Brij Kothari
Dr. Brij Kothari (Cornell University) and his team have innovated, researched, and nationalized the use of "Same Language Subtitling" (SLS) on Bollywood film songs on TV, for mass literacy in India. He laid the foundation for the SLS project as an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) in its Centre for Educational Innovation.
Brij is an Ashoka Fellow and the President of PlanetRead, a non-profit involved in scaling SLS efforts in India and other countries. He is also the CEO of BookBox Inc, a for-profit social venture producing children's animated stories in more than 25 languages. He co-founded PlanetRead.org and BookBox.com as a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University.
Brij grew up in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry and went on to get a Masters in Physics at IIT Kanpur, a Masters in Development Communication and a Ph.D. in Education from Cornell University. His doctoral research was on the conservation of local knowledge in Andean Ecuador.
Megan J. Smith
Megan J. Smith is an award-winning entrepreneur, engineer, and tech evangelist.
Served as the third U.S. chief technology officer from 2014-2017 after spending eleven years as vice president at Google leading new business development, and later at Google[x]. PlanetOut CEO, General Magic and co-founder of the Malala Fund. Board member of MIT, Vital Voices; Member, National Academy of Engineering.
Robert G. Lynch
Robert G. Lynch is a Professor of Economics at Washington College, where he has taught since the fall of 1998.
Dr Lynch has served as a consultant to numerous organizations including private businesses, governments, labor unions, and research organizations.
His areas of specialization include International Economics, Public Policy, Public Finance, Economic Development and Comparative Economics. Dr. Lynch holds masters (1981) and doctoral (1984) degrees in Economics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a bachelor’s (1979) degree in International and Development Economics from Georgetown University.
Shweta Suresh
Shweta Suresh specializes in nonprofit strategy and has experience working across philanthropy, social enterprise, and the private sector. In her current role as Senior Strategy Officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, she is a strategic advisor to Melinda Gates, and has supported strategy development across a variety of teams, including family planning, gender equality, and US education.
She has a dual degree in business and development economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University and is especially passionate about closing gender gaps in development.