Fellows

President and CEO of College Track

Dr. Shirley M. Collado

Shirley M. Collado, Ph.D., began her tenure as President and CEO of College Track, a comprehensive college completion program, in January 2022. Prior to this role, she served as the ninth president of Ithaca College, and was named president emerita at the conclusion of her tenure. She is the first Dominican-American to serve as president of a four-year institution of higher education in the United States. Dr. Collado is nationally regarded for designing and implementing innovative approaches in higher education that expand student access and success. She has served as executive vice chancellor and chief operating officer at Rutgers University-Newark; dean of the college and vice president for student affairs at Middlebury; and as executive vice president of The Posse Foundation, where she scaled its operations nationally. Dr. Collado is a founding member of Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, and a member of the boards of ACT, Excelencia in Education, and Vanderbilt University. This summer, Dr. Collado collaborated with President Knowles and Senior Fellow Fred Swaniker to establish the Silicon Valley Program, an entrepreneurship intensive for postsecondary students from across Africa and California.

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Founding Partner at The JMH Team, Inc.

Mike Hanson

Mike Hanson is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He is the founding partner of The JMH Team, Inc., specializing in executive coaching and strategic advising to education systems and state agencies across the U.S. He serves as the Superintendent Advisor to LEAs working with the California Collaborative for Excellence in Education. He is the former superintendent of California’s third-largest urban school district and co-founder and inaugural president of CORE. This nonprofit organization seeks to improve student achievement by fostering highly productive, meaningful collaboration and learning between California’s largest school districts. Mike is a California Education Partners board member and serves as the Chair of the Board for Valley Children’s Healthcare System, where he also chairs the compensation committee.

Before his 12-year tenure as superintendent, Mike served in many roles as a public educator in New York and California, including deputy superintendent, high school principal, social science teacher, and coach.

His work has focused on teacher, school, and district improvement through building capacity in others, systems knowledge, formalized collaborative relationships, and improved governance. His work in continuous improvement focuses on issues of equity and access, and organizational transformation. Areas of demonstrated expertise include improved student achievement, improved behavior of students, increased diversity of high-quality human capital, systems alignment, and leadership development systems. Mike is a California native who lives in Sacramento with his wife, Julie. They laugh constantly with their four adult children.

CEO at Hope Chicago

Janice K. Jackson

Dr. Janice Jackson is a Senior Fellow whose work at Carnegie focuses on equity issues, such as improving high school and college attainment nationwide, and ensuring that African American, Latinx, and Indigenous students receive exemplary education and social and emotional support. She is the CEO of education nonprofit Hope Chicago and former CEO of Chicago Public Schools.

Jackson’s tenure at CPS—the nation’s 3rd largest school district with more than 355,000 students, 38,000 employees, and an annual budget of $7 billion—is most notable for the results the district attained in advancing equitable outcomes for its students. Jackson’s efforts, along with those of Chicago’s dedicated teachers and principals, have propelled CPS students to record-breaking improvements in academic achievement, high school graduation, and post-secondary completion. Education experts across the country regard Chicago as a national leader in improving results for young people at scale.

She began her career within CPS in 1999 as a social studies teacher and debate team coach at South Shore High School. Subsequently, she served as a high school principal, District Network Chief, and Chief Education Officer. Appointed CEO in 2017, she was the first CPS alumna to serve in the position. Jackson holds a B.A. and M.A. from Chicago State University, and an M.A. and Ed.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is also a board member of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning.

Senior Advisor to the President

Paul LeMahieu

Paul G. LeMahieu is senior advisor to the president at the Carnegie Foundation and graduate faculty in the College of Education, University of Hawai‘i – Mānoa. LeMahieu served as superintendent of education for the State of Hawai‘i, the chief educational and executive officer of the only state system that is a unitary school district, serving 190,000 students; prior to that he was undersecretary for educational policy and research for the State of Delaware. He has been president of the National Association of Test Directors and vice president of the American Educational Research Association. He served on the National Academy of Sciences’ Board on International Comparative Studies in Education, Mathematical Sciences Board, National Board on Testing Policy, and the National Board on Professional Teaching Standards.

Paul’s current professional interests focus on the adaptation of improvement science methodologies for application in networks in education. He is a co-author of the book Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better (2015), and lead author of the volume Working to improve: Seven approaches to quality improvement in education (2017). He is currently working on a book entitled Assessing to improve: Practical measurement for improvement (forthcoming).

Paul has a doctorate (Ph.D.) from the University of Pittsburgh, a master’s (M.Ed.) from Harvard University, and a bachelor’s (A.B.) from Yale College.

Managing Director, Skills for the Future

Laura Slover

Laura Slover is Managing Director of Skills for the Future, a joint initiative of ETS and Carnegie Foundation to transform education and measure what matters most.

Previously, she was the founder and CEO of CenterPoint Education Solutions. Laura started her career as a high school English teacher in Colorado. She was the Senior Vice President at Achieve, Inc. and then was the founding CEO of the Partnership for Assessment of College and Careers (PARCC), a consortium of states advancing college- and career-readiness through quality assessments. She lives in Washington, DC, where she served eight years on the Board of Education.

Founder and CEO of African Leadership Group

Fred Swaniker

Fred Swaniker is a Senior Fellow working with the Carnegie Foundation on its strategic priority to support renewal and innovation in the postsecondary sector with the goal of improving equity, social mobility, and public purpose. These efforts will help Carnegie understand and elevate designs for post-secondary education that are rigorous, affordable, experiential, and career aligned, with the goal of building robust pathways for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and African young people into the highest growth professional sectors. He is the founder and CEO of the African Leadership Group—an ecosystem of organizations that are catalyzing a new era of ethical, entrepreneurial African leaders.

Swaniker began his education career as headmaster of a school in Botswana that was started by his mother and became the best school in the country five years later. Over the past 15 years, he has founded and led the college-prep African Leadership Academy; the African Leadership University that has campuses in Mauritius, Rwanda, and Kenya; and the African Leadership Group and its initiative The Room—communities of global leaders and organizations committed to unlocking opportunities for undiscovered talent, starting in Africa. Collectively, these endeavors aim to transform the continent by developing 3 million African leaders by 2035.

Swaniker is an Echoing Green Fellow, an Aspen Institute Fellow, and was recognized as one of TIME’s 100 of 2019. He holds a B.A. in economics from Macalester College in Minnesota and an M.B.A. from Stanford University. He has also received honorary doctorate degrees from Macalester College, Middlebury College, and Nelson Mandela University.

Higher Education Leader | Learning Design Strategist

Dr. Erin Driver-Linn

Dr. Erin Driver-Linn is a nationally respected expert in institutional learning, inclusive pedagogy, and academic innovation. Formerly the Dean for Education at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Associate Provost for Institutional Research at Harvard, and the founding Director of the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching, she has led transformative innovations in programming, had significant impact on policy change for educational equity, and created and implemented a multifaceted grants program.

Vestigo Partners, Founder and CEO

John Bailey

John serves as a strategic advisor and investor, leveraging cross-sector experience in government, philanthropy, and the private sector to drive solutions in AI, technology, workforce development, climate technology, and behavioral health.

He currently serves as a fellow at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He has supported a range of investors and philanthropies with designing their strategies, launching initiatives, and developing policy agendas.

John served as a domestic policy advisor in the White House where he coordinated the Bush Administration’s efforts during the credit crisis to stabilize $200 billion in student loans and served as a negotiator for the reauthorization of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program. As the Deputy Policy Director to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, he contributed to the first national pandemic preparedness strategy and worked on policies related to American competitiveness and comprehensive immigration reform.

He co-founded the strategic advisory firm Whiteboard Advisors and served as a senior program officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Earlier in his career, John served as the nation’s second Director of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education, where he co-chaired the interagency Advanced Education Technology Initiative. While working for Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, John spearheaded several technology and education initiatives, including a statewide broadband mapping project.

John currently serves on the board of directors for Zearn Math, the Federation of American Scientists, U.S. Digital Response, the Just Trust, and American Policy Ventures. He also serves on advisory boards for Trustible.ai, the XPRIZE, the FPF Center for Artificial Intelligence, and the Tech Talent Project. In addition, John is a Pahara-Aspen Institute Fellow and a moderator and member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. He is also an alumnus of the American Council on Germany Young Leaders Program. In 2022, 2023, and 2024 the Washingtonian named him as one of Washington’s Most Influential People in policy.

He previously served on boards for the Aspen Institute’s Future of Work, Indego Africa, and the Data Quality Campaign.

Founder and Executive Director, Arizona Institute for Education and the Economy; Special Advisor to the President on PK-12 Initiatives, Northern Arizona University.

Dr. Chad Gestson

Dr. Chad Gestson is the Founder and Executive Director of the Arizona Institute for Education and the Economy and serves as the Special Advisor to the President on PK-12 Initiatives at Northern Arizona University. 

Gestson spent over 20 years in K-12 education and served as Superintendent of Arizona’s largest high school district, Phoenix Union, from 2015-2023. He was named Arizona’s 73rd Man of the Year in 2022. Prior serving as Superintendent, he was Director of Leadership and principal at Camelback High School. Before joining Phoenix Union in 2009, Gestson served as an elementary school assistant principal and as a middle school principal.  A product of Teach For America, he began his teaching career in 2001.  Prior to his public education career, he was a commercial construction superintendent in Seattle, WA. He and his wife, Megan, reside in Phoenix, Arizona. 

President, Indiana Charter Innovation Center; Founder, Purdue Polytechnic High Schools

Scott Bess

Scott Bess is an education entrepreneur and the President of the Indiana Charter Innovation Center. He founded Purdue Polytechnic High Schools, which quadrupled the annual number of URM students from Indianapolis who attend Purdue University. Prior, Scott was President of Goodwill Education and developed the Excel Center to create opportunities for adults to attain a high school diploma. That network now serves over 9,000 students across the US. Scott serves on the Indiana State Board of Education, the boards of the Indiana Youth Institute, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, The National Association for Public Charter Schools and the Washington, DC Excel Center.

Scott is an alumni of the Pahara Institute. He lives in Indiana with his wife and enjoys time with his four adult children and five grandchildren.

Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Policy, Schar School of Policy and Government and the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University

Dr. Thema Monroe-White

Thema (Tay-mah) Monroe-White is an Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government and the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. She is particularly concerned with understanding the pathways to achieving social and economic empowerment for minoritized groups via AI education, and emancipatory data science, a liberatory approach to computational and quantitative inquiry that challenges algorithmic biases, advances racial equity, and reimagines how data and AI can serve marginalized communities.

She investigates the intersections of bias mitigation, critical computational methods, and racial equity across science and technology education. Dr. Monroe-White has received multiple grants to study equity in K-20 learning ecosystems for the purpose of designing inclusive, data-driven pedagogies that broaden participation in AI and data science. She is an advisory board member and fellow of the Institute in Critical Quantitative and Mixed Methodologies (ICQCM), has served on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Technical Advisory Committee, and contributes regularly to national dialogues on equitable and emancipatory AI education through forums at the White House, the National Academies, and other convenings.

Thema holds a PhD in Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from Howard University.

CITATIONS

Shieh, E., Vassel, F. M., Sugimoto, C. R., & Monroe-White, T. (2026). Intersectional biases in narratives produced by open-ended prompting of generative language models. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-68004-9

Monroe-White, T., Boykin, C. M., & Daniels, J. (2025, March). Dismantling the logics of eugenics via emancipatory data science education. In IASE Conference Proceedings Series.

Vassel, F. M., Shieh, E., Sugimoto, C. R., & Monroe-White, T. (2024, May). The psychosocial impacts of generative AI harms. In Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series (Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 440-447).

Monroe-White, T., & Lecy, J. (2023). The Wells-Du Bois Protocol for machine learning bias: building critical quantitative foundations for third sector scholarship. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 34(1), 170-184.

Monroe-White, T., Marshall, B., & Contreras-Palacios, H. (2021, September). Waking up to Marginalization: Public Value Failures in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. In Artificial Intelligence Diversity, Belonging, Equity, and Inclusion (pp. 7-21). PMLR.

Monroe-White, T. (2021, June). Emancipatory data science: a liberatory framework for mitigating data harms and fostering social transformation. In Proceedings of the 2021 Computers and People Research Conference (pp. 23-30).

Chief Research and Development Officer and Co-Founder, The Center for Expanding Leadership & Opportunity

Dr. John Dugan

Dr. John P. Dugan (he/him/his) is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning and a nationally recognized scholar-practitioner focused on leadership education, equity, evaluation, and human development.

Dr. Dugan serves as Chief Research and Development Officer and Co-Founder of the Center for Expanding Leadership & Opportunity (CELO), where he leads large-scale research and design initiatives that strengthen educational pathways, advance civic and leadership capacities, and improve institutional practice across secondary and postsecondary education. His work has informed educational practice, policy conversations, and leadership development initiatives across K–12, higher education, and nonprofit sectors.

Previously, Dr. Dugan served as Executive Director of Youth Leadership Research & Impact at the Aspen Institute, where he led a national portfolio of initiatives focused on values-based leadership, educational and workforce pathways, and community investment through cross-sector collaboration. During his tenure, the portfolio expanded its reach and sustainability, maintained full operations throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and mobilized significant philanthropic and earned-revenue investments to support long-term impact.

Dr. Dugan co-founded the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (MSL) and serves as its principal investigator. Since its launch in 2005, MSL has partnered with hundreds of institutions to generate actionable evidence that informs teaching, learning, and program design while contributing to the broader scholarship on leadership education.

A former full professor in the Higher Education graduate program at Loyola University Chicago, Dr. Dugan has authored more than 70 scholarly publications, including books, peer-reviewed journal articles, and book chapters. His scholarship is widely cited for its contributions to leadership theory, student development, and educational equity. His most recent book, The Handbook of Leadership Education & Impact, reflects his commitment to bridging theory, practice, and social responsibility.

Dr. Dugan earned his bachelor’s degree from John Carroll University and holds master’s and doctoral degrees in Counseling and Personnel Services from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Professor, Human Development, Social Policy, Psychology, Northwestern University

Dr. Mesmin Destin

Mesmin Destin is a Professor at Northwestern University, where he holds a joint appointment in the School of Education and Social Policy and the Department of Psychology. He directs a multidisciplinary lab group and investigates social psychological mechanisms underlying socioeconomic disparities in educational outcomes during adolescence and young adulthood.

Using laboratory and field experiments, Destin studies factors that influence how young people perceive themselves and pursue their futures. At the university level, Destin examines how social experiences and institutional structures shape the motivation, well-being, and educational trajectories of lower socioeconomic status and first-generation college students.

Dr. Destin received a B.A. from Northwestern University, and Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Founder, Center for Whole-Child Education

Dr. Pamela Cantor

Pamela Cantor, M.D., is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and the Co-Founder and CEO of The Human Potential L.A.B., whose mission is to leverage scientific knowledge and technologies to transform what people understand and institutions do to unlock human potential in each and every individual. She is currently writing a book about how everything we need to unlock our hidden potential is right inside and in front of us: in our biology and the people we trust. Dr. Cantor is an author of Whole-Child Development, Learning and Thriving: A Dynamic Systems Approach (Cambridge University Press) and The Science of Learning and Development (Routledge).

She founded the nonprofit organization Turnaround for Children (now the Center for Whole-Child Education at Arizona State University), is a Governing Partner of the Science of Learning and Development Alliance, and a strategic science advisor to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, AASA, The School Superintendents Association, and Learning Heroes.

Dr. Cantor received an M.D. from Cornell University, a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, served as an Assistant Clinical Professor of Child Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Professor, School of Nursing, John Hopkins University

Dr. Robert Atkins

Robert (Bob) Atkins is the Anna D. Wolf Endowed Professor and Executive Vice Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. He has spent most of his career working to improve the health and well-being of marginalized children and families living in distressed neighborhoods. Early in his career, he worked as a school nurse at East Camden (NJ) Middle School and cofounded the Camden STARR Program, a nonprofit development program dedicated to improving the life chances of young people in Camden. His work there motivated him to complete a PhD in the Department of Public Health at Temple University to better understand the factors that influence the health of children living in distressed environments. He also earned a bachelor of arts degree in political science and American civilizations from Brown University and bachelor of science in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Atkins has also served as national program director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s New Jersey Health Initiatives (NJHI) program. In this role, he created meaningful partnerships between stakeholders from higher education, philanthropy, local and state governments, and communities.

Professor of Developmental Psychology, New York University

Dr. Niobe Way

Dr. Niobe Way is Professor of Developmental Psychology at New York University. She is the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (PACH; pach.org), co-founder of agapi and a youth tech center, Principal Investigator (PI) on the Listening with Curiosity Project, and head of the Science of Human Connection Lab (https://niobewaylab.squarespace.com). She is also the PI on a 20-year longitudinal study of 1,200 Chinese families. Dr. Way previously served as President of the Society for Research on Adolescence. She earned her B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, her doctoral degree in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard, and completed an NIMH postdoctoral fellowship at Yale in the psychology department. She has served on the Aspen Digital group on humanizing AI, consulted for TikTok, and currently serves as a senior fellow for the Carnegie Foundation.

Her mixed-method and longitudinal research examines the social and emotional development of children and adolescents and explores how macro ideologies shape families and child development in the U.S. and China. Dr. Way and her team created the Listening with Curiosity Project (LCP) to address the crisis of connection in schools by teaching the skills of relational intelligence necessary for human connection. The LCP has been integrated into classrooms across New York City and has been empirically shown to foster social and emotional skills, well-being, and a sense of common humanity. She also developed the NYU core course The Science of Human Connection.

Dr. Way is the author of Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture (niobeway.com), and the co-editor of The Crisis of Connection: Its Roots, Consequences, and Solution (NYU Press). She has authored or co-authored over a hundred journal articles and seven books, including Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection (Harvard University Press), which inspired Close, a film nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film and winner of the Grand Prix Award. Her research with boys and young men has influenced changes to the guidelines for Division 51 of the American Psychological Association. Her forthcoming book, Our Social Nature in an Anti-Social Culture: A Five Part Story (Harvard University Press), continues her exploration of human connection.

Her research has been widely cited in mainstream media, and she has been profiled in The New Yorker and The New York Times, NPR, TEDMED, The Daily Show podcast, and ABC News.