Adriana Valdez Young

Adriana Valdez Young (she/her) is a mother, design researcher, and educator. She practices design research that focuses on centering the lived experiences of people and communities. She works in the context of personal care, the built environment, and product design. Currently, she is faculty and chair of MFA Interaction Design at the School of Visual Arts, a senior advisor at SOUR, and a board member of Superbloom.

Candice Walker

Candice Walker is a Social Impact Designer and a candidate for the MFA in Design for Social Innovation at SVA. Her work focuses on the intersection of data visualization, urban policy, and community advocacy. Through the development of the Jersey City Equity Nexus (JCEN), she leverages human-centered design to address systemic housing displacement. Candice is dedicated to creating accessible digital tools that empower residents to navigate complex urban landscapes and advocate for equitable housing futures.

Chelsea McCullough

Dr. Chelsea McCullough translates between government, innovation, social, and academic sectors to support community-centered technology practices. She is the Founder of Digi.City, a Professor of Practice at Texas State University, and an advisor to Smart Cities Connect, and various ethical AI projects.

Daniel Fusca

Daniel Fusca is an urban planner, facilitator, and engagement strategist committed to meaningful participation that leads to more resilient decisions. In 2015, he established Canada’s first permanent deliberative citizen’s assembly within a municipal government—the Toronto Planning Review Panel—and continues to pioneer deliberative approaches in city building. As Manager of Public Consultation for Toronto’s Parks and Recreation Division, he has built a leading municipal engagement practice that emphasizes equity and trust-building. Daniel teaches at both undergraduate and graduate levels and speaks internationally about the conditions required for democratic participation to genuinely shape public decisions—work he further advanced as Urbanist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities in 2025–26.

Krizia Fernando

Krizia Fernando is a product design lead at Evernorth. She's worked in education, nonprofits and IoT, building toolkits and systems that help product teams work more inclusively. As co-founder of Femmecubator, a nonprofit supporting BIPOC Women in Tech, Krizia designs open source products and teaches workshops on emerging technologies. In 2024, she was recognized as an Aspen Ideas Fellow for her work on Femmecubator and opencivic.tech. When she's not designing, you'll find her taking film photos while traveling.

Priyanka Thomas

Priyanka Thomas is a product designer exploring how systems can better support human agency and collaboration. She has worked on design systems and AI-supported workflows across complex healthcare platforms and consumer applications, focusing on reducing friction, increasing clarity, and helping people make better decisions. She is particularly interested in ethical approaches to AI that support well-being, strengthen democratic systems, and remain accountable to the communities they impact. Outside of work, she spends time playing, making, and listening to music.

Kris Rubiano

Kris Rubiano is a project manager specializing in civic technology and machine learning. From design to data, they guide the evolution of LLM platforms and community initiatives to ensure technology remains an inclusive resource rather than a barrier. This multidisciplinary approach is driven by a desire to solve problems from every angle—balancing UX-driven empathy with the technical rigor of data analysis. Having led conversational AI training, they are now advancing their work in Responsible AI foundations, data strategy, and governance to build frameworks that hold emerging systems accountable to the communities they serve.

Georgia Bullen

Georgia Bullen joined Superbloom in 2018, returning to her first passions — usability and human centered design. She has been working to change who technology serves as an advocate in the internet health movement focusing on issues such as security, privacy, and equitable access to technology. Her work has focused on the intersection of human-centered design, communities, physical space, and technology – e.g. how technology intersects with human rights — access to information and the right to communicate. Georgia brings over 20 years of experience at the intersection of usability and design, technology, data, policy, and nonprofit leadership. In addition to her work at Superbloom, Georgia is the chair of the Advisory Committee for Measurement Lab and serves as an advisor to TechCongress. Georgia came to Superbloom from New America’s Open Technology Institute, where she had most recently been a core member of the leadership team. Georgia studied Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon and Urban Planning at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Her previous work and projects are available at georgiabullen.com.

Greg Lindsay

Greg Lindsay is a 2026-2027 urbanist-in-residence at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, where his work focuses on the threats and opportunities AI poses to cities and municipal governance. He is also a non-resident senior fellow of MIT Architecture’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, Ari­zo­na State University’s Threat­cast­ing Lab, and the Atlan­tic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Previously, he was a 2022-2023 urban tech fellow at Cor­nell Tech’s Jacobs Insti­tute, where he ex­plo­­red the future of AI and aug­men­ted rea­lity at urban scale in The Augmented City: Seeing Through Disruption (2024).

Hannah Quay-de la Vallee

Hannah Quay-de la Vallee is a Senior Technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology. While she brings her technical expertise to bear across CDT’s projects, she is primarily focused on the Equity in Civic Technology Project, dedicated to ensuring that education agencies and other civic institutions use data and technology responsibly while protecting the privacy and civil rights of individuals. Hannah received her PhD in computer science from Brown University in 2017.

Jacqueline Lu

Jacqueline helps organizations foster community understanding and trust in their use of emerging technologies like sensors and AI. She leads Helpful Places, a social impact enterprise advancing Digital Trust for Places and Routines (DTPR), an open-source transparency standard that makes the use of data, sensors and AI legible to the public. Helpful Places also builds Clarable, a platform that uses AI to translate regulatory and governance documents into DTPR disclosures - a visual AI register with straightforward descriptions of the systems and their uses. DTPR has been deployed across 17 cities on 3 continents. Jacqueline also serves as Urbanist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto's School of Cities, and previously held roles at Mozilla Foundation, Sidewalk Labs, and the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation.

Jake Hirsch-Allen

Jake Hirsch-Allen is the head of Partnerships at The Dais, Canada’s leading think tank. Current foci include “Kids and Tech”, “Renewing Democracy” and “AI and the Innovation Economy.” Jake previously built public-private partnerships in workforce development and higher education for LinkedIn. Jake advises impact investors, public sector leaders and start-ups, including on edTech, responsible tech, ethical data and Public AI. He co-founded Lighthouse Labs and has acted as a director on many boards. A former intellectual property and international criminal lawyer, Jake was also chair of the Technology Committee of the Global Education Platform, taught Global Health at McMaster University and clerked at the Supreme Court of Israel.

Jamil Ellis

Jamil Ellis is a technologist and social entrepreneur committed to leveraging innovation for climate justice and equity. He is the Founder and CEO of Unified Ground, a climate justice company connecting networks of community organizations and businesses to impact investments, and recently launched the AI Empower initiative with Civ:Lab and community-based organizations to promote equitable AI applications. Jamil also co-produces the Ellis Conversations podcast with his father and advises Women in Energy at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

Jeffrey Dungen

Jeffrey Dungen is a computer engineer and technology entrepreneur with over two decades of experience in IoT and RFID startups. He is the co-founder and CEO of reelyActive whose mission is to put ambient data to work in order to enrich the human experience. Jeffrey has co-authored several IEEE publications, and leads the development of Pareto Anywhere open source IoT middleware which is used in industry and research around the world. He is a member of the DTPR CoPC.

Keelin Burke

Keelin Burke (Digital Strategy Director at Agency 15) is a holistic marketer and brand strategist with an extensive background in UX/UI, digital strategy, e-commerce, content development, and consumer behavior research. She has led digital strategy, marketing, and comprehensive brand evolutions across multiple industries. Her research explores the relationship between digital design, consumerism, and political efficacy, drawing on parallels between urban planning and civil engineering to advocate for a more equitable approach to our evolving digital lives. Her work examines how digital and physical spaces can be shaped to foster more equitable, civically engaged experiences.

Ky Decker

Ky Decker (they/them) is a trans and non-binary designer who enjoys writing CSS and playing piano. They lead design and development at Namesake. You can read more about Ky and Namesake at https://ky.fyi and https://namesake.fyi.

Lavannya Suressh (LAV)

Lavannya (LAV), is a designer and researcher exploring the relationships between culture, technology, and community in her practice. She is a board member of the Culture Keepers Circle and former faculty at Parsons School of Design. Her work investigates how cultural knowledge systems excluded from modern scientific frameworks can offer alternative ways of understanding and building technology. Her work on Kolams has been featured in the Algorithmic Pattern Salon 2025, Critical Coding Cookbook, the 2023 Open Source Arts Contributors Conference (OSACC), and during her research fellowship at the India China Institute.

Marco Zamarato

Marco Zamarato is the founder of Under Over Through, a research, production, and publishing studio for soft and hard infrastructures. The studio works at the intersection of what stories can reveal and what systems can enable, building language for emerging technologies, prototyping the systems a changing world needs, and supporting people and organizations working at the edges of AI diffusion, climate adaptation, and demographic change. Marco has spent most of his career designing soft and hard infrastructures across R&D labs and companies including Google, Nokia, IDEO, CurrentTV, and Warner Brothers. At Google, he contributed to developing operating systems, privacy infrastructures, and AI workflows and products. Notable contributions include Android and Fuchsia OS; Ambient Computing and Android Private Compute Core; the People + AI Guidebook, Artists & Machine Intelligence program, and Google Labs.

Megan Marini

Megan Marini is Founding Partner at 3x3, where she leads community-centered design initiatives in technology equity and regenerative governance. With 15+ years’ experience, she has guided organizations in centering lived experience to shape more just systems and spaces. Previously, she designed programs and led stakeholder engagement for organizations like the Earth Institute, UN, and World Bank. Megan holds an MS in Urban Planning and a Bachelor’s in Architecture, has taught critical design at Pratt Institute, and has taught or lectured at Columbia University, Parsons, IIT, and Johns Hopkins. Her work has been featured in GOOD, DWELL, Public Interest Design, and AIGA’s Design Future Live.

Nepal Asatthawasi

Nepal Asatthawasi is a strategist and systems thinker helping organizations find their footing and their power in rapidly shifting, unpredictable times. She specializes in building the fundraising, operational, and governance infrastructure that lets mission-driven organizations move with agility and intention.

As Co-Executive Director of Mechanism, she drives national initiatives bridging economic development, equity, and manufacturing to build just and resilient local economies. She advises 3x3, a people-centered research and design firm that partners with organizations across sectors to co-design services, systems, and strategies that advance community wellbeing, civic innovation, and regenerative economies. Previously, she served as Director of Development and Operations at the Pratt Center for Community Development and helped launch The Action Lab, which convened activists, organizers, artists, and cultural producers to reimagine democratic engagement. She is also a longtime advisor to AGO, which supports human rights NGOs In Southeast Asia to scale their impact.

Nepal serves on the board of Mid Hudson Energy Transition, supporting community-owned renewable energy and climate resilience, and is a founding board member of At Play Rhinebeck, a community playspace dedicated to inclusive, joyful play for children and families. She also serves on the board of Engage Thailand, which advances Thailand's democracy and human rights movement on the international stage. Nepal holds a BA from Columbia University and Master's degrees from the London School of Economics and the Architectural Association School of Architecture.

Nick Kaufmann

Nick Kaufmann works with communities at the intersection of digital and physical places, studying how spatial media connects with collective imagination, participatory planning, and collaborative building. He has a BA in Sociology & Anthropology from Lewis & Clark College and has studied at Waseda University, Middlebury College, and The London School of Economics. He was previously a captain in Code for America’s Brigade Network, a Fulbright Fellow, WEF Global Shaper, serial TEDx organizer, and a Mozilla Open Leader.

Pinar Guvenc

A National Design Award winner, Pinar Guvenc (she/her) is a recognized leader in inclusive innovation. As Partner at SOUR, a global design innovation studio tackling social and urban challenges, she leads participatory research and design strategies for Fortune 500 clients and local governments worldwide. She extends this mission through her academic roles at Parsons and SVA, where she teaches Ethical Leadership and Inclusive Systems. Pinar also contributes to the broader ecosystem as a board member of Open Style Lab, and as an advisor to NYC’s maker economy through Pratt Center for Community Development.

Violet Whitney

Violet Whitney is the co-founder of Spatial Pixel, a creative studio building a “spatial computer for your space, not your face.” Spatial Pixel’s mission is to enable artists and creatives to craft their own AI-powered media, especially those that can “speak human,” responding to space, voice, gesture, motion, and physical objects. Violet researches human computer interactions that leverage multimodal AI beyond the screen. Prior to co-founding Spatial Pixel, Violet served as director of product at Sidewalk Labs, the Google future cities initiative, where she started a generative design product for real estate development, now part of Google Earth. At Columbia University she helped launch a new Masters program in Computational Design. Today she teaches tangible and spatial computing at University of Pennsylvania, School of Visual Arts, University of Michigan, and Columbia University.

William Martin

William Martin is an interaction design researcher, product leader, and software engineer, currently co-founder of Spatial Pixel, where he develops Procession, Spatial Pixel's vibe-coding spatial computer for prototyping digital-physical interactions. His research covers "Spatial AI," the application of artificial intelligence to spatial reasoning and design. He teaches a graduate seminar of the same name at Columbia GSAPP. Trained as an architect, he was also software engineer and UI designer at data science startup Ufora and has held teaching positions at NYIT, Yale, and General Assembly. He served as product lead at multiple tech companies, including Floored, Pivotal Software, and VMware, and product director at Recycle Track Systems. Immediately prior to Spatial Pixel, he was director of AI at Consensys, a web3 and blockchain company. He holds a Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Arts from Yale University.

Zoe Voss Lee

Zoe Voss Lee is a born and raised New Yorker and spatial data practitioner working at the intersection of economic and environmental justice. Her work is rooted in a commitment to epistemic justice: centering local knowledge in formal planning processes and building tools that elevate ground-up data. In the past, Zoe led the development of NYC’s first Environmental Justice mapping tool and has conducted research on climate data governance. As co-founder of GROUND3D, she works to reclaim data, data infrastructure, and energy infrastructure as shared community assets—ensuring that those most impacted by systemic inequity hold the power to shape solutions that advance self-determination and community wealth building.