New Class

We are delighted to welcome nearly 100 new Young Global Leaders to our community of outstanding people addressing the world's most pressing problems. From courageous journalists uncovering the most critical political and human rights issues of our time to savvy entrepreneurs transforming the way we work with technology, this year's class is packed with brilliant minds and passionate leaders from business, civil society, academia, and government. Discover the new class:

17 YGLs in North America

Nick Allardice

Adviser, fmr CEO, Change.org, PBC, USA

Nick Allardice is the CEO at Change.org. He was previously VP of Product & Design. Nick started his career as an activist - about as far from the world of tech products as you can imagine. He joined Change.org because it was a tech enabled social platform that could have larger impact than the world of activism that he was in. He led Change.org’s internationalization effort - and subsequently the campaigns team before heading up Change.org’s product team.

Moritz Baier-Lentz

Partner and Head of Gaming, Lightspeed Venture Partners, USA

Moritz Baier-Lentz is a Partner and the Head of Gaming at Lightspeed Venture Partners, a globally leading venture capital firm with over $29 billion in capital under management and more than 500 investments across the U.S., Europe, and Asia—including Epic Games, Stability AI, and Snap. Moritz loves to partner with exceptional entrepreneurs and, to date, has invested over $100 million into the gaming industry—including many founders who have led the creation of games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, League of Legends, Wild Rift, Apex Legends, Overwatch, Valorant, StarCraft II, and Warcraft III. Previously, Moritz was a Vice President at Goldman Sachs, where he founded and led the firm's global gaming practice, and a #1 ranked player of Diablo II. He was recognized among the ‘30 Under 30’ (Forbes), ‘40 Under 40’ (Capital), 'Young Leaders' (Atlantik-Brücke), and 'Young Global Leaders' (World Economic Forum). Moritz holds an M.B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University, where he graduated with distinction (Arjay Miller Scholar). https://gaming.lsvp.com

Stefany Bello

Senior Vice President of Digital Partnerships, Retail & Commerce, Mastercard, USA

Stefany Bello is a Head of Digital Partnerships and Strategic Alliances in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) at Mastercard. In her role, she is responsible for executing Mastercard's digital strategy with digital giants, marketplaces, streaming services, e-commerce software enablers, social media platforms, gig platforms, ride-sharing, fast fashion, gaming, crypto, and innovative startups. Stefany is responsible for expanding Mastercard's digital footprint, managing relationships with key players, and driving innovation and transformational efforts across digital payments in LAC. Before this role, Stefany led partner engagements with Operating Systems and Social Network players globally and with a broader Product team, launching proximity and remote wallet solutions leveraging the Mastercards tokenization platform. Stefany joined Mastercard in 2009 and has played a key role in driving Mastercard preference, product strategy, co-brand engagements, value-added services, and data insights. Stefany also holds a patent for the Mastercard Aid network, an end-to-end, non-financial service designed to streamline aid distribution even in the absence of telecommunications infrastructure. Stefany holds a B.A. in International Business Management with a double concentration in finance and Latin American Studies from Manhattanville College in N.Y. Additionally, she is fluent in English, Spanish, and Italian and proficient in French.

Alejo Czerwonko

Chief Investment Officer, Emerging Markets, Americas, UBS AG, USA

Alejo is Managing Director and Chief Investment Officer Emerging Markets Americas at UBS Global Wealth Management, based in New York. In this capacity, Alejo leads a team of analysts focusing on emerging economies and developing investment ideas in these markets, influencing the allocation of billions of dollars of the firm's assets under management. As a member of two management forums at UBS, he helps set the strategic direction of the business. Alejo is also an Adjunct Professor at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, where he teaches a course on emerging markets. Outside of business and academia, Alejo helps shape the policy debate impacting emerging markets through his involvement with leading global think tanks. He has been named Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Wilson Center's Latin America Program and a Millennium Leadership Fellow by the Atlantic Council. He frequently appears on Bloomberg Television, CNBC, and CNN, and regularly contributes to financial publications including the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal. Alejo earned a PhD in economics from Columbia University. He also holds degrees in economics and finance from Tilburg University and Universidad del CEMA.

Roopa Dhatt

Executive Director, Women in Global Health, USA

Dr. Roopa Dhatt is a passionate advocate for gender equality in global health and a leading voice in the movement to correct the gender imbalance in global health leadership. She is also a practicing Internal Medicine physician in Washington, D.C. Dr. Dhatt is particularly committed to addressing issues of power, privilege, and intersectionality that keep many women from global health leadership roles and to opening up spaces for the voices of these women to be heard. Determined to build a movement to transform women’s leadership opportunities in health, Dr. Dhatt co-founded Women in Global Health in 2015. Today, Women in Global Health has 47 chapters, 100,000 supporters in more than 100 countries, and continues to grow. Dr. Dhatt, the Executive Director, the global team, and its network of chapters drive change by mobilizing a diverse group of emerging women health leaders, advocating for governments and global health leaders to meet commitments made, and holding those leaders to account. Dr. Dhatt has worked in global health for nearly 15 years, collaborating with 120+ countries. She holds numerous advisory and board roles. She advises global health institutions on matters of the health workforce, gender equity, and universal health coverage. Dr. Dhatt was recognized in the Gender Equality Top 100, the most influential people in global policy. She was on the Lancet COVID-19 Commission. She is a former W7 Germany Advisor and a current W7 Japan Advisor on advocating feminist agendas to the G7 governments (2023), a member of the Global Council on SDG3, a member of the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) Scientific Advisory Board, and is a member of the Virchow Prize Committee. She was invited as a public delegate to the historic U.S. Delegation to the United Nations 65th Commission of Status of Women Meeting in March 2021, which was led by Vice President Kamala Harris. She has published in the Lancet, British Medical Journal (BMJ), Devex, and Forbes and has been interviewed in National Geographic, Nature, NPR, EuroNews, and numerous other channels.

Porter Diehl

Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Bridgewater Associates, USA

Porter joined Bridgewater in 2009 and is the Deputy Chief Executive Officer. He partners with the co-CEOs to set and drive the strategic goals and oversee the day-to-day management of the firm. Previously, Porter was Lead of Portfolio Analytics, working closely with the co-CIOs to evolve the portfolio construction process, evaluate and manage investment risks, and design investment strategies for clients. His work has included evolving the risk controls and event risk strategy, researching how to best combine beta and alpha, and systemizing the portfolio construction and trade generation logic. Porter is also a member of the firms Executive Committee, Commercial and Business Strategy Committee, and a Partner.

Sofia Elizondo

Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, Brightseed, USA

As an award-winning tech business leader, Sofia Elizondo is committed to endowing people with fundamentally longer and healthier lives. She has built multimillion-dollar companies and brands in the consumer goods, pharmaceutical, and technology industries. Before Brightseed, Sofia led the commercialization of plant-based protein products, including the novel mung bean protein isolate to replace egg functionality. Sofia began her career at the Boston Consulting Group and was also a founding member of the BCG Henderson Institute; the consulting firm's think tank on the future of business innovation. She also served as an advisor to the UN Global Compact, the United Nations agency focused on the private sector, while it developed its global corporate sustainability standards released at the 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos. Her decades of leadership in corporate social innovation now enable Brightseed's mission to resource companies looking for scientifically validated and naturally derived products that can transform human health. Sofia holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She lives in San Francisco, California, with her husband and two young daughters. Accolades include Inspiring Women Leading in the AgTech Sector by Food Tank (2019), VentureBeats Women in AI - Award in the Entrepreneur category (2020), Top 100 Female Founders from Inc. Magazine (2021).

Marissa Giustina

Research Scientist and Quantum Electronics Engineer, Google, USA

Marissa Giustina is a staff research scientist and quantum electronics engineer. She developed and deployed superconducting device packaging that enabled Google’s unprecedentedly capable “quantum supreme” Sycamore processor. As head of device packaging and co-author of the team’s roadmap, Giustina is responsible for both research and engineering developments in the device integration that lies at the heart of the quantum computing hardware system. Giustina studied engineering at Dartmouth College with a focus on electrical and materials engineering, moving to foundational research in experimental quantum physics at Uni of Vienna. For her PhD (advised by quantum pioneer Anton Zeilinger), she designed and built a 60-meter-long precision apparatus, leading a local team and collaborating with senior scientists at five institutions to settle a 50-year outstanding challenge in the foundations of quantum mechanics. Giustina joined Google in 2016. As Google Quantum AI’s first female scientist, she helped grow the team to ~150 members. She is a highly sought-after speaker: as Senior Technical Spokesperson for Policy Engagements, she represents Google to prominent global academic, government, and media audiences. She prioritizes meeting students, especially from underrepresented backgrounds, undertaking one-on-one mentorships. Giustina featured in Fortune’s 40 Under 40, and Future 50. She served on US National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee as its youngest member (2020-22)

Smriti Kirubanandan

Director and Head, Strategic Marketing, Healthcare, Tata Consultancy Services, USA

Smriti has a strong background in robotics and public health and currently serves as a Director, Healthcare at TATA Consultancy Services, where she focuses on driving significant transformations within the healthcare ecosystem, concentrating on customer experience, Intelligent automation, digital analytics, and insights, and is determined to make healthcare more accessible and affordable. She is also the Head of Strategic Marketing for Healthcare and Lifesciences, North America, where she drives brand development, thought leadership, and market research. Smriti serves on the Board of the World Food Bank and as a Vice Chair for the American College of Healthcare Executives, Southern California.

An empathetic and innovative strategic policy advisor has helped organizations globally to build the capacity to empower people to engage in wellness programs and is responsible for educating small farmers in Africa to lift them out of poverty to improve food & nutrition insecurity, impacting 2 million people per year. In 2022, Smriti was appointed to serve the Los Angeles County food equity round table as a Nutrition & Policy Advisor to design and strategize programs to address food insecurity by educating and improving access and affordability to nutritious food. Smriti is also the founder of HLTH Forward Podcast- a space that hosts healthcare leaders, policymakers, and artists such as Bryan Adams,Dr. Joneigh Khaldun of CVS Health, and many others to discuss the challenges in the system and what we could do collectively to move healthcare forward.

Smriti has shared her thought leadership by speaking at The Adama Carolla show, SXSW, HLTH, and other national forums. She is a health news contributor at Medcity News and is featured on Washington Post, ABC News, Huffington Post, Times of India, The Hindu, VegNews, Medium, and Yahoo News.

Smriti holds her Bachelor of Science in Robotics, Master in Engineering Management from the University of Southern California, and Masters in Public Health from the University of California,Los Angeles, Certified Raw Vegan Chef and Nutritionist, and is currently in Fellowship with the American College of Healthcare Executives.

Shinjini Kundu

Physician-Scientist, Johns Hopkins Hospital, USA

Shinjini Kundu, MD, Ph.D., is a physician and medical researcher at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She is well-known for her work in diagnosing diseases from medical images at a pre-emergent stage where the images do not show human-identifiable abnormalities. By making previously imperceptible patterns recognizable using artificial intelligence, Shinjini's work has been truly transformational. Before her clinical appointment in radiology at Johns Hopkins, she received a PhD in artificial intelligence from Carnegie-Mellon concurrently with an MD from the University of Pittsburgh. Earlier, she obtained her BS and MS in electrical engineering from Stanford University. She is a prolific researcher with publications in top journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature Medicine. Her work has had a regional, national, and international impact. She has given TEDx talks and has been a featured speaker at the World Business Dialogue in Germany. She has also been named to the Forbes 30 under 30 and MIT Technology Review 35 under 35 lists. Shinjini contributed to the emerging digital health policies of the American Medical Association, digital privacy policies at the Observer Research Foundation, and the AI for good forum at the United Nations. Her work stands to accelerate new precision medical diagnostic technologies capable of detecting diseases earlier, with greater accuracy and suggestions for tailored treatments.

Lee Redden

Entrepreneur and Co-Founder, Hands On Robotics, USA

Lee is a visionary technologist and remarkable people leader. His technical genius, loving, positive nature, and intense curiosity propelled him to successfully build a revolutionary company in the agriculture space, Blue River Technologies. They are building robots with cameras that detect every plant and spray just the weeds. Lee has been passionate about bringing this technology to market and its significant impact on improving agriculture on a global scale. Because of the technical decisions Lee helped make early on, this technology can scale across the earth, and it's impressive that he's attained market dominance in this innovative multidisciplinary area seeing this cause through for so long (10+ years). Lee is an active leader in the Forbes 30 under 30 community leading international travel, hosting dinner events, and accelerating this group's mission. Lees has been an active mentor to startups, working with several in the technology and cancer detection space. His philanthropic efforts include advising and donating to a non-profit called Marci, an organization that combats child sex trafficking, and co-founding the non-profit Hands-On Robotics that is developing dog robots for education purposes. Lee has been a speaker at multiple technology and educational conferences, led John Deers' internal training in machine learning of 5,000 employees and over 100 engineers, and has made curriculum recommendations changes to over ten universities in the US.

Aron Schwarzkopf

Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Kushki, USA

Aron is an Ecuadorian-American serial entrepreneur. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kushki, the leading payment infrastructure company in Latin America. Most recently he served as Founder and CEO of Leaf, a financial technology company based in Cambridge, MA. Leaf was purchased in 2014 by Heartland Payment Systems (now Global Payments NYSE: GPN).

Varun Sivaram

Group Senior Vice-President, Strategy, Innovation, Portfolio, Partnerships and M&A, Ørsted, USA

Dr. Varun Sivaram is Senior Vice President and member of the Group Executive Team at Ørsted, a leading renewable energy company with the world’s largest offshore wind energy portfolio, where he leads strategy, innovation, portfolio and capital allocation, and partnerships and M&A. He previously served in the U.S. Biden-Harris administration as the managing director for clean energy and innovation for Secretary John Kerry, the US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, where he spearheaded flagship U.S. initiatives such as the First Movers Coalition. He has also served as Chief Technology Officer of ReNew Power (NASDAQ:RNW), a multibillion-dollar renewable-energy firm that is India's largest; on the faculty of Columbia University and Georgetown University; as director of the energy program at the Council on Foreign Relations; and as senior energy advisor to the Los Angeles Mayor and New York Governor. TIME Magazine named him to its TIME 100 Next list of the next hundred most influential people in the world, and MIT Technology Review named him one of the top 35 innovators under 35. His books include "Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet," "Energizing America: A Roadmap to Launch a National Energy Innovation Mission," and "Digital Decarbonization: Promoting Digital Innovations to Advance Clean Energy Systems." His TED Talk on India's clean energy transition has been viewed more than 1.5 million times. A Rhodes and Truman Scholar, he holds a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Oxford University and undergraduate degrees from Stanford University.

Shelley Stewart

Senior Partner, McKinsey & Company, USA

Shelley Stewart III is a Senior Partner within McKinseys Growth, Marketing and Sales Practice, where he works across the US, Europe and Asia with industrial and technology companies to help them scale their businesses in a global context. Shelley leads the firms research on inclusive economic growth in his role as leader for McKinseys Institute for Black Economic Mobility. In this capacity, he focuses on conducting research related to Black economic development and translates these insights into tools that corporations, philanthropists and governments can use to create meaningful impact for Black individuals and communities. Shelley is on the Board of Directors of the National Black MBA Association, a non-profit supporting 15,000 members with career placement and development. He is also on the Board of the Brooklyn Community Foundation, the first and only public foundation solely dedicated to Brooklyns charitable community. He is a member of the United Justice Coalition, a non-profit working across disciplines to raise awareness around social justice issues, emphasizing the need for criminal justice reform. Shelley has a BA in economics from Boston College, an MBA with a focus on finance from Columbia University, an MPA in political economy from Harvard and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of New Haven.

Lauren Tilstra

Executive Director, Chief Executive Officer Communications and Chief of Staff, Verizon Communications, USA

Lauren Tilstra is a seasoned leadership communications advisor who’s spent her career launching and counseling Fortune 50 c-suite executives across technology and media. She currently serves as Chief of Staff and Executive Director of Strategic Communications to the Chairman and CEO of Verizon. She’s the first in the firm’s 22-year history to serve in both roles simultaneously.

Tilstra is a passionate advocate for digital inclusion and in 2020 she joined Verizon’s Chairman and CEO, Hans Vestberg and Chief Strategy Officer, Rima Qureshi in forming the EDISON Alliance with Professor Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum. In this role, she leads communications for the Alliance and is working daily to connect 1B lives to the promise of the digital world. She also serves on the Board of grassroots organization, Friends for Global Change and Is a founding member of the National Executive Communication Council. Tilstra is a PRWeek 40 under 40 and was named Penn State University’s College of Communications Outstanding Alumni of 2022.

Maureen Trantham

Senior Vice President, Head of Strategy and Social Impact & Philanthropy Operations, Sesame Workshop, USA

Maureen Tranthams diverse background spans media, education policy and business strategy. She currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Global Social Impact & Philanthropy Operations and a member of the Senior Leadership Team at Sesame Workshop. In her role, Maureen is responsible for the overall planning and coordination of strategic and financial results across Sesames global, philanthropically funded social impact efforts including the organizations work supporting displaced children in crisis contexts and children from marginalized communities in the U.S. She also oversees the organizations Compliance and Risk Management capabilities, working closely with teams to navigate the challenges of reaching children in conflict zones. A former international journalist with experience in Thailand and China, she has also led a Washington state education policy and advocacy nonprofit, as well as worked as a management consultant supporting global media and technology companies on a variety of strategic, operations and organizational issues. A committed mentor, particularly to early career professionals, she frequently coaches individuals hoping to transition sectors and contribute to social impact. Maureen holds a BA in Journalism and the Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington and an MBA from the New York University Stern School of Business. She also serves as an active Term Member on the Council on Foreign Relations.

Tiffany Xingyu Wang

Chief Trust and Marketing Officer, OpenWeb, USA

Tiffany Xingyu Wang is an award-winning founder, operator and investor who focuses on building an ethical web3. She leads the way in defining and elevating the industry of digital safety. Identifying the urgent need for industry collaboration on safety initiatives as the social web evolves into the metaverse, Tiffany co-founded Oasis Consortium, a non-profit organization that launched the first comprehensive User Safety Standards for web3.0. She is also currently the Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer of Spectrum Labs, a contextual AI platform created to build a safer internet. Spectrum Labs protects billions of users from harassment, toxicity, and abuse in online communities. As a keynote speaker and expert at the intersection of AI and Trust & Safety, she has been featured and published in TIME, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, Protocol, Digiday, VentureBeat and more. She also sits on the Digital Safety Coalition committee at the World Economic Forum, hosts the Brand Safety Exchange podcast, a destination for digital user safety thought leaders, and created the first-of-its-kind course on Trust and Safety partnering with Linkedin Learning. Tiffany is also an advisor and investor in blockchain and quantum computing companies. She is also a venture partner at Tribe, a Singapore government-backed blockchain accelerator. She holds two USPTO patents in machine learning applications on marketing. Her previous roles span tech and global investing.