Molly Welch is a joint Masters in Public Policy and Masters in Business Administration candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. Before attending Harvard, she worked for Google's artificial intelligence research division in marketing and public policy roles, where her responsibilities included communications strategy, speechwriting, developing public policy materials, and working closely with research groups to responsibly manage innovation.

Kelsey Roberts has a background that is a mix of engineering and entrepreneurship. She became passionate about workforce development from her experiences working in manufacturing plants across the US and Ireland and seeing the changing landscape of job opportunities within manufacturing. Following that, she pursued entrepreneurship programming as a way to help people to create their own jobs and to fuel job growth in regions. She is an MBA candidate at Harvard Business School and holds a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Tech.

Balaji Alwar is a Research Fellow at Malcolm Wiener Centre for Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and acts as a product lead with the Skillbase initiative. He graduated with an Ed M in Technology, Innovation, and Education (TIE) program at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Rachel Lipson is the inaugural Project Director of the Project on Workforce, a newly-seeded, interdisciplinary Harvard initiative focused on policy and research at the intersection of education and labor markets. The project, based at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, is a collaboration with the Harvard Business School Managing the Future of Work Project and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Prior to this role, Rachel was Director of Special Projects at Year Up, an acclaimed social enterprise and workforce training provider that connects young adults without four-year degrees to meaningful careers in some of America’s most prestigious companies. Rachel is an alum of Harvard College and the joint MBA/MPP program with Harvard Business School and Kennedy School of Government.

Elle Kang is a dual MPA in International Development/MBA candidate at HKS and Stanford GSB, where she is interested in creating solutions for equitable access to the changing structure of the economy. Prior to HKS, she held multiple roles at the intersection of business and economic development. Most recently, she was a program manager at Google.org, supporting nonprofits focused on digital skilling for underserved populations. She also worked at Alter Global, an emerging market-focused VC and entrepreneur support network, and also a consultant at McKinsey.

E.B. is currently a first year student at Harvard Business School. Prior to business school, she worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Company for 3 years, serving clients in consumer, healthcare, and accommodations on a wide range of workforce-related topics.

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” Mahatma Gandhi’s words ring very true in Chino’s life. His personal story as a first-generation college graduate combined with experience working in college admissions and as a leader within the out-of-school learning space has developed within him a keen understanding of the challenges facing students from marginalized populations. His professional travels granted him perspective and proximity to know his experience growing up in poverty in St. Louis is, unfortunately, not unique. He is driven by this work because, as he sees it, our education system is not structured to ensure everyone has equal access to opportunities. Chino wants to create the conditions that are fueled by and thrive because of equity. This is the fuel which inspires him to create opportunities to make real impact on people's lives. Chino is a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Ed.L.D. May 2022). He holds a Master’s degree in Education Policy and Management (EPM ‘19) from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Bachelor's degree in Journalism from the Walter Williams School of Journalism at the University of Missouri (BJ ‘04).

David is pursuing a master’s degree in Education Policy and Management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Before joining the SkillBase team, he worked at an education policy non-profit where he built elected officials’ capacity to be leaders in education for their constituents.

Isaiah is a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and recently completed a Master’s degree in technology and innovation at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Prior to joining the SkillBase team, Isaiah founded two education technology startups focused on helping students find their career paths, and was also the lead educator at a social venture incubator.

Xiaomeng Huang is a graduate student in Technology, Innovation and Education program in Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her primary interest is in the intersection between technology and workforce training. Prior to HGSE, her recent professional experience was at an adult language learning EdTech startup in Beijing where she worked as product manager and instructional designer. Before that experience, she was a second language instructor for five years in the universities in China and the U.S..

Toba Olokungbemi is a Junior at Harvard College living in Cabot House and studying Computer Science with a Secondary in African Studies and a Language Citation in Yoruba. Outside of Skillbase, Toba serves as the President of the Harvard Nigerian Students Association. He has also been involved in many Community Service roles and has served as a youth mentor and Science instructor for multiple Phillips Brooks House Association programs. This upcoming Summer, Toba will be a Software Engineering Intern at Google. In his free time, Toba loves to explore different art forms, but his favorite will always be afrobeat dancing.

José Antonio Murillo is a rising Junior at Harvard College living in Winthrop House and studying Computer Science with a Secondary in Economics. José has been significantly involved with the Latinx community, having been part of the boards for the Harvard Organization for Latin America, Latinx in Finance and Technology, and HACIA Democracy.

Shireen Yacoub is a graduate student in the Technology, Innovation and Education program at the Harvard graduate School of Education. She is the CEO of the Arab world’s largest open online education platform serving +4M learners across the MENA region including refugees and disadvantaged youth in conflict Zones. You can reach her at syacoub@gse.harvard.edu

David Deming is a Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Faculty Director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. His research focuses broadly on the economics of skill development, education and labor markets. He is a Principal Investigator (along with Raj Chetty and John Friedman) at the CLIMB Initiative, an organization that seeks to study and improve the role of higher education in social mobility. Deming also studies the “future of work”, in particular focusing on how technology changes the labor market returns to skills and the resulting implications for college and career pathways.

Joseph Fuller is a Professor of Management Practice in General Management and co-leads the school’s initiative, Managing the Future of Work. He currently teaches the Becoming a General Manager course in the second year of the MBA program and formerly headed The Entrepreneurial Manager course in the program’s first year. A 1981 graduate of the school, Joe was a founder and first employee of the global consulting firm, Monitor Group, now Monitor-Deloitte.

Peter Q. Blair is on the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where he co-directs the Project on Workforce. He serves as a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the principal investigator of the BE-Lab — a research group with partners from Harvard University, Clemson University, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His group’s research focuses on the link between the future of work and the future of education, labor market discrimination, occupational licensing, and residential segregation.

Bob Schwartz currently serves as Senior Advisor to the Harvard Project on Workforce at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. From 1996-2013 he was a member of the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, serving successively as Senior Lecturer, Professor of Practice, Academic Dean, and Francis Keppel Professor of Practice in Educational Policy and Administration. In 2015 he rejoined HGSE as a Senior Research Fellow.