David C. Banks is Chancellor of New York City Public Schools, the largest school system in the nation. Appointed by Mayor Eric Adams on January 1, 2022, Chancellor Banks is reimagining the school experience to build bright starts and bold futures for all New York City children.

In the spring of 2023, Chancellor Banks launched NYC Reads(Open external link), a transformative effort to align literacy instruction across the entire school system to the science of reading, an initiative that includes professional learning and job-embedded coaching for thousands of teachers. He has also dramatically expanded career-connected learning, such as paid internships, via FutureReadyNYC, Modern Youth Apprenticeship(Open external link), and other similar programs, which collectively serve hundreds of high schools, with plans to grow.

In addition, Chancellor Banks has prioritized safety, health, and wellness through the Project Pivot(Open external link) initiative, which has grown to 250 schools, and daily mindfulness in all classrooms. He increased supports for students with disabilities by creating a Special Education Advisory Council and adding more than 1,000 seats to NYCPS’ highly effective specialized programs. His administration also offered full-day summer learning and fun, two years in a row, to 110,000 K-8 students in the Summer Rising(Open external link) program—the largest such program in New York City’s history. Under Chancellor Banks’s leadership, overall school enrollment increased in the 2023-2024 school year for the first time in eight years.

Chancellor Banks started his career as a school safety officer, after which he began his first teaching job at P.S. 167. He served as an assistant principal at P.S. 191 before becoming a founding principal at the Bronx School for Law, Government and Justice and then at The Eagle Academy for Young Men, the first in a network of innovative all-boys public schools in New York City and Newark, N.J. The Chancellor later served as President and CEO of the Eagle Academy Foundation.

Chancellor Banks is also an author and thought leader, recognized throughout his career as a defining voice on empowering young men of color, and the Eagle Academy model he pioneered has expanded nationally via the Eagle Institute.

For over 30 years, the Chancellor has been a member of One Hundred Black Men of New York, where he served on the Board of Directors. He is a co-founder of Black EdFluencers United, an organization dedicated to influencing and developing the capacity of Black educators, and has also served as a board member for the International Boys’ Schools Coalition, the co-chair of New York City Young Men’s Initiative, and a founding board member for the Coalition of Schools Educating Boys of Color.

Chancellor Banks has been recognized by City & State New York on their Education Power 100 and NYC Power 100(Open external link) lists and was featured on Crain’s 2021 list(Open external link) of notable Black executives. He served on the NYC Mayor’s Taskforce to Reopen Schools in 2020 and on the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce from 2018 to 2020.

The Chancellor is a native New Yorker and a proud graduate of New York City Public Schools. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University and earned his Juris Doctorate from St. John’s University School of Law. He participated in the original cohort of the Cahn Fellows Program for Distinguished Principals in 2003 and holds an honorary doctorate in education from Wheelock College.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble is a NY-based privacy and cybersecurity associate at a global law firm. At his firm, Dyllan maintains an active pro bono practice advising early-stage entrepreneurs and small businesses. He also serves on the VOLS Pro Bono Advocates Council and the junior board for the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. While in law school, he was a Tech Law & Policy Scholar, represented clients in the Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic, was a research assistant at the Center on Privacy & Technology, and was a teaching assistant for Computer Programming for Lawyers and Legal Communication Design. Before law school, Dyllan attended Rutgers University where he was a Braven Fellow and a part of the Honors College.

Rutgers University–Newark Interim Chancellor Jeffrey Robinson is an internationally known author and co-founder of the Center for Urban Entrepreneurship and Economic Development at Rutgers Business School. His broad academic and professional background spans business, the social sciences, public policy, and engineering. Since 2008, Robinson has been on the faculty of management and global business at Rutgers Business School. His work addresses community and economic development issues for urban metropolitan areas in the United States and abroad. He has produced grant-funded research projects on high-growth oriented African American women entrepreneurs, social innovation, and minority representation in technology entrepreneurship. He is the co-editor, alongwith Johanna Mair and Kai Hockerts, of the research volumes Social Entrepreneurship, International Perspectives in Social Entrepreneurship, and Values and Opportunities in Social Entrepreneurship. His most recent manuscripts are related to urban social innovation, indigenous social enterprises, and entrepreneurship for economic development. In 2021, Robinson was named the Prudential Chair in Business and was named Rutgers-Newark Provost in 2022.For the past five years, Robinson has partnered with the federal government to develop programs and initiatives that are intended to make the tech sector more inclusive, an effort that is funded by the National Science Foundation. Much of Robinson’s early work to advance social entrepreneurship as a driver for economic development was done through The Center for Urban Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (CUEED). As co-founding assistant director, he helped to create programs that have supported more than 500 entrepreneurs in the region.Robinson is the co-author of two books published by HarperCollins Leadership, including Black Faces in White Places: 10 Game-Changing Strategies to Achieve Success and Find Greatness, which gives Black professionals advice on navigating workplaces where they are in the minority. It was published in 2010.The sequel, published in 2022, is Black Faces in High Places: 10 Strategic Actions for Black Professionals to Reach the Top and Stay There, which won a 2023 Axiom Award, one of the top honors for books about business. Both books were co-authored with Rutgers alumnus Randal Pinkett, Robinson’s long-time friend and business partner, who rose to fame after he refused an offer to share his win on The Apprentice, sparking a national conversation about racism in the workplace.Robinson, who was born in East Orange and raised in Parsippany, holds five academic degrees spanning engineering, urban studies, and business. He completed a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Studies at Rutgers College and a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering at Rutgers School of Engineering, a Master of Science in Civil Engineering Management from Georgia Institute of Technology as a GEM Fellow, and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Management and Organizations from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business.Robinson is the recipient of the Aspen Institute’s Social Impact Faculty Pioneer Award for his research, service and teaching activities at the intersection of entrepreneurship and society. His course, Urban Entrepreneurship & Economic Development, was recognized as a model of Innovative Entrepreneurship Education by the U.S. Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Over his 25-year academic career, he has been the keynote speaker or presenter at international events and conferences on six continents.

Lynn Mahoney is the 14th person and first woman to serve as president of San Francisco State University. President Mahoney is on the board of directors for both the Bay Area Council and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. She is a member of the Bay Area Higher Education Council, the San Francisco Workforce Investment Board and the CSU Graduation Initiative 2025 Advisory Committee. She was also appointed to serve on San Francisco’s COVID-19 Economic Recovery Task Force. Her scholarly work and teaching have focused on United States history, women’s history, feminism, race studies, and ethnicity.

Ruth V. Watkins is president of postsecondary education, where she leads Strada Education Foundation’s research, philanthropy, thought leadership, and policy efforts to help more individuals access and complete postsecondary education and training to improve their careers and lives. Before joining Strada in 2021, Watkins built a strong reputation for supporting social change and community workforce needs as the 16th president of the University of Utah. In that role, she increased degree completion rates and research funding, established innovative student funding models, and built strong partnerships with community stakeholders. Uniting the campus as “One U,” Watkins and her team drove innovation in research, education, and operational efficiency, and addressed major societal challenges, including in mental health and interpersonal violence.Under Watkins’ leadership, the University of Utah cultivated broad and deep connections to communities and was responsive to the state’s workforce needs. During her tenure, the university produced more graduates in high-demand fields than any other state institution, and those graduates secured employment or proceeded to graduate or professional school at noteworthy rates. Watkins previously served as the University of Utah’s senior vice president for academic affairs for five years before being appointed president. Earlier in her career, she spent 20 years in leadership and faculty roles at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she served as dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, vice provost, and associate provost. Watkins graduated with highest honors from the University of Northern Iowa with a bachelor’s degree in speech-language pathology. She earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in child language at the University of Kansas, where she was a National Institutes of Health predoctoral fellow. Her scholarship focuses on communication development and disabilities in young children.

Sharif El-Mekki is the Founder and CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development. The Center exists to ensure there will be equity in the recruiting, training, hiring, and retention of quality educators that reflect the cultural backgrounds and share common socio-political interests of the students they serve. The Center is developing a nationally relevant model to measurably increase teacher diversity and support Black educators through four pillars: Professional Learning, Pipeline, Policies, and Pedagogy. So far, the Center has developed ongoing and direct professional learning, mentoring, and coaching opportunities for Black teachers and other educators serving students of color. The Center also carries forth the freedom or liberation school legacy by hosting Freedom School sites that incorporate research-based curricula and exposes high school and college students to the teaching profession to help fuel a pipeline of Black educators. Prior to founding the Center, El-Mekki served as a nationally recognized principal and U.S. Department of Education Principal Ambassador Fellow. His school, Mastery Charter Shoemaker, was recognized by President Obama and Oprah Winfrey, and was awarded the prestigious EPIC award for three consecutive years as being amongst the top three schools in the country for accelerating students’ achievement levels. The Shoemaker Campus was also recognized as one of the top ten middle school and top ten high schools in the state of Pennsylvania for accelerating the achievement levels of African-American students. In 2014, El-Mekki founded The Fellowship – Black Male Educators for Social Justice, an organization dedicated to recruiting, retaining, and developing Black male teachers. El-Mekki blogs on Philly’s 7th Ward, is a member of the 8 Black Hands podcast and serves on several boards and committees focused on educational and racial justice.