Katherine Mead

I've spent my career since college navigating uncertainty, driven by my belief in all students' potential. What has stayed with me is my mission orientation and the relationships I've made along the way.

In college I recruited for Teach For America, working with a team that made the University of Virginia the top contributor of corps members on the East Coast. I then moved to Nashville to teach the founding class of Valor Collegiate Academies their first year of chemistry. The classroom is where I became passionate about building data tools that help students understand exactly why they got the grades they got, rather than walking away believing they “aren't good at chemistry.”

I went on to earn my master's in data science at Georgetown while continuing to work for Valor remotely: first as executive assistant to the Chief of Schools, then as Special Projects Manager reporting to the Chief Academic Officer, building data tools and infrastructure across the network.

After graduate school I returned to Nashville and joined NTT DATA as a data and AI consultant, where my team won Microsoft's global partner hackathon and I built data and AI solutions for enterprise clients.

Today I run Planning Partner full time, alongside a small number of bespoke data and AI consulting projects for schools.