Dr. Edmund Adjapong is an Assistant Professor of Education at Seton Hall University. He is also a faculty fellow at The Institute for Urban and Multicultural Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and author of #HipHopEd: The Compilation on Hip-Hop Education Volume 1.
Dr. Adjapong is a former middle school science educator at a New York City public school in The Bronx. He is the director of the Science Genius Program, a program that engages urban students in the sciences...
Ms. Shervaughnna Anderson-Byrd, Executive Director of the California Reading and Literature Project, is a proud graduate of Long Beach Unified School District and has been working in education for 30 years. She began her teaching career in Hong Kong, where she taught primary school and eventually became Head Teacher. Since returning to the United States, she has been a K-12 teacher, a reading specialist, and a site and district administrator; she has extensive instructional coaching knowledge and experience in establishing and nurturing professional learning...
Dr. Cheryl Grills is a Clinical Psychologist with a current emphasis in Community Psychology. A President’s Professor and Full Professor in the Department of Psychological Science, she has been on the faculty of LMU for 36 years and is Founder and Director of its Psychology Applied Research Center. She also founded Imoyase Community Support Services, a 33-year non-profit organization providing action research, program evaluation and strategic technical assistance to social justice and social service community-based organizations.
Lisa Holder is President of the Oakland-based Equal Justice Society and recently completed her two-year term as an appointee of Gov. Gavin Newsom on the historic Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans. Ms. Holder is a nationally recognized, award-winning trial attorney with specialized expertise in equal protection, education equity, employment discrimination, constitutional policing, and international human rights law. In 2019, she drafted AB 241 and 242, the laws that now require all judges, attorneys, court staff, and health professionals to...
Jovan Scott Lewis is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke University Press, 2022).
He studies Black people's lived experience of economic and racial inequality and reparative frameworks for those disparities. As such, his work has been centrally concerned with reparations not only as a means of remedying past harms but how they might engender future...
A Southern California native, Desiré earned an AS from Antelope Valley College, a BS in chemical engineering from UCLA, and an MS and PhD in chemical and material physics from UC Irvine. Her research focused on developing very fast laser and microscope systems that could capture molecules vibrating and rotating in real time. She was a postdoc at UC Berkeley, where she designed and built attosecond lasers (the fastest laser pulses, which emit x-ray light, ever measured). At the Lawrence Hall of Science she wrote an all-digital K–8 science curriculum (Amplify Science), which aligned to...
Dr. Lawrence Torry Winn brings over twenty-five years of diverse professional experience, collaborating and consulting with a range of organizations including foundations, cities, schools, colleges/universities, and non-profits. Notable partners include Casey Family Programs, Annie E. Casey, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, City of Newark (NJ), City of Madison (WI), St. HOPE, University of California, Berkeley, Sierra Health Foundation, MLK Sr. Community Resources Collaborative, and Race to Equity. As a trained ethnographer, Dr. Winn’s projects explore the nuanced connections between...
