Ashwin is an entrepreneur, researcher and engineer from Brooklyn who uses design thinking to fight food waste. As COO of Rise Products, he brings together diverse actors, resources and technology to convert overlooked byproducts into healthy, tasty and sustainable ingredients. He is on the board of a few non-profit organizations, helping them navigate logistical, operational, strategic and technological issues. His previous work was in International Development, focussing on empowerment of disenfranchised women through community building and resilience. Ashwin also worked on analyzing and building multinational organizational culture at Mars Inc. He hails from India, where he studied Mechanical Engineering with a focus on process automation. Ashwin graduated from NYU Tandon with a PhD in Technology Management and wrote his doctoral dissertation on technology and labor in on-demand and algorithmically managed work. He currently teaches technology strategy and entrepreneurship at the New School and at NYU.

Tagan Engel is an organizer, entrepreneur, chef, artist, and mentor who has dedicated her life to the liberation of all people and the planet. She has over 25 years experience across many sectors of the food system as well as in equitable community and economic development. Tagan integrates her knowledge of regenerative food systems, racial & economic equity, and environmental justice to support vibrant community driven work and transformational change. 

For more than a decade, Tagan worked as a chef and entrepreneur in New York City, Boston, and New Haven, CT.  In 2008 she began work on sustainable local supply chains and workers' rights in small businesses and institutions such as Blue State Coffee, New Haven Public Schools, and Yale University. As Community Food Systems Director for CitySeed she ran community-driven food and farm access programs, cooking and garden education, and supported food business entrepreneurship. Through her work on the New Haven Food Policy Council she organized a city-wide network to address food issues, spearheaded the co-creation of the first New Haven Food Action Plan in 2012, and the establishment of the Department of Food Systems Policy for the City in 2016. 

Currently Tagan is a Resident Fellow at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment where she leads work on regenerative food systems, diversity, equity and inclusion, practices for a new economy, and building respectful relationships with local communities. She is also the Executive Producer of The Table Underground radio show and podcast where she records stories on food, radical love, race, and creative social justice. 

Since 2016, Tagan has served on the Board of Directors of Soul Fire Farm, an “Afro-Indigenous centered community farm committed to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system”. She also mentors community-based food and social ventures with Collab. Tagan served on the advisory team to establish the ConnCAT Culinary Arts Academy, was a Mentor in Residence to entrepreneurs at the TSAI Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale, was invited to the White House by Michelle Obama in her Chefs Move to Schools initiative, and was a 2018 Inspiring Equity in Education Story Fellow with the Graustein Memorial Fund. 

Tagan lives in New Haven, CT with her husband, two children and extended family. She is an Ashkenazi Jew, the grandchild of Holocaust survivors who led a revolt and escaped from the death camp Sobibor. She is also an Iyanifa priestess in the Yoruba Orisa tradition. Tagan can often be found cooking and sharing food, connecting people, and loving up on her community near and far.

Robert Y. Chang is an Emmy-nominated producer and the Coordinating Producer of America ReFramed. America ReFramed is committed to presenting stories that illuminate complex social issues and pose an array of experiences through which viewers can contemplate our past, understand our present, and challenge the reimagining of America’s future. The curated year-round series is broadcast on public television’s WORLD Channel and streams via the PBS app. As a member of the Programming & Production team at American Documentary, Robert contributes to the curation of its award-winning documentary series. He has served as juror, screener, programmer, panelist, and reviewer for a range of film festivals and arts funders. He has also served as juror for the IDA Awards, the Tellys, RTDNA Murrow Awards, and the News & Documentary Emmys. Previously, Robert received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology at NYU for his research on the intersection of religion and media. Robert is also a documentary filmmaker whose work has screened worldwide at festivals and is distributed by Documentary Educational Resources (DER). He is a member of the Producers Guild of America.

Akhil SG is a graduate student in Nonprofit Management with a minor in Global Urban Futures at the New School. He is the founding president of Sahridhaya, a non profit based in Kerala that works for creating social awareness among youth for the last 8 years. He also works as a consultant for initiatives at the intersection of social justice and technology in academic and public institutions.

Before engaging with New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) he was the Technology Fellow at Kerala Startupmission, a state government agency that promotes technology startups and a Researcher in Assistive Technology at International Center for Free and Open Source Software. Having a Bachelors in Engineering he explores the organizational interactions of public institutions through a technology lens. Currently researching New York City’s urban food systems from a neighborhood perspective.

Joanne Scillitoe is the inaugural Paul Jennings Chair in Entrepreneurship and a Professor of Management at California State University Northridge. She holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Management and an MBA from Rutgers University, a BS in Business Administration from The College of New Jersey, and an A.A.S. degree in Biological Technology from Middlesex County Community College.

She is the 2015-16 Fulbright-SyCip Distinguished Lecturer (Philippines) and a 2018-19 Fulbright Senior Scholar (Spain). Prior to her appointment at CSUN she was a Professor of Entrepreneurship and Director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at New York Institute of Technology and an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at Michigan Technological University. Prior to her academic career, she had over 17 years of life sciences work experience. Her research interests include business incubation processes, technological innovation processes, technology entrepreneurship, socio-tech entrepreneurship and innovation, and interdisciplinary. Dr. Scillitoe's research has won several best paper awards and has been published in top-tier academic journals.

Coming Soon

Mr. Pacino is a well known industry KOL. A 16 year head and neck cancer survivor, a US Army veteran and a senior executive with over 35 years experience in healthcare and clinical research. Inventor GDPRWallet® and Trust&Verify on BlueCloud. Patient Diversity Advocate and Co-Founder and current President of BlueCloud by HealthCarePoint, a leading global PRIVACY / GDPR Based Network of over 2M+ healthcare and clinical research professionals in the neurosciences, Cardiovascular, CNS and other therapeutic verticals, from more than 494,000+ organizations, focused on providing globally standardized training, education and certifications (NIH Stroke Scale, mRS Rankin, Suicidality (C-SSRS), Barthel Index (BI), + dozens more patient focused diagnostic instruments) along with providing modern tools and “real-time” networking technologies that empower members to own, manage everyday operational, managerial and compliance processes by connecting healthcare and clinical research stakeholders with a focus on PATIENT CENTRIC CARE.

Mr. Pacino is a past member of the Association of Clinical Research Professionals (ACRP) Editorial Advisory Board and past chair of the Central Texas Chapter. He previously served as the VP for Collaborative Network Development at the Alliance for Clinical Research Excellence and Safety (ACRES), and past member of Society for Clinical Research Sites (SCRS) Global Impact Partners among others. Actively involved in collaborations for global standardization of modern diagnostic programs from the governments, universities, not for profits and other entities which are modernizing the healthcare and clinical research ecosystem with a focus on education, standards of care, compliance, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), CCPA and privacy.

Dr. Jeremy Greene is broadly interested in the history of disease, and his research explores the ways in which medical technologies come to influence our understandings of what it means to be sick or healthy, normal or abnormal. In addition to directing the Institute of the History of Medicine, he is the founding Director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, Core Faculty in the Johns Hopkins Drug Access and Affordability Initiative, Associate Faculty at the Berman Institute of Bioethics, and holds joint appointments in the Department of History of Science and Technology and the Department of Anthropology at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

His first two books, Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease and Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine, (2007 and 2014, Johns Hopkins University Press) describe how the relationship of knowledge and practice, medical science and the pharmaceutical marketplace, and broader understandings of the relationship between medicine and public health can only be understood through understanding the complex histories of medical technologies (like pharmaceuticals) and the series of legislative, regulatory, clinical, and consumer decisions that guide their production, circulation, and consumption. His current book project, titled The Doctor Who Wasn't There, Technology, History and the Limits of Telehealth (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press) examines how changing expectations of instantaneous communications through electric, electronic, and digital media transformed the nature of medical practice and medical knowledge. This research is focused on recapturing how seemingly mundane communications technologies have enabled and altered the production, circulation, and consumption of medical knowledge, from telegraph to text pager, telephone to telemedicine, fax machine to Facebook. The present work has been supported by a Faculty Scholars Fellowship from the Greenwall Foundation and a G13 Award from the National Library of Medicine.

He received an MA in medical anthropology from Harvard in 2004, the MD and PhD degrees in the history of science from Harvard in 2005, completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital in 2008, and is board certified in Internal Medicine and a member of the American College of Physicians. In addition to his appointment at the Institute for the History of Medicine, he also practices internal medicine at the East Baltimore Medical Center, a community health center affiliated with Johns Hopkins. His work has been recognized by the Roy Porter Award from the Society for Social History of Medicine, the J. Worth Estes Award and the Richard Shryock Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine, the Edward Kremers Award from the American Institute for the History of Pharmacy, the Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science, and most recently he was named the 2021 Nicholas Davies Award recipient from the American College of Physicians for “outstanding scholarly activities in history, literature, philosophy, and ethics and contributions to humanism in medicine.”

Melissa Creary, PhD, MPH is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy in the School of Public Health and the Senior Director for the Office of Public Health Initiatives at the American Thrombosis and Hemostasis Network (ATHN). As Senior Director she assists ATHN in finding ways to leverage public health research and policy to make a broader impact within the bleeding and blood disorders community.
She received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies (focusing on Health, History, and Culture) at the Graduate Institute for the Liberal Arts (ILA) and Masters in Public Health at Emory University. Over a nine-year career at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the Division of Blood Disorders, she helped create and lead the first national program and data collection system for sickle cell disease (SCD) at the agency. Dr. Creary’s research and
teaching interests broadly include how science, culture, and policy intersect. Through a health equity lens and using historical and ethnographic methods, she investigates how national policy for SCD (in Brazil and the U.S.) is influenced by race and other notions of belonging. Her research also interrogates how inclusion and knowledge production are at odds with structural barriers. In her most recent project, she analyzes how equity-based
scientific and public health policies are incongruent to the very justice they are trying to produce. She speaks on topics of justice, racism and anti-racism in health and biomedicine, COVID-19, identity politics in health, and bioethics. She has been published in Social Science and Medicine, BioSocieties, Law, Medicine, and Ethics, The American Journal of Bioethics, and JAMA Open Network.

Kathleen M. Vogel is Professor and Interim Director in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. She is Senior Global Futures Scientist, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.  She was previously a tenured associate professor in the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland. She was also a tenured professor in the Department of Political Science and was Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program at North Carolina State University (NC State), and held a joint appointment in the Department of Science and Technology Studies and Judith V. Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Cornell University. Vogel holds a Ph.D. in bio-physical chemistry from Princeton University.

She has served in the U.S. Department of State as a Jefferson Science Fellow in the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons and as William C. Foster Fellow in the Office of Proliferation Threat Reduction in the Bureau of Nonproliferation. Vogel has also spent time as a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Cooperative Monitoring Center, Sandia National Laboratories, and the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies.

 Dr. Kristin Reynolds is Chair and Visiting Assistant Professor of Food Studies at The New School. As a critical food geographer, her work focuses on racial and economic justice dimensions of the global food system. She uses action research approaches to connect research and scholarship to food justice and food sovereignty, with current projects in New York City and Eastern France. Dr. Reynolds also lectures on social justice in the food system at Yale School of the Environment. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography and M.S. in International Agricultural Development from the University of California, Davis.