See the Impact Design Immersion Fellowship awardees for 2021.
Kelsey Aijala
Kelsey is an advocate for inclusive educational opportunities that leverage creativity to raise up young voices and to give them the tools to connect elements of their own identities with the world around them. Prior to coming to Stanford to earn a joint MBA-MA in Education, Kelsey worked in business development and strategy and spent most of her non-professional time supporting 826’s young authors book project in New York City.
IDIF Focus
Kelsey will explore the use of community-centric interventions addressing student disengagement and lack of representation in U.S. public schools. She will identify ways to incorporate community artists into curriculum development and open doors for students to see themselves reflected in their learning, develop ownership of their learning experience, contextualize concepts in more approachable ways, and engage in critical thinking skills that are indicative of academic success.
Andrew Leon Hanna
Andrew is a lawyer, social entrepreneur, and author whose work is focused on human rights and socioeconomic opportunity. He co-founded DreamxAmerica, which joins storytelling and economic impact to support immigrant-led small businesses, and is writing a book, 25 Million Sparks, on refugee entrepreneurs. He was formerly a senior associate at McKinsey where he led the launch of the Generation global youth employment nonprofit in Jacksonville and graduated with honors from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
IDIF Focus
Andrew will focus on economic empowerment of underserved small businesses across the United States. Small businesses are a vehicle for socioeconomic mobility and the generator of two-thirds of net new jobs in America, yet – as inequitable COVID-19 loan distribution highlighted – low-to-medium income entrepreneurs have limited pathways to capital and support.
Sarah Johnson
Sarah is passionate about developing products and services that improve people’s lives in a sustainable way. Her background is in innovation, product development, and human-centered design. Most recently, she led the solar product management team for a company operating in Africa and Asia, where she managed a range of off-grid solar products that have impacted over one million people. Prior to that role, Sarah worked in sales and marketing and international expansion for other sustainability-oriented impact companies. She got her B.A. in economics from Stanford.
IDIF Focus
Sarah will be exploring how to support product designers and manufacturers to develop products that are built for sustainability. This includes designing for durability, repairability, and recyclability using improved products and materials data.
Nina Lu
Nina is passionate about improving patient access and health equity / affordability. An engineer by training, Nina’s prior experience is as a senior product manager in digital healthcare. Prior to that, Nina was a venture capital associate at Kleiner Perkins Digital Growth Fund and a private equity analyst at TPG Capital with a focus on technology and healthcare IT. Nina graduated from the Jerome Fisher M&T Program at UPenn/Wharton summa cum laude with joint degrees in computer science and finance, with a minor in mathematics.
IDIF Focus
Nina is focused on non-opioid treatments for chronic pain management, starting with improving patient access to physical therapy. According to the CDC, one in five Americans suffer from chronic pain and, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 20 million American adults battle a substance use disorder today.
Melissa Marts
Melissa is passionate about helping workers realize their full potential and achieve upward economic mobility. She is currently a first year MBA student at Stanford GSB. Previously, she worked as a consultant in Deloitte’s Human Capital practice, where she advised clients on ways to leverage technology to achieve their people strategies and founded a social impact consulting program. She also served as a Research Fellow at the Center for the Edge, a think tank where she conducted primary research on the future of work, focusing on how to cultivate workers’ enduring human capabilities (imagination, creativity, critical thinking, curiosity, empathy, etc.) and improve their learning agility. Melissa graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt with a B.S. in Human & Organizational Development.
IDIF Focus
Melissa is focused on bridging the skills gap for young workers in Indonesia, helping them develop the capabilities and professional skills they need to secure a full-time stable corporate job. She is looking to understand key skills gaps for workers who have recently graduated from vocational high school or university that large companies in Jakarta most desire. Additionally, she hopes to explore how to cultivate key capabilities like empathy and creativity that are the underpinning for many soft skills through a micro-learning, cohort-based model.
Nandini Mullaji
Nandini’s passions lie in the intersection of public health and education in India. After a stint in consulting at McKinsey and doing venture capital at LGT Aspada, Nandini focused on building a live online tuition company serving K-12 students in India. Nandini was Chief Product Officer and Chief Strategy Officer of Lido, a Series B edtech in India, for two years before joining Stanford GSB and during her LOA. While at Georgetown, Nandini co-founded the India Innovation Lab, funded by the Gates Foundation and World Bank, to work on wicked problems in public health and education with the government of Maharashtra.
IDIF Focus
Nandini will be looking for ways to help individuals 10x their potential through upskilling, coaching, and mentoring. Instead of college graduates going into low-paying service sector jobs, imagine a world in which they would be prepared for high-impact, high-paying jobs. 10X plans to run upskilling / job readiness / coaching programs that focus on tech roles that are in high demand in North America and Europe, and train Indians to provide these services for far lower than it would cost to hire talent and labor in the Western world. So students from the program have a 10X higher salary than they would before the program, and companies get their IT and data work outsourced for 10X cheaper.
Gail Ratanasopinswat
Born and raised in Thailand, Gail is committed to advancing a holistic human development agenda and searching for means to maximize human potential. Prior to Stanford, where she is now pursuing a joint MBA and Master of Education degree, she worked as a consultant at Bain & Company, specializing in leadership development, capability building, and organizational transformation. She also has more than eight years of experience in the fields of youth engagement, education, and adult learning. She served as the president of a local chapter of the world’s largest youth-run organization, and subsequently as an advisor. She also served as a coach and a mentor for college students and young entrepreneurs and volunteered to teach in underprivileged schools. As an independent consultant, she designed learning & development programs, facilitated innovative workshops, and advised companies on their talent strategies. Gail is passionate about performing arts, psychology, and wellness, and is now looking to integrate these areas in her people development initiatives.
IDIF Focus
Gail is exploring different preventative, non-clinical approaches to address the rising rates of depression and other mental health illnesses among young adults in Thailand, where resources for mental health are scarce, inaccessible, and unaffordable. As therapy is taboo and not an option for most people, she strongly believes that effective solutions will have to help build mental wellbeing and resilience, but more importantly will have to focus on raising awareness, educating, and destigmatizing mental health issues for Thai young adults.
Sarah Alexander
Olivia Rosenthal
Sarah Alexander and Olivia Rosenthal
Sarah and Olivia are committed to increasing the affordability and accessibility of childcare for working families. Sarah is a first year MBA candidate. Prior to joining Stanford GSB, Sarah started a small-scale biodiesel company, then went on to work in management consulting at Oliver Wyman, and most recently, worked as a VC investor where she focused on funding ventures that promote financial inclusion. Sarah first became interested in childcare as an issue of economic justice after realizing just how large of an expense it represents for most American families and how little financial innovation has occurred. Olivia is a first-year MBA student and third-year law student at Stanford. Prior to graduate school, Olivia worked as a management consultant at McKinsey and has subsequently spent her career focused on policy and research innovations for issues affecting family and maternal health at a telehealth company, reproductive nonprofit, and most recently at the Office of the California Surgeon General. Olivia came to the challenge of childcare through this interest in family and women’s health.
IDIF Focus
We know that quality care from the ages of 0-5 is the most important factor in setting up children and families for success. Yet as it stands, this care is unaffordable (on average $10,000 a year per child), inaccessible (51% of Americans live in daycare deserts), and fundamentally not designed to meet the schedules of many working Americans. After months of interviews, Sarah and Olivia are partnering with a few employers this summer to conduct further research and to explore potential ways for employers to connect employees with new modalities of care and care financing.
Siddarth Shrikanth
John Foye
Siddarth Shrikanth and John Foye
Siddarth and John are committed to finding interdisciplinary solutions that address both the climate crisis and social impact.
A conservation biologist by training from Oxford, Siddarth advised companies and policymakers on their sustainability and technology strategies at McKinsey in London. He later moved to Indonesia to set up and scale a new environmental incubator, McKinsey.org. Before starting concurrent policy and business degrees at Harvard and Stanford, Siddarth was a writer for the Financial Times in Hong Kong. Previously, John was at Fenix International, an energy access start-up serving off-grid households, where he first led new product strategy then transitioned into starting and scaling operations in Zambia. Prior to that, he worked at McKinsey.
IDIF Focus
Siddarth and John are focusing on scaling markets for natural climate solutions — a vital tool to draw down carbon from the atmosphere and buffer the worst impacts of climate change. While demand for nature-based carbon offsets is soaring, high-quality supply remains scarce. Enabling participation from small, minority and indigenous landowners could help meet this demand while also providing a sustainable source of livelihoods to marginalized communities.
Jonathan Siktberg
Emily Stebbins
Jonathan Siktberg and Emily Stebbins
Nashville native Jonathan is a doctor in training and deeply committed to improving the patient experience. He brings years of experience across multiple organizations in the ed tech space and spent the past three years at Vanderbilt Medical School before coming to Stanford GSB. Emily holds a deep belief in the power and practicality of human-centered design to shape the patient experience, molded from her time as an innovation consultant on the Digital Product team at Bain and on the Health Tech team and Johnson and Johnson. She is Boston bred and back at Stanford for the second time for her MBA.
IDIF Focus
Jonathan and Emily are on a mission to make diabetes prevention programs more accessible to the 88 prediabetic Americans at high risk for type 2 diabetes. With their unique mobile microlearning platform, they are building an affordable on-the-go program that fits into the daily lives of patients. Together, they hope to reimagine disease prevention through microlearning.