harvard-kennedy-school
(9)
Snigdha Kumar
Snigdha Kumar is the CEO and co-founder of Brico, a San Francisco regtech startup that automates the slow, state-by-state process of getting and keeping financial licenses for payments, lending, mortgage and crypto companies. A Harvard-trained public policy analyst with more than a decade in fintech across the U.S., India, Indonesia and Myanmar, she previously led product operations at the savings app Digit. In October 2025 Brico raised a $13.5M Series A led by Flourish Ventures, on the back of 600% year-over-year growth.
Irene Chung
Irene Chung is a product builder and former startup founder who leads collaboration product work at Webflow, the visual web development platform. She co-founded and co-ran StellarEmploy, a data-driven recruiting tool for high-turnover hourly jobs that was later acquired by Learning Collider, then built collaboration and integrations products at Dropbox before joining Webflow. Trained with dual graduate degrees from the Harvard Kennedy School and MIT Sloan, she describes herself as a builder focused on how people use technology to think and work together.
Leise Sandeman
Leise Sandeman is the CEO and co-founder of Pathways, a climate-tech startup building the data layer for sustainable manufacturing. Pathways uses AI to automate the creation of Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for building-material makers - concrete, steel, cement, glass - turning a months-long consultant slog into a process that takes weeks. A Copenhagen native and former McKinsey sustainability consultant who scaled a recycling venture before studying at Harvard and MIT, Leise co-founded Pathways in 2022 with Alex Cooper after meeting in an MIT entrepreneurship class. The company raised an oversubscribed $2.5M seed round in February 2024 and now serves manufacturers across hundreds of plants.
Abdulhamid Haidar
Abdulhamid Haidar is the founder and CEO of Darsel, a nonprofit that teaches K-12 math over text messages. Instead of apps and video that assume reliable Wi-Fi, Darsel runs entirely on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and SMS, using AI-powered adaptive algorithms to tutor students in Jordan, India and Nigeria. Built during the 2020 COVID lockdown by a Syrian-American who grew up in a family of teachers, Darsel has had more than 120,000 students answer over 170 million math questions. Haidar holds degrees from MIT, Harvard Kennedy School and Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and previously spent three years at McKinsey. His goal: meaningfully reach 100 million students by 2030.
Anna Ford
Anna Ford is the co-founder and CEO of Bookclubs, the free app and website that has grown into the organizing layer for more than a million readers and over 100,000 book clubs worldwide. A former public health policy advocate with a Georgetown degree and a Harvard Kennedy School MPA, she built the platform out of pure frustration after the tangled email threads of her own Philadelphia book club nearly killed it. The fix - coded by a friend named Ian Campbell, who later became her husband - turned a logistics problem into a company, and a public health career into a mission against loneliness. She runs it all from Camden, Maine.
Wyly Wade
Wyly Wade is the CEO of Biometrica Systems (also operating as Safience), a Las Vegas and Virginia-based company that links physical and digital information to help prevent crime, identify threats, and recover victims. A self-taught coder who published his first video game at age ten and fixed a bug in Lotus Notes 4 while barely out of his teens, Wade has spent more than two decades at the intersection of biometrics, cybersecurity, and public policy. He helped build biometric standards for the U.S. passport, advised the ICAO on e-passports, and was part of the founding core team behind India's Aadhaar, the largest biometric identity program on Earth. Today he is pushing Biometrica toward a privacy-first, biometric-free model of threat and victim detection.
Francisco Aguilar
Francisco Aguilar is the founder and CEO of Bounce Imaging, the company behind a softball-sized, throwable 360-degree camera that lets police, firefighters and soldiers see inside dangerous spaces before stepping into them. He conceived the idea as a graduate student at MIT and Harvard after watching rescuers struggle to find survivors in the rubble of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The original Explorer earned a spot on TIME's Best Inventions of 2012; the thermal-equipped Pit Viper 360 repeated the honor in 2024. Today his cameras are used by 300-plus police and fire departments and by defense customers including U.S. Special Operations Command.
Howard Husock
Howard Husock is a senior fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies housing, municipal government, civil society, and philanthropy. A former Emmy-winning WGBH documentary filmmaker who later taught case studies at Harvard's Kennedy School and ran research at the Manhattan Institute, he has spent four decades arguing that American housing policy keeps making the same trillion-dollar mistake. His 2025 book The Projects rereads the history of public housing as a story of demolished communities, not just demolished buildings.
Jason Furman
Jason Furman is an American economist who chaired President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017 and now teaches the famous Economics 10 introductory course at Harvard alongside David Laibson. The Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, he is one of the most widely quoted policy economists working today, dissecting tariffs, inflation, deficits and AI in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Project Syndicate and on his prolific X feed.