Patrick Choquette – Acting Director of Innovation, Peace Corps
As the head of the Office of Innovation, Mr. Choquette works with senior staff at Peace Corps to implement President Obama’s vision of a more open, participatory and modern federal government. His office focuses on crowdsourcing, use of mobile technology, and involving more of the public in the mission of the Peace Corps. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana from 2005-2007 teaching Physics, Chemistry and Biology at a rural high school.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Kurtis Heimerl – UC Berkeley PhD Candidate
Kurtis Heimerl is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley working under Eric Brewer in EECS and Tapan Parikh in the iSchool. His work focuses primarily on cellular systems and their intersection with international development. He is interested in Education, having worked on the Metamouse group learning program, Crowdsourcing, winning Best Paper at CHI for work on Kiosk-based crowdsourcing systems, and of course cellular systems for rural areas, winning the Community award at NSDI. He will be graduating in the winter and is very excited about the future of rural connectivity. 

Elisa Oreglia – UC Berkeley PhD Candidate
Elisa Oreglia studies how people in emerging regions ‘invent’ themselves as users of new media, with a particular focus on rural China.

Dave Rolnitzky – Cofounder, MobileWorks
Dave is cofounder of MobileWorks, a Y Combinator-backed virtual staffing company with roots in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. He leads the product team in creating meaningful experience through design, and oversees the MobileWorks product development and brand. Prior to founding MobileWorks, he worked at Mozilla where he led user acquisition strategy and product marketing initiatives for Firefox. He holds a Master’s degree from the UC Berkeley School of Information.