Tarun Cherukuri is the Founder CEO at Indus Action, a India-based nonprofit that builds digital public goods and mobilizes communities to enable sustainable access to social protection. Since 2013, they have enabled more than 2 million vulnerable families in India access legislated rights, including education, livelihoods, and public services. Tarun is passionate about advancing social justice in India through community organizing, active citizenship, and systems leadership. He is a 2015 HKS Emerging Global Leader, 2017 DRK Social Entrepreneur, 2019 Obama Foundation Fellow, 2021 GLG Social Impact Fellow and 2022 Ashoka Fellow. Tarun holds degrees from Harvard Kennedy School and Birla Institute of Technology and Science. 

Amanda Beatty co-leads Youth Impact’s AB testing partnership initiative which seeks to help fellow non-profits quickly generate data and analysis to make their programming more impactful, cost-effective, and scalable. She also leads Botswana’s annual representative survey, Education Compass, which produces learning and parent engagement metrics with the goal of helping the country address its learning crisis. Amanda has been a researcher in the areas of youth development and education for over 20 years, mainly in Asia and Africa. Prior to joining Youth Impact, she worked at Mathematica, the World Bank, the Center for Global Development, Innovations for Poverty Action, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and RAND. She holds an MPA in International Development (MPA/ID) from the Kennedy School at Harvard University.

Carolina Trivelli is currently a Senior Researcher at Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, an Associated Researcher at RIMISP, and a consultant for several national and international organizations. Ms. Trivelli is an Economist with an MSc in Agricultural Economics from The Pennsylvania State University. She has been the Minister of Development and Social Inclusion of Peru (2011-2013), has worked as Managing Director of Pagos Digitales Peruanos (2014-2016), and as Strategic Analysis Senior Advisor for the Latin American and the Caribbean FAO Regional Office (2021-2022). She serves as a Board member for Instituto Bicentenario and AFP Integra. She is a member of the International Advisory Group of MOSIP (India), the Technical Advisory Committee of FinEquity (CGAP), the Technical Advisory Committee on Poverty Measurement (INEI). She serves as an advisor to the Peruvian Fiscal Committee.

Hirokazu Yoshikawa is the Courtney Sale Ross Professor of Globalization and Education at NYU Steinhardt and a University Professor at NYU. He is a core faculty member of the Psychology of Social Intervention and Human Development Research and Policy programs at NYU Steinhardt, and a faculty affiliate of the Institute of Human Development and Social Change and Metropolitan Center for Equity and the Transformation of Schools. From 2014 to 2024 he was a founding co-director (with J. Lawrence Aber) of the Global TIES for Children center at NYU. He is a community and developmental psychologist who conducts research-policy and research-practice partnerships related to immigration, early childhood, youth development, and poverty reduction across the lifespan. He conducts research in the United States and in Latin America, South Asia and the Middle East.

Florencia Lopez Boo uses randomized controlled trials and interdisciplinary approaches to identify innovative and scalable ways to improving the lives of children and their families’ lives, combining the perspectives and methods of applied labor and development economics with behavioral sciences, neuroscience, and developmental psychology. In particular, her research focuses on rigorously evaluating social programs implemented at a national scale in low- and middle-income countries, with an emphasis on Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Prior to joining NYU, she was a Lead Economist at the Social Protection and Health Unit of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). She advised LAC governments on the design, implementation, and evaluation of human development public policies, particularly on child development, social protection and health. She is an affiliated researcher at the Department of International Development of the University of Oxford and founding member and former Head of the LAC Economics Association Behavioral Insights network (LACEA-BRAIN). 

Kate Schwartz is Assistant Professor in Applied Statistics, New York University, and affiliate researcher at Global TIES for Children. As part of the Ahlan Simsim and Play to Learn initiatives at TIES she helped lead four impact evaluations and two implementation studies in Lebanon, Jordan, and Colombia; supported an impact evaluation, intervention development research, and a longitudinal study in Bangladesh; and advised on school-readiness/ECE curricula in Iraq. Her work centers on research practice partnerships, finding the right methodology for the right questions, program implementation and adaptation (including for whom and under what conditions programs work), and supporting the adults in children's lives. Kate holds a Masters in Public Policy from the University of Chicago Harris School and a PhD in Psychology and Social Intervention from NYU. 

Co-founder of Rocket Learning, social entrepreneur, and policy advisor for early childhood care, Namya Mahajan is a member of Government of India’s Curriculum Committee for Early Childhood Care, and has led Rocket Learning’s partnerships, policy, and curriculum strategy. She is recognised in Forbes Asia’s 30 Under 30. Namya’s background includes leadership at SEWA's Cooperative Federation and a career at McKinsey & Co. She holds an MBA from Harvard and a degree in Applied Mathematics and Economics from Harvard College.

Co-founder of Rocket Learning, Siddhant Sachdeva brings expertise in behaviour-change communications and large-scale transformations. He previously led projects at Boston Consulting Group and has been recognised as a Social Impact Leader by BusinessWorld and Forbes Asia’s 30 Under 30. Siddhant oversees operations and advocacy at Rocket Learning. He is inspired by his mother’s work in affordable preschool education and is a speaker on social entrepreneurship at IITs and IIMs. He holds an MBA from IIM Calcutta and a Master’s in International Management from St. Gallen.

Christopher Neilson is a Chilean American Economist. He researches the design and evaluation of education markets and public service delivery on digital platforms. He is the founder of TetherEducation, a GovTech/EdTech company that builds digital infrastructure and AI tools to improve access to education, and of ConsiliumBots, a nonprofit advancing research using digital assistance for public programs. His research combines industrial organization, public economics, and development, and has informed education policies across the U.S. and Latin America. His work has been published in leading economics journals and supported by the NSF, World Bank, and J-PAL. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University.

Edith Elliott is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Noora Health, a non-profit organization that equips patients and their loved ones with caregiving skills. Working in 12,000+ health facilities across India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Nepal, Noora Health delivers high-quality training to patients and families, then stays connected via mobile tech. Noora Health's programs have reached more than 30 million patients and caregivers and was named a 2022 TED Audacious Project grantee and recipient of the 2022 Skoll Award for Social Innovation. Prior to Noora Health, Edith was a Design Innovation Fellow and Entrepreneur Instructor at Stanford and previously worked at the Aspen Institute and PSI; an Ashoka Fellow, Rainer Arnhold Fellow at Mulago Foundation, DRK Foundation Fellow, Echoing Green Fellow, and Associate Faculty at Ariadne Labs at Harvard. She holds a BA from Tufts and MA in International Policy Studies and Global Health from Stanford.

Jona Repishti leads initiatives to integrate AI into agriculture, empower smallholder farmers, and promote regenerative farming practices at Digital Green. She focuses on designing scalable, data-driven solutions that address climate challenges and enhance productivity across farming communities. Before joining Digital Green in 2023, she advised multinational corporations, foundations, and development institutions on global strategies and programs at the International Center for Research on Women. At MIT D-Lab, she supported innovators scaling market-based solutions for poverty reduction. Jona holds a BA from Middlebury College and an MPA from Princeton University.

Alex Kelly is the Chief Operating Officer at Acceso, a social enterprise building inclusive, farmer-led supply chains across Latin America and the Caribbean. He brings nearly two decades of experience working at the intersection of global development, social enterprise, and agriculture. Before joining Acceso, Alex spent six years at One Acre Fund in Kenya, where he led a 2,500-person team and oversaw core field operations serving over 500,000 smallholder farmers. His work focused on improving food security and rural livelihoods through scaled, data-driven agricultural programming. He later served as Global Director of Growth and Revenue at Educate!. Alex began his development career in El Salvador, managing rural health operations for the Foundation for the International Medical Relief of Children (FIMRC). He is a returned Peace Corps volunteer who served in Costa Rica, and he holds a MS in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. 

Rezarta Bilali is Associate Professor of Psychology and Social Intervention at New York University. Before joining NYU, she worked as Assistant Professor of Conflict Resolution at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She holds a PhD in Social Psychology with a concentration in peace and violence from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research focuses on the role of social psychological factors underlying mass violence; the role of historical narratives in collective action for social change, and development and evaluation of interventions to promote intergroup reconciliation, with a focus on narrative interventions via media.

Elisabeth King is Founding Director of NYU’s interdisciplinary minor in Peace and Conflict Studies. Her research focuses on building inclusive identities and institutions in ethnically diverse and conflict-affected contexts. King uses research methods ranging from in-depth qualitative interviews and focus groups, to randomized field experiments and surveys, and works with policy-makers to link her scholarship with on-the-ground practice and programming. She has consulted for organizations including UNICEF, USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the MasterCard Foundation, with special expertise in post-conflict peacebuilding, education in conflict-affected contexts, and community-driven development. King received her PhD in political science from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.