Dr. Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg is Founder and Executive Director of Akili Dada, an award-winning leadership incubator that is nurturing the next generation of African women leaders. Akili Dada's innovative and holistic approach includes rigorous leadership training, personalized mentoring, and comprehensive scholarships to brilliant, high-potential young women from some of Africa's most impoverished families.
Wanjiru is also an Assistant Professor in the Politics department at the University of San Francisco, where her research and teaching interests center on the politics of philanthropy, gender, Africa, ethnicity, and democratization, and on the role of technology in social activism. Originally from Kenya, she earned a B.A. in Politics from Whitman College and Masters and Ph.D . degrees in Political Science with concentrations in African Studies and Gender Studies from the University of Minnesota.
In her dual roles, Wanjiru divides her time between the U.S. and Kenya, where Akili Dada is based. Working at the intersection of academia and social entrepreneurship, Wanjiru is passionate about the synergy between rigorous academic analysis and committed social activism.
Christina Pate
Christina works at Google and is the founder of Africa Start-Up, a non-profit organization which partners universities globally to provide free business education to entrepreneurs throughout Africa. She developed the premis of Africa Start-Up as a business school student while living in Malawi, Africa and won funding the William Simon Fellowship to launch the program in partnership with Malawi College of Accountancy and several labor and business organizations. In Malawi, Africa Start-Up has helped hundreds of women micro-finance recipients learn skills of entrepreneurship to see their investment grow. The program will be launched in Ghana in partnership with Ashesi University this August. At Google, Christina builds and executed global advertising campaigns for Microsoft's enterprise business. Christina and her husband Eric live in Santa Cruz, CA and enjoy triathalons, surfing and skiing.
Pooja Upadhyaya
In 2009, Pooja Upadhyaya launched Mobilizing Health, a non-profit that has developed a technology and community model to connect rural villagers to first-rate medical advice via text messages. With fullt-time staff on the ground and the help of twenty committed physicians and thirty village leaders, Mobilizing Health has now connected more than 4,500 patients in India. In the next month, new technology integration will allow for thorough patient histories and automatic symptom tracking. For more information, here is their Executive Summary: http://bit.ly/MHpage.
Eva Enns
Eva Enns will join the Division of Health Policy and Management in the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health as an assistant professor in fall 2012. Her research is concerned with the application of mathematical, economic, and systems analysis to problems in health policy, health operations, and medical decision making. In her dissertation work, she has focused on the influences of network structure and contact patterns on the spread of infectious disease and developing methods that leverage network structure in designing optimal disease control policies. She received an SB degree in electrical engineering from MIT (2006) and an MS degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University (2008). She will receive her PhD in electrical engineering, with a minor in Management Science and Engineering, from Stanford University in June 2012. She is a recipient of the Henry Ford II Award, the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Graduation Fellowship, and the Rambus Inc. Stanford Graduate Fellowship.