I love how Salman Rushdie puts it: to understand a life you need to swallow the world. A multitude of things have brought me to where I am today. I grew up as a child of two immigrants, moving around Canada and the US as our family found its footing. Questions about assimilation, socioeconomic mobility, and how identity shapes access to opportunities left an imprint on me pretty early in my life.

I started off in the chemistry lab- fascinated by how interactions in our brain – say the blocking of an enzyme – could have profound implications on sense of self, agency, and action. I took these aspirations to university, where I began to pursue an interest in understanding and influencing brain chemistry. But other experiences kept rubbing against this – including a collaboration with a community organizations in Harlem and reading about contexts of inequity in the US and across the world – pushed me to shift my focus to trying to understand, and hopefully shape some of those structures.

This interest took me from a Public Defenders Office in the Bronx to Egypt where I worked on higher education reform issues during the Arab Spring. After a military coup in 2013, I spent a year in DC researching political reform issues from a comparative lens – with the aim of bringing different discourses of reform into contact with one another (cutting across regional, disciplinary, and thematic boundaries).

I shifted my focus again in late 2014 to join the founding team of a startup pan-African university that aimed to create a network of tertiary institutions across Africa. The principle goal of our work was to support young, talented Africans through intentional leadership development, an emphasis on project based, constructivist learning, and exposure to peers and mentors from across the continent and the world. Because of a lack of public investment in higher ed, we elected to go a for-profit route, raising money from mainly US and European investors. While this fueled our growth across Mauritius, Rwanda, Kenya, and South Africa, it also created a tension – pressure to scale and expand, even with patient capital, in the face of fine tuning and refining our learning environment.

I joined the Media Lab this year to take a step back from the hustle of building an institution – to explore in greater depth how people learn – and how we can democratize the means for creation so that more young people can become creators, not consumers – of not just technology, but the systems and environments we’re immersed in.