Sydney Apple
Director of Foundation and Nonprofit Work, Protagonist
Sydney Apple is the Director of Foundation and Nonprofit work at Protagonist. Sydney specializes in Narrative Analytics and research design, with an expertise in using data to understand complex problems. In her six years at Protagonist, she has worked on dozens of projects across the Foundation and Nonprofit sector, specializing in analyzing narrative content through the lenses of racial justice, gender justice, and collective power across a variety of social issues. Sydney holds a BA, magna cum laude, in Economics and a minor in International Conflict and Cooperation from Boston College, where she was a Gabelli Presidential Scholar. Sydney also studied Spanish at the Granada Institute of International Studies in Spain and Arabic (MSA, Levantine) at the Sijal Institute in Amman, Jordan.
Justin Arenstein
Founder and CEO, Code for Africa
Justin Arenstein is the founding CEO of Code for Africa—the continent’s largest civic technology network—and the co-CEO of ICFJ+—a new organization created by ICFJ and CfA that will provide unique and innovative services worldwide for journalists and the broader civic information ecosystem.
Beginning as an anti-corruption investigative journalist in South Africa, Arenstein launched the nation’s first rural social justice wire-service, African Eye News Service (AENS), before helping pioneer the region’s first rural lifestyle magazine publisher (HomeGrown Magazines) and Mpumalanga’s first commercial radio station (MPowerFM). He is a former ICFJ Knight Fellow—who grew CfA through his fellowship—and a former Knight Fellow at Stanford University, where he explored data journalism, augmented reality/metaverse, and civic engagement media.
Outside of CfA work, Arenstein serves on a range of advisory boards for organizations ranging from the Partnership for AI and the World Bank/IFC, to WEF’s Global Futures Council on Information Integrity, the global Code for All civic technology association and FT Futures NextGen media strategy team, on issues from data-driven investigative journalism to digital democracy strategies in Africa.
Maritza L. Félix
Founder and Director, Conecta Arizona
Maritza is an award-winning freelance journalist, producer, and writer in Arizona. She is the founder of Conecta Arizona, a Spanish-language news service that connects people in Arizona and Sonora primarily through WhatsApp and social media. She is the creator of Cruzando Líneas, a podcast of new border narratives. She is co-producer and co-host of Comadres al Aire.
In 2022, Maritza was named Innovator of the Year by the Local Media Association and received the 2022 Cecilia Vaisman Award for Best Hispanic Multimedia Journalist from Northwestern University and NAHJ.
She is a senior fellow in the JSK Community Impact Fellowship program at Stanford and a graduate of the Executive Program in News Innovation and Leadership in Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She is also a fellow of The Carter Center, the Education Writers Association (EWA), Feet in 2 Worlds (Fi2w), IWMF’s “Adelante” and Listening Post Collective; she is part of Take The Lead’s 50 Women Who Can Change the World of Journalism 2020. Felix has twice been named “Arizona’s Best Spanish Language Journalist” and one of the “40 Hispanic Personalities Under 40 in Arizona.”
Nancy Gibbs
Director, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School
Jesse Hardman
Founder and Director, Listening Post Collective
Flora Lichtman
Host, Science Friday
Flora Lichtman is host of Science Friday, a science show broadcast on over 500 public radio stations, and on all podcast platforms. Previously, Flora created and hosted Gimlet’s Every Little Thing, a listener call-in podcast that ran for 200 episodes, averaging a million monthly downloads. She was nominated for an Emmy for her writing on Netflix’s Bill Nye Saves the World, and again for the New York Times Op-Doc video series she co-directed, Animated Life. She got her start as a researcher at a NATO oceanographic lab in Italy, where she sailed around the Mediterranean looking for whales. (A good gig.)
Julia Minson
Associate Professor, Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Julia Minson is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She is a decision scientist with research interests in conflict management, negotiations, and judgment and decision making. Her main line of research addresses the “psychology of disagreement” – How do people engage with opinions, values, and judgments that conflict with their own?
Her work examines disagreements around hot-button, identity-relevant topics — conflicts around politics, values, and professional, and health decision-making. She is interested in simple, scalable interventions to help people become more receptive to the opposing views of others.
Minson also studies group decision-making to uncover the psychological biases that prevent managers, consumers, and policy-makers from maximizing the benefits of collaboration. This includes research on the under-weighting of advice, “wisdom of crowds,” and overconfidence.
Much of Julia’s research is conducted in collaboration with the graduate and post-doctoral members of Constructive Disagreement Lab (CDL). Julia is also the founder of the Constructive Disagreement Project — a project dedicated to disseminating cutting edge research and developing interventions for professionals in government, education, healthcare, and the media.
Ashwath Narayanan
Co-founder and CEO, Social Currant
Ashwath Narayanan is the Co-founder & CEO at Social Currant, a DC based managed service and platform that matches social impact organizations and nonprofits with the influencers and content creators across social media platforms. He founded Social Currant while a student at The George Washington University and continues to manage the firm & platform after graduating in May 2022. He can be reached at ashwath@socialcurrant.co.
Andy Norman
Executive Director, CIRCE – The Cognitive Immunology Research Collaborative
Andy Norman is a cognitive scientist, award-winning author, and Research Associate at Carnegie Mellon University. He studies the evolutionary origins of human reasoning, the norms that make dialogue fruitful, and the nature of responsible thinking about what matters. He writes for national magazines like Free Inquiry, Skeptic, and The Humanist, and is frequently asked to speak on topics related to science and human values. In his book Mental Immunity, he develops the conceptual foundations of cognitive immunology—the emerging science of immunity to misinformation. Andy is the Executive Director of the Cognitive Immunology Research Collaborative (CIRCE) and the Chief Catalyst of the Mental Immunity Project, an ambitious attempt to protect everyone from information manipulation.
Rita Parhad
President, Protagonist
Rita Parhad, Ph.D., is President of Protagonist, overseeing their work with nonprofit and foundation clients. She has over twenty years of professional experience in the private and non-profit sectors, government, and academic research. At Protagonist, Rita has led dozens of Narrative Analytics projects across many issue areas, including higher education, reproductive rights, racial equity, criminal justice reform, climate change, health equity, and the social safety net. Current work focuses on strategy development for narrative power-building and advancing narrative change. Rita holds a BA, magna cum laude, in Government and International Studies from the University of Notre Dame, an MPA in Public and International Policy from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and a PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley, with specialization in international relations, comparative politics, and social science research methodology.
Janai Raphael
Strategy Officer for Access, Lumina Foundation
Janai Raphael is the Strategy Officer for Access at Lumina Foundation where her work focuses on increasing enrollment and re-enrollment in bachelor’s degree programs. Janai has spent most of her career guiding underserved students to and through college and has worked with organizations like the College Advising Corps, National College Attainment Network, District of Columbia Public Schools, and Achieve Atlanta, where she managed Georgia’s largest need-based aid program. She holds a BS from the University of Georgia and an MA in Higher Education from the University of Maryland, College Park.