights, equal opportunity, and children’s well-being their whole careers. Jonah was born and raised in Washington, D.C., graduated from Yale University in 1992, and attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, earning master’s and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in politics. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Celeste Ford
Celeste Ford is the Director of External Relations for Carnegie Corporation of New York. She is a former TV news reporter of 25 years who worked her way up from smaller markets to the nation’s top local station–WABC-TV in New York City. She also reported for PBS and CNBC. During her 15 years at WABC-TV, Celeste started and ran the station’s first unit dedicated to education issues. Her reporting was honored with a number of the broadcast industry’s top awards including a DuPont-Columbia University Award and two Edward R. Murrow awards.
Mitch Gelman
Mitch Gelman is the president and chief executive of WCNY in Central New York. An experienced digital media executive and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, Gelman’s experience spans journalism, entertainment technology and digital media. Gelman formerly worked as chief technology officer at The Newseum in Washington, D.C. and as vice president of product at Gannett Co., overseeing digital product development in key areas for more than 90 national and local news entities across the USA TODAY Network. He was also a reporter at New York Newsday, executive producer at CNN.com, vice president at Examiner.com and chief operating officer at THX, Ltd.
LynNell Hancock
LynNell Hancock is a reporter and writer specializing in education and child and family policy issues, who has taught journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism since 1993. She is the director of the Spencer Fellowship for Education Journalism. In addition to contributing to Newsweek, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation and The New York Times, she served on staff of The Village Voice, the New York Daily News, and Newsweek where she covered national and local education issues.
John Hechinger
John Hechinger is a senior editor at Bloomberg News, where he was a 2011 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service and a two-time winner of the George Polk Award for his reporting on higher education. He is the author of True Gentlemen, The Broken Pledge of America’s Fraternities (PublicAffairs-Hachette, 2017). Before joining Bloomberg in 2010, he was a senior special writer at The Wall Street Journal, where he focused on education and finance. He is the son of Fred Hechinger, for whom The Hechinger Report is named.
Paul Hechinger
Paul Hechinger is a veteran of broadcast and online journalism. He has produced cross-medium journalism for Time, Court TV, NPR and The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. He is the son of former journalist Fred Hechinger, for whom the Hechinger Report is named.
Kiki Keating
Kiki Keating is the founder and director of KikiNetwork, where she brings a wealth of experience in communications strategy and practice from around the world. She was previously founding Director of Public and Media Relations at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. An experienced trial attorney, Kiki is also a certified mediator/arbitrator and a recognized leader in the business education communications world. She is also a frequent speaker at global business school conferences. Kiki earned a BA from Smith College and a JD from the University of Maine. She resides in Hanover, NH and commutes regularly to Boston, New York, and locations around the world for event and media relations assignments.
Jeff Livingston
Jeff Livingston is the CEO of EdSolutions, LLC, a vehicle for focusing education innovation, investment and philanthropy on underserved students and scaling proven innovations to reach those who will benefit most from them. He formed EdSolutions in 2015 after a long career at McGraw-Hill Education, including roles in sales, marketing, education policy and general management. Jeff graduated from Harvard University and was a successful entrepreneur with specialties in instructional technology and marketing to urban school systems before joining McGraw Hill. Jeff has served as a director of the Association of Educational Publishers, the Association of American Publishers-Education Division, the Software and Information Industry Association, The Harlem Educational Activities Fund, UnBoundEd Learning, among others.
Vernon Loeb
Vernon Loeb is senior editor for investigations, enterprise and innovations at Inside Climate News, the Brooklyn-based non-profit that won a Pulitzer for national reporting. Previously he has served as politics editor at The Atlantic, managing editor of the Houston Chronicle, local editor for The Washington Post and deputy managing editor/news at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was a reporter earlier in his career. Before returning to Philadelphia, he was Metro investigations editor at the Los Angeles Times and a defense reporter at The Washington Post.
Jeevan Padiyar
Jeevan Padiyar is a technology investor, entrepreneur and product team leader. He most recently served as Chief Product Officer at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Prior to joining JKCF, he managed education product portfolio for Palm Ventures, a private equity firm. Padiyar made his entrepreneurial debut in college when he started a remote-controlled blimp company, which he grew from a dorm room startup to 150 employees and sold for $95MM. He studied medicine as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine after earning degrees in Chemistry and Biochemistry at Kansas State University. Jeevan brings deep experience in innovation management, technology product development, and conversion optimization with expertise in education.
Jennifer Preston
Jennifer Preston is a fellow at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Previously she was vice-president for journalism at the Knight Foundation. Before that, Preston was an award-winning journalist for The New York Times for almost 19 years, with broad experience as a digital journalist, reporter and senior editor. In 2009 she became the company’s first social media editor. In 2011 she returned to a reporting role where she focused on the impact of social media in politics, government, business and real life. Her most recent work as an editor focused on extending digital media and social media storytelling and curation across the newsroom. Preston also worked as an editor and circulation marketing manager at New York Newsday, where she won numerous awards for an investigative reporting project that examined the police use of deadly force by off-duty police officers in New York. Preston was a 2010 fellow in the Sulzberger Leadership Program at Columbia University and is on the board of directors of the Online News Association.
Richard Tofel
Dick Tofel was the founding general manager (and first employee) of ProPublica from 2007-2012, and its president from 2013 until September 2021. As president, he had responsibility for all of ProPublica’s non-journalism operations, including communications, legal, development, finance and budgeting, and human resources. During the period of Tofel’s business leadership, ProPublica published stories that won seven Pulitzer Prizes, seven National Magazine Awards, five Peabody Awards, three Emmy Awards and eleven George Polk Awards, among other honors. Also during this time, ProPublica grew from an initial staff of just over 20 to more than 160, and raised more than $225 million from other than its founding funders. From August 2021 through 2022, Tofel is a distinguished visiting fellow in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he led a faculty seminar on “The Pandemic, the Press, and Public Health” and will teach a noncredit course on “Engaging with the Press.”