Mrs. Andrews is actively involved in her profession and the community. She is both a board member and Trustee of Olivet College, and has served as a board member for the Michigan Association for Art Education, Michigan Alternative Education Organization and Young Audiences of Michigan. She is a founding member of the Detroit Professional Women’s Network and is a task force member of the National Committee to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.

In her limited free time, she functions as a choir director for the Second New Hope Baptist Church and is also a founding member of the vocal group “One Mind.”

Notably, Mrs. Andrews was honored as a Milken Family Foundation Educator of the Year in 1992 for her work at the academy. In addition, she received an award as a Fulbright Hayes Study Tour Teacher in Zimbabwe. Mrs. Andrews has a B.A. from Olivet College, an M.A. in education from Wayne State University and an ABD in Educational Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Anant Agarwal

President
edX

Anant Agarwal is the President of edX, an online learning venture of Harvard and MIT. Agarwal taught the first course of edX on circuits and electronics from MIT, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. He has served as the director of CSAIL, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

He is also a founder of Tilera Corporation which created the Tile multicore processor. He led the development of Raw, an early tiled multicore processor, Sparcle, an early multi-threaded microprocessor, and Alewife, a scalable multiprocessor. He also led the VirtualWires project at MIT and was the founder of Virtual Machine Works. Agarwal won the Maurice Wilkes prize for computer architecture, and MIT’s Smullin and Jamieson prizes for teaching. He holds a Guinness World Record for the largest microphone array, and is an author of the textbook “Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits.”

His work on Organic Computing was selected by Scientific American as one of 10 World Changing Ideas in 2011, and he was named one of 12 Bostonians changing the world by Boston Globe Magazine in 2012. Agarwal holds a Ph.D. from Stanford and a bachelor's from IIT Madras. He hacks on WebSim, a web-based circuits laboratory, in his spare time.

Laura Pappano

Journalist
The New York Times

Laura Pappano is an award-winning journalist, author, and blogger. She is the author of Inside School Turnarounds (2010), co-author of Playing With the Boys (2008), and author of The Connection Gap (2001).

A former education columnist for The Boston Globe, Laura is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Education Life section, and The Harvard Education Letter. Her work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine, among other print and online publications.

She is writer-in-residence at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, and founder and editor of the FairGameNews blog. Laura serves on several non-profit boards, including the Long Wharf Theatre and New Haven Reads, and runs a journalism program for public school students in New Haven, CT.

Andrew Ng

Co-Founder
Coursera

Andrew Ng is the co-founder of Coursera, as well as a Computer Science faculty member at Stanford University and the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, the main AI research organization at Stanford.

In 2011, he led the development of Stanford's main MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform, and also taught an online Machine Learning class that was offered to over 100,000 students, leading to the founding of Coursera. Ng's goal is to give everyone in the world access to a high quality education, for free. With 33 university partners, 212 courses, and more than two million students, Coursera is currently the largest MOOC (Massively Open Online Courses) platform in the world.

In 1975, Gates left Harvard University in his junior year to focus on Microsoft, the company he founded with his childhood friend Paul Allen. As chief software architect and chairman, Gates led the company to become the worldwide leader in business and personal software, services, and solutions. In July 2008, Gates transitioned into a new role as chairman of Microsoft and advisor on some key development projects. (See Microsoft’s web site for more information on his work with the company).

Gates also founded Corbis, which is developing a comprehensive digital archive of art and photography from public and private collections around the globe. He is a member of the board of directors of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Gates grew up in Seattle with his two sisters. His father, William H. Gates Sr., is a co-chair of the foundation and a retired attorney. His late mother, Mary Gates, was a schoolteacher, University of Washington regent, and chairwoman of United Way International. The Gates have three children.