Jennifer Morton
Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania
Jennifer Morton is Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research, which spans ethics, political and moral philosophy, and the philosophy of education, has been featured in The Atlantic, Inside Higher Education, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, New York Daily News, Times Higher Education, Princeton Alumni Weekly, Public Books, and Vox. Her book, Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility, was awarded the Frederic W. Ness Book Award by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and was chosen as the Princeton Pre-Read for the Class of 2025. Jennifer also received the 2023 Grawemeyer Award for her work on the ethical sacrifices made by first-generation and low-income university students. She tweets at @jennifermmorton.
Bonnie Mangold
Financial Advisor at Northwestern Mutual
Bonnie Mangold is a financial advisor with a nationwide financial planning practice. She attended Colby College, and after studying law at William & Mary, Bonnie was a financial services litigator at a global law firm. Building upon her experience in law, Bonnie specializes in providing personalized, strategic advice to help clients identify and avoid potential obstacles that may exist on the path to achieving their financial goals. In her financial advising practice, Bonnie provides comprehensive financial planning services in which she creatively leverages a variety of financial products and services to proactively address each client’s individualized insurance, investing, savings, tax-efficient strategies, education planning, and retirement planning needs. By utilizing a goal-based approach to financial planning, Bonnie ensures that her clients’ intentions have been understood and their needs are being addressed head-on.
As an expert in her field, Bonnie is regularly invited to speak about the various aspects of financial planning. She educates groups across the country on fundamental financial planning topics, including saving for big financial goals, investing, retirement planning, managing student debt, and more. Bonnie’s writing has been published by SheMD, a blog for women physicians. Her article is titled, “The Resident Starter Pack: 3 Critical Pieces of Financial Planning for Resident Physicians.” Finally, in addition to her personal practice, Bonnie is the co-founder of Continuum University, a training academy for new financial advisors. Bonnie lives in Chicago, IL with her husband and 1-year old daughter.
Yanely Espinal
Director of Educational Outreach at Next Gen Personal Finance
Yanely Espinal was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and is one of the first in her family to graduate from college. After two decades of school, she still can’t believe that she never had a class about making smart money decisions! Now, she’s on a mission to help young people learn about personal finance in a fun and engaging way.
After completing Teach For America, Yanely paired her love for teaching with her passion for financial literacy, creating a unique YouTube channel with over 4 million views on tutorials about budgeting, managing credit, saving, investing in the stock market, and more!
Yanely serves as the Director of Educational Outreach at Next Gen Personal Finance and is a member of CNBC’s Financial Wellness Advisory Council.
Emma Dinh
QuestBridge Alum, Yale '18
Emma Dinh is a product manager at Capital One in New York City. A first-generation immigrant and first-generation college student, she graduated from Yale and started out her career in finance at Goldman Sachs before transitioning to product. Emma grew up in Vietnam and moved to the U.S. with her family when she was 13. With her passion for writing and storytelling as a means to share, empower, and empathize, she founded the Straddler Collective, a storytelling platform dedicated to the adolescent immigrant experience. A deeply curious person and a lifelong learner, Emma loves to explore, travel, ask questions, and try out new experiences. In her spare time, she enjoys writing, spending time outdoors, and cooking new recipes.
Saxon Bryant
QuestBridge Alum, Penn '21
Saxon Bryant attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania as a National College Match Finalist. After helping found Phi Chi Theta business fraternity, he graduated in 2021 with degrees in Economics and Political Science. Saxon then spent a year in Taiwan as a Fulbright debate coach, teaching American style debate in high schools around the island. Additionally Saxon was accepted into Harvard Law’s Junior Deferral Program and is excited to pursue a legal education in a few years. Until then, Saxon works as a business analyst at McKinsey & Company in Washington, DC. After work Saxon spends most of his time enjoying hiking, rugby, video games, and anime.
Frank Teng
QuestBridge Alum, Yale '14
Frank Teng went to Yale and is currently a Senior UX Designer for the Mayo Clinic. But more importantly, he believes in a life of reflective self-improvement by stepping outside comfort zones. Since he was 19, he has backpacked around the world with $5000, solo-trekked the Himalayas, interned at NASA, and is looking forward to taking wilderness survival courses. Above all, Frank is grateful for how QuestBridge literally changed his life. Raised in a low-income home by a single mother who spoke little English, Frank could not have had such amazing life experiences if not for QuestBridge.
Chandra Marshall
QuestBridge Alum, Scripps '16
Chandra Marshall is currently a Program Associate at the Mellon Foundation in New York City where she manages grants to libraries, archives and publishers, with expressed interest in supporting libraries and archives for Black communities and tribal nations. She previously attended Brown University where she received a Masters in Public Humanities and held a fellowship at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, she received a bachelor’s degree in History and Politics from Scripps College in 2016. Outside of work, she enjoys going to art exhibitions, taking long hiking trips, and biking. She is grateful for the ways QuestBridge changed the trajectory of her life.
Nicholas Casey
Quest Leadership Alum
National Politics Reporter, New York Times
Nicholas Casey is a staff writer for The New York Times whose wanderings have taken him from Easter Island to the Gaza Strip. This year he is working as a political correspondent for the newspaper writing long narratives about the difficult decisions Americans face under President Trump and Covid-19. Before 2020, Nicholas worked as a foreign correspondent in Mexico, Israel, Venezuela and Colombia, spending eight years at The Wall Street Journal. He attended the Quest Scholars Program in 2000. He graduated from Stanford in 2005 with a degree in anthropology – a field whose adventures abroad would eventually lead him to become a foreign correspondent.
Ashanti Branch
Founder & Executive Director, The Ever Forward Club
Ashanti Branch, raised by a single mother on welfare in Oakland, went on to study engineering at California Polytechnic – San Luis Obispo. A Civil Engineer in his first career, Ashanti found his passion for teaching while tutoring struggling students. In 2004, as a first-year teacher, Ashanti started The Ever Forward Club to provide a support group for African American and Latino males, who were not achieving to the level of their potential. The Ever Forward Club has helped 100% of its members graduate high school. Branch is on a mission to change the way that students interact with their education and the way schools interact with students.
After being featured in The Mask You Live In the documentary, and Fellowships at the Stanford d.school, Campaign for Black Male Achievement, and The Gratitude Network, Ashanti and The Ever Forward Club has launched the #MillionMaskMovement to collect 1 Million masks from people all over the world in a self-reflective experience that helps people visualize and realize, “I am not alone.”
Amy Elizabeth Paulson
Co-Founder & CEO, Gratitude Alliance
Amy Elizabeth Paulson is a mental health advocate, writer, speaker, facilitator, trauma survivor, and the co-founder and CEO of Gratitude Alliance, a non-profit that works at the intersection of healing and social justice – helping to break generational cycles of trauma and harm, build individual and collective resilience, and democratize access to mental health resources in the Bay Area, Asia, and Africa. As an orphan and survivor of gender-based child abandonment, Amy is passionate about de-stigmatizing and de-pathologizing trauma as a mental health issue, and advocates for survivor-centered, community-led approaches to trauma-informed, healing-centered
care.
Based in Oakland, California, Amy left a corporate finance career in 2011 to co-found Gratitude Alliance after working for over a decade in the U.S. and Europe for Deloitte, SAP, and eBay. She holds a MS in Nonprofit Management with a concentration in Global Studies from Northeastern University, certifications in Trauma-Informed Interventions (UC Berkeley) and Global Mental Health (Harvard Medical School), and is a facilitator for Stanford GSB’s legendary Interpersonal Dynamics Course.
Amy’s #MeToo story was published in The Anatomy of Silence: 26 Stories About All The Sh*t That Gets In The Way Of Speaking About Sexual Violence. Her memoir, The Wound Myth (working title) chronicles her journey as a survivor of generational, gender based violence, child sexual abuse, and transnational adoption – through the lens of trauma – and explores what it means to embrace gratitude as a powerful catalyst for transformation, from the inside out.
Isabel Cesanto Safie
QuestBridge Board of Directors, Quest Leadership Alum
Partner, Best Best & Krieger LLP
Isabel Safie is an attorney and equity partner in the Employee Benefits Practice Group of Best Best & Krieger LLP. She works with public and private sector clients on the design, interpretation and operation of employee benefit programs and issues related to those programs, including pension and health benefits. Isabel graduated from UCLA School of Law in 2005 and received her bachelor’s degree in Political Science with a minor in Human Biology from Stanford University in 2002. She is an alumna of Stanford Youth Environmental Science Program, the predecessor to Quest Scholars, Inc. Isabel has been involved with Quest Scholars, Inc. in various forms over more than two decades, including as a member of the Board of Directors. She’s married to her high school sweetheart (Omar) and has three children: Mateo Ali (12), Gabriel Esmael (10) and Olivia Nazanin (4). She enjoys cooking, running/cycling and hiking.
Omar Safie
Director of Evaluation & Assessment, University of California, Riverside
Omar Safie, Ph.D. is the Director of Evaluation and Assessment at the University of California, Riverside where he guides programs on using the assessment process for continuous improvement. His approach is based on nearly 15 years of experience in assessment and evaluation in K-12 and higher education where he utilized mixed-methods, including observational methodology to evaluate schools and school programs. He strongly believes that such a triangulated approach allows for more voices to be heard, leading to a fuller picture of a program’s strengths and areas for growth. Omar Safie received his B.S. in Environmental Science from the University of California, Riverside, his M.A. from California State University, San Bernardino, and his Ph.D. from the Claremont Graduate University. His dissertation focused on identifying the factors that contribute to effective schools in high crime, high poverty, and high minority communities.
Mike Murillo
Quest Leadership Alum
Principal Mechanical Engineer, Carbon
Mike is a QuestLeadership scholar from 1996 (back when it was called SYESP). It was the major catalyst to his attendance at Stanford University, from where he graduated in 2001 with a degree in Product Design. Mike has worked over a dozen different jobs since then but settled on a career in Mechanical Engineering. He now leads the mechanical engineering team at Carbon, a company specializing in 3D printing in Redwood City.
Erin Schutte Wadzinski
QuestBridge Alum, Yale '12
Attorney, Kivu Immigration Law PLLC
Erin is an immigration attorney and a 2007 QuestBridge College Prep Scholar. In 2019, Erin won the Initiators Fellowship to launch Kivu Immigration Law as a social enterprise to provide immigrants access to legal resources. Erin previously worked as a staff attorney at Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota and as the Director of the Yale Young Global Scholars Program. She earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from Yale University and her JD from the University of Connecticut School of Law.
Linnea Paseiro
QuestBridge Alum, Princeton '14
Alumni Relations Manager, Girls Who Invest
Originally from Northern Arizona, Linnea has worn a number of hats since graduating from Princeton with a degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures in 2014. She has taught writing to business students at a university in Kazakhstan, recruited students for State Department scholarships in Ukraine, engaged in public health advocacy in Vietnam, and worked in Talent Development at a quantitative hedge fund in New York City. Currently, Linnea works as the Alumni Relations Manager at Girls Who Invest, where she gets to support and encourage young women as they strive towards their career goals and gender parity in the finance industry. Outside of work, Linnea is an avid traveler, especially if there are foreign weddings involved. She is also actively engaged with the Princeton Alumni Schools Committee, the QuestBridge Alumni Association, and the Princeton in Asia Alumni Network.
Natalia Delery
QuestBridge Alum, UChicago '17
Admissions Ambassador, Columbia University School of Social Work
Natalia Delery (she/her/hers) is a Licensed Master Social Worker and Queens native, currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. She is a proud first-generation college graduate and QuestBridge alum, and was a member of the UChicago QSN board for all 4 years. You may have seen or attended her “Designing Your Life” workshop or QSN Leaders affinity group at QB25!
After receiving her B.A. in Human Development from the University of Chicago in 2017, Natalia served as a College Advising Corps Member and Postsecondary Coach on the Southside of Chicago, helping students apply to their dream schools. To further build on her passions for social impact and innovation, she later pursued her M.S. in Social Work with a specialization in Social Enterprise Administration at Columbia University, and recently graduated during the pandemic. She has a diverse range of work experience, from doing school social work for the NYC Department of Education’s Pathways to Graduation program, to shaping programming for the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and most recently was a Public-Private Partnerships Fellow at NYC Service, a division of the Mayor’s Office. In both her professional and personal life, Natalia is committed to uplifting individual voices and stories, advocating for marginalized communities, promoting educational opportunities for youth of color, and fighting for racial and economic justice. In her free time, she dances, writes poetry, and practices her guitar.
Maria Taha
QuestBridge Alum, Wellesley '12
Assistant Program Manager, The Diverse Future
Maria is a QB alumni with roots in Ethiopia and Minnesota. She attended Wellesley College and majored in Peace & Justice Studies. After graduating college in 2014, Maria went on to become a Princeton in Asia fellow where she taught at a university on a tropical island in Malaysia. She then moved from the tropics back to the Northeast to pursue a master’s degree in International Education Development at Teachers College, Columbia University. Maria has worked in international development, improving education accessibility and gender parity in Asia and Africa, and most recently at a mentoring program designed to help professionals of color break through the glass ceiling and help shape American national news through a more multicultural lens.