Harshil Parikh
Harshil is the Co-Founder and CEO of TuvaLabs, a startup on a mission to make open data more useful for teaching and learning by offering teachers, students, and parents a platform to analyse, visualize, and interpret data around issues that are relevant to their communities and interests. TuvaLabs believes that analyzing data, spotting patterns, and extracting useful information have become gateway skills for future STEM jobs, full participation in the workforce, and civic engagement in the 21st century. Harshil has been obsessed with the simple idea of learning from events unfolding around us since serving as a tutor in high school. He launched TuvaLabs out of a coffee shop in New Delhi after spending six months learning how to program while he was teaching economically disadvantaged students in a large slum in South Delhi. He received an undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Masters in Financial Mathematics from North Carolina State University. Immediately prior to starting TuvaLabs, Harshil spent seventeen months in India helping Greenlight Planet, a venture-backed clean energy company, with their solar lantern distribution in rural India. He also helped Arpana, a New Delhi-based NGO, plan a first-of-its-kind learning center in the mountains of Himachal Pradesh.