Katherine Mead

Katherine has spent her career since college navigating uncertainty, driven by a belief in every student's potential. What has stayed with her is a mission orientation and the relationships built along the way.

In college she 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. She then moved to Nashville to teach the founding class of Valor Collegiate Academies their first year of chemistry. The classroom is where she 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.”

She went on to earn a 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 she returned to Nashville and joined NTT DATA as a data and AI consultant, where her team won Microsoft's global partner hackathon and she built data and AI solutions for enterprise clients.

Today she leads Planning Partner, which builds AI lesson planning for teachers and custom data and AI tools for schools.