Denis McDonough. From February 2013 until January 20, 2017, McDonough served as White House Chief of Staff for President Obama. In that role, McDonough managed the four thousand member White House staff, as well as Cabinet Secretaries and agency leaders. He provided strategic advice to the President on the most significant domestic policy, national security, and management issues facing the federal government and enforced plans and accountability for performance and goals, maintaining the Obama Administration’s reputation for effective, ethical operation. He planned and coordinated efforts to recruit and retain key talent—including an unprecedented expansion of technology experts, engineers, and content generators within the White House and across the federal government.

David B. Grusky is the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, Director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality (CPI), Director of the California Welfare Laboratory, Director of Recession Trends, and coeditor of Pathways Magazine and the Social Inequality Series. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, co-recipient of the 2004 Max Weber Award, founder of the Cornell University Center for the Study of Inequality, and a former Presidential Young Investigator.

Mitchell Stevens is Associate Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Organizational Behavior and Sociology at Stanford. He studies the organization of US higher education, the quantification of academic performance, and alternative school forms. The author of prize-winning studies of home education and selective college admissions, he currently is writing a book about how US research universities organize research and teaching about the rest of the world. He serves as the third Director of the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research, a cooperative institution that has brought more than 500 scholars to Stanford over a quarter century and catalyzes organizational scholarship worldwide.

Martin Carnoy is the Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University School of Education. Dr. Carnoy is a labor economist with a special interest in the relation between the economy and the educational system. To this end, he studies the US labor market, including the role in that relation of race, ethnicity, and gender, the US educational system, and systems in many other countries. He uses comparative analysis to understand how education influences productivity and economic growth, and, in turn, how and why educational systems change over time, and why some countries educational systems are marked by better student performance than others'.

Aman Kumar is Head of Operations Innovation in the Office of the CFO at SAP SE, where he focuses on consumerization, simplification, and business agility. He is also special advisor to the CIO of the Republic of Estonia and advisor to startups in Silicon Valley and Boston. Aman was previously the head of strategic marketing at MobileIron, Inc., an enterprise mobile startup in Silicon Valley. Working with the CEO and executive team, he was responsible for strategic planning, consumer product definition, and application partnerships for the organization before its IPO in 2014.

Sima Yazdani is a Senior Technical Leader, Chief Data Scientist at Learning@Cisco at Cisco Services, where she leads Cisco Collaborative Knowledge Cognitive Analytics, team helping enterprise users as learners, mentor and training partners with their personalize knowledge discovery and recommendation services. She has 30+ years of experience in Database technology, system architecture, analytics, Business Process Optimization, Semantic technologies, cloud computing and machine learning in a variety of industries, including IT, learning, health, and workforce professional development.

Charlotte Fenner is a Director of Partner Resources at Starbucks Coffee Company, based in San Francisco. During her career she has worked for global brands in the UK, The Netherlands, Germany and Australia. Prior to the Bay Area, Charlotte spent 3 years as the Director of Global Leadership Development at Starbucks headquarters in Seattle. Charlotte is currently responsible for supporting the Northern California business, and is specifically focused on the attraction, retention and development of talent in competitive urban markets.

Raquel Coelho is a PhD student and Lemann Fellow at Stanford Graduate School of Education. She holds a M.A. degree in International Comparative Education from Stanford University and an undergraduate degree in Portuguese Language and Brazilian Literature from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Over the past ten years, she has taught and tutored children, youths, and adults in formal and informal settings within both public and private sectors of Brazil, Czech Republic, and the United States. Raquel is particularly interested in helping students - especially those in public and under-resourced schools - to communicate ethically and persuasively.