study-abroad
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Edwin van Rest
Edwin van Rest is the co-founder and CEO of Studyportals, the Eindhoven-based platform that helps students compare study programs across borders. He started the company in 2007 with two engineering friends after his own year abroad in Japan showed him how hard it was to find information about international study options. Today Studyportals lists hundreds of thousands of programs, reaches millions of students a month, and van Rest is a recognized voice in international education, a former EAIE Rising Star Award winner, and chair of the EAIE Marketing & Recruitment Expert Community.
Jason Yin
Jason Yin (Yin Jiankun) is the founder and CEO of uhomes.com (formerly Uhouzz), a global online marketplace for international student accommodation. After more than a decade teaching and leading at New Oriental Education & Technology Group, he launched the platform in March 2015 to help students studying overseas find, tour and book housing. Today uhomes.com lists more than two million beds across 500-plus cities and roughly 2,000 universities, operates from around 16 global offices, and carries a 4.9-star Trustpilot rating, positioning itself as one of the largest student housing booking platforms in the world.
Greg Shrader
Greg Shrader is the founder and CEO of Wellspring International Education, a Colorado-based firm that connects international students with U.S. colleges and universities. A learning scientist by training who has worked in higher education since 1999, he built Wellspring from a start-up into one of the leading higher-education marketing and recruitment organizations through a string of mergers and acquisitions, including the 2022 purchase of Australian platform StudyMe. He also leads Wellspring Higher Education and its teacher-education brand, NTEC.
Allen Hao
Allen Hao is the founder and CEO of CL Global Academy, an international education company he co-founded in 2009 with Katrina Hao after the two met in Cambridge. From offices in the UK, Shanghai, and the US, the academy runs its 'OxCam Programmes' - short, project-based academic courses taught in Cambridge colleges by University-affiliated faculty. Hao has called himself an entrepreneur since age 16 and built the company without external funding into a profitable business serving over 1,500 students a year, with a claimed 24,000-plus alumni. Internally he goes by the title 'Chief Student-Centered Officer.' Born in Shanghai and splitting time between Cambridge and Madison, Wisconsin, he completed a Master's at the University of Cambridge from 2023 to 2025.
Dmitrii Pistolyako
Dmitrii Pistolyako is the co-founder and CEO of LinguaTrip, a San Francisco-based booking platform for language courses and study-abroad programs that has served more than 100,000 students from over 100 countries. A math-and-economics graduate from Saint Petersburg, he turned a free study-abroad consulting side hustle into a venture-backed company, surviving more than 50 investor rejections before becoming the only Russian startup in his 500 Startups batch. He also leads Fluent.Express and shares his playbook for building a company in the US through his Russian-language YouTube channel and online courses.
Khadeejah Nauman
Khadeejah Nauman is a Karachi-based education professional working as an Executive Associate at ExxelTNR, a higher education consultancy that guides Pakistani students through studying abroad - from admissions and visas to landing in a new country. Trained as a psychologist at Istanbul Bilgi University, she pairs a counselor's read of people with the logistics of moving lives across borders.