Making healthy air the standard in every classroom

David Carel co-founded Panorama Education, a Y Combinator-backed analytics company now serving nearly a quarter of U.S. K-12 schools across all 50 states, and subsequently helped build Funda Wande in South Africa, an early literacy initiative reaching hundreds of thousands of children in partnership with the national government. He was Managing Director at Blueprint Biosecurity, and holds degrees from Yale and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Dr. Georgia Lagoudas is a Senior Fellow at Brown University’s Pandemic Center, where she leads the Clean Indoor Air Initiative. She previously served as Senior Advisor at the White House, where she launched an initiative to improve indoor air quality as part of the national pandemic response. She holds a PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT.

Jessica Cole co-founded U.S. Digital Response, which placed technologists with more than 150 state, local, and federal government agencies during COVID-19, and has served in leadership roles across education, health, and government innovation.

Julie Horowitz leads the design of the Early Round: 2027 Cohort, drawing on roughly fifteen years advising philanthropic leaders on cross-sector initiatives. She led the strategy and launch of the Ford Foundation’s Global Fellowship, a $50M award program on inequality, and later designed a national competition for Carnegie Corporation focused on educational pathways.

Katherine Pippert has worked in K-12 education across several districts and served as a managing director at New Leaders, which prepares principals to lead high-need schools. She has built large-scale selection and human capital initiatives across the New York City school system and for the Ford Foundation’s Global Fellowship, and has designed prizes and competitions for education departments and major foundations, including Carnegie Corporation.

LaVerne Srinivasan led education grantmaking at Carnegie Corporation of New York for eleven years, most recently as Vice President of the National Program. As Deputy Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, she redesigned how the city recruits, hires, and places teachers and principals, a model since replicated nationwide, and she later served as president of New Leaders. She chairs the board of Educational Testing Service and holds degrees from Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

Liesl McConchie is an international expert on how the brain learns and the conditions the brain needs to learn at its best. She is the author of Building a Positive Math Identity: A Brain Science Approach, and co-author of the best-selling Brain-Based Learning with Dr. Eric Jensen. With over 25 years of experience in education, Liesl combines cognitive neuroscience with classroom experience across the K-12 spectrum to help schools understand the role indoor air quality plays in cognition, attendance, and student and teacher health.