Team
Clean Air Capitals is an initiative of the Inspired Air Fund, a program at Renaissance Philanthropy.
David Carel co-founded Panorama Education, a Y Combinator-backed analytics company now serving nearly a quarter of U.S. K-12 schools across all 50 states, and subsequently helped build Funda Wande in South Africa, an early literacy initiative reaching hundreds of thousands of children in partnership with the national government. He was Managing Director at Blueprint Biosecurity, and holds degrees from Yale and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
Julie Horowitz has spent more than 15 years advising philanthropic leaders on cross-sector initiatives. She led the strategy and launch of the Ford Foundation’s Global Fellowship, a $50M award program on inequality, and later designed a national competition for the Andrew Carnegie Foundation focused on educational pathways. Earlier in her career, she held leadership roles in large school districts, nonprofits, and for-profit organizations. She holds an MBA from the Yale School of Management.
Dr. Georgia Lagoudas is a Senior Fellow at Brown University’s Pandemic Center, where she leads the Clean Indoor Air Initiative. She is also the founding leader of Air Club, a global coalition of champions of clean indoor air. She previously served as Senior Advisor at the White House, where she launched an initiative to improve indoor air quality as part of the national pandemic response. She holds a PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT.
Liesl McConchie is an international expert on how the brain learns and the conditions it needs to learn at its best. She is the author of Building a Positive Math Identity and co-author of the best-selling Brain-Based Learning with Dr. Eric Jensen. With over 25 years in education, she combines cognitive neuroscience with classroom experience across K-12 to help schools understand how indoor air quality affects cognition, attendance, and student and teacher health.
Johanna Partin ran renewable energy programs at San Francisco’s Department of the Environment, then served as Senior Policy Advisor on Environment to Mayors Gavin Newsom and Edwin Lee. She later directed C40’s North American work and founded the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance. She has consulted on the design and execution of city climate and energy work in North America and internationally. She holds a master’s degree in Energy and Environmental Policy from the University of Delaware.
Katherine Pippert has worked in K-12 education across several districts and served as a managing director at New Leaders, which prepares school leaders to lead high-need schools. She has built large-scale selection and human capital initiatives across the New York City school system and for the Ford Foundation’s Global Fellowship, and has designed prizes and competitions for education departments and major foundations, including the Andrew Carnegie Foundation. She holds an M.Ed. from Fordham University.
LaVerne Srinivasan led education grantmaking at the Andrew Carnegie Foundation (formerly, Carnegie Corp. of NY) for eleven years, most recently as Vice President of the National Program. As Deputy Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, she redesigned how the city recruits, hires, and places teachers and principals, a model since replicated nationwide, and she later served as president of New Leaders. She chairs the board of Educational Testing Service and holds a law degree from Harvard Law School.
President, Renaissance Philanthropy
Sternberg Family Professor at the City College of New York and former New York City Health Commissioner
Director of the Healthy Buildings Program, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
CEO and President, Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America
S J Archuleta Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder
Dean of the College of Engineering, University of California, Davis
To learn more about Clean Air Capitals and the 2027 Cohort, write to us at [email protected].
