Theme: CreaTED

Our goal is to have everybody be more aware of the ideas that individuals have been able to create themselves.

Los Altos High School
201 Almond Avenue
Los Altos, California, 94022
United States

Anooshka Shetty

Since freshman year, Anooshkha has been building awareness among teenagers in the bay area and India about child trafficking. The FBI has identified the San Francisco Bay Area as one of the three regions in the country with the most child trafficking incidents. She hopes to inspire young women and men to take action to fight this issue in their own community.

Ben Rubinstein

Ben is a junior in high school who allows his passion for quirky things to drive his decision making process and pursues his passions to the extreme, whether it means creating a language or building a rocket.

Ben Rubenstein Rubenstein

Student

Ben Rubinstein is a Junior in High school who allows his passion for quirky things to drive his decision-making process and pursues his passions to the extreme, whether it means creating a language or building a rocket.

Brian Weisfeld

Author

Brian Weisfeld has been building businesses his entire life. As a kid, he bought gummy bears and hired his friends to sell them. As a teen, he sorted baseball cards, babysat, and sold mixtapes. As an adult, he helped build well-known, billion-dollar companies including IMAX Corporation and Coupons.com. Brian is the Founder and Chief Squad Officer of The Startup Squad, an initiative dedicated to empowering girls with an entrepreneurial mindset to help them reach their potential, whatever their passions. His first book, The Startup Squad, will be released by Macmillan on May 7, 2019. Brian lives in Silicon Valley with his wife and two daughters.

Charles Atkins

Student

Charles Atkins is a sophomore at Los Altos High School. He is passionate about the humanities, especially philosophy, which he believes can teach us what it means to be human and how we can best live. He has his own blog, Neologikon, where he writes about his interests, in hopes of inspiring others to ask questions and think for themselves. Charles also runs for the Los Altos track and field varsity team.

Elise Nguyen

Student

Elise Nguyen is a senior at Los Altos High School. She’s the embodiment of a typical teenager - she loves dogs, shopping, and traveling. She hates homework and waking up early. She’s also Malaysian born, a former figure skater, a daydreamer, and a 17-year-old girl, but above all, she’s a human being. After losing somebody close to her, she wants to reach out to her community and address something that every human will experience - grief and heartbreak - and tell others what we can do for ourselves and for others when bad things happen.

Isaiah Swift

Entrepreneur

Isaiah Swift was born and raised in Norfolk, VA and graduated from Maury High School as an AP Scholar with distinction. During his senior year, He was dual enrolled at Tidewater Community College, where He received six transferrable credits towards His degree. At Maury High School, Isaiah was the Branch Manager of Commodore Branch, a subsidiary of Port Alliance Credit Union, and He was a member of Future Business Leaders of America. Recently, Isaiah published a book called “Unlock Your Greatness” 8 Ways to be Successful in High School and Beyond.

Jerry Behar

CEO

Jerry Behar co-founded in 2018 and is the Chairman of Grand River Solutions which provides Title IX and Clery (safety) compliance and reporting solutions and services to colleges and universities. Jerry is the founder and CEO of Nissim Capital and is on the board of directors of Click Diagnostics. Jerry was previously the founding CEO and visionary of Workiva (NYSE: WK), and was managing director through March 2013. Workiva created Wdesk, a cloud-based platform for enterprises to collect, manage, report and analyze business data in real time. Wdesk includes a sophisticated productivity suite for business data collaboration and reporting that is used by thousands of corporations, including more than 75% of the Fortune 500.

Jill Asher

Founder

Jill Asher is part of the founding team of Magical Bridge Playground in Palo Alto and co-founder of Magical Bridge Foundation. A seasoned public relations and marketing executive, Jill left a successful high tech career to run the Magical Bridge Foundation and lead administration, community engagement, development, public relations and marketing. Jill actively engages with communities to promote inclusive play and kindness through a full spectrum of communications and fundraising programs. She is instrumental in promoting the values and principles of Magical Bridge to the media and the global community. She holds degrees in Economics and English from Rutgers University.

Kayley Gould

Student

Kayley Gould is a senior at Los Altos High School. She enjoys swimming, baking, and warm weather. Kayley loves volunteering, and with more experience, has become interested in the white savior complex. She has been researching the topic with an emphasis on orphanage tourism for her Senior Project since November. She hopes to share with you what she has learned about the different aspects of the complex, as well as what she thinks we as high schoolers can do to address the negative effects of voluntourism.

Noah Tesfaye

Student

Noah Tesfaye is a senior at Los Altos and web managing editor for the Talon. He is extremely passionate about politics and constitutional law, and he hopes to major in political science in college. In his free time, he enjoys reading the news, listening to podcasts on criminal justice, and eating great food with friends. His favorite books he’s recently read are Just Mercy by Brian Stevenson and If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin.

Paul Thiebaut III

Entrepreneur

Paul Thiebaut III is a human potential educator, scientist, and entrepreneur whose work for the past 15 years has focused on leveraging interest and intrinsic motivation to enhance student learning, performance, achievement, and well-being. Thiebaut has worked with students of all types, including special and general needs, English-learners, and preschool to PhD level. Thiebaut’s achievements include overcoming poverty by discovering his own interests and motivations, inventing the educational approach, Thiebaut Method, founding Thiebaut Method Tutoring in 2007, and founding the early education tutoring nonprofit, 10 Books A Home, in 2009. Thiebaut has a B.A. in economics and minor in business from SJSU. Thiebaut’s vision is to redesign education to cultivate interest and intrinsic motivation.

Richa Krishna

Student

Richa Krishna is currently a senior at Los Altos High School. She began ballet at age 4, which developed into an intense appreciation for the art form through her pre-professional training. Richa has gotten very involved in making, entrepreneurship, and design thinking in recent years and is currently working on developing her business, Pulse Wearables, looking to study product design in college.

Zack Bodner

CEO

Zack Bodner joined the OFJCC as the CEO in August of 2013. Under Zack’s leadership, the JCC completed construction of the campus, transforming it into a community-gathering space where it is filled with people of all ages and backgrounds at all hours of the day. Before joining the JCC, Zack served for 14 years as the Pacific Northwest Regional Director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), where he oversaw a period of unprecedented growth in community outreach, political advocacy and fundraising. Zack is an accomplished speaker and writes for publications throughout the U.S. and Israel. Zack holds degrees from Yale and Claremont Graduate University. He has also completed Stanford Business School’s program for Executives in Non-Profit Leadership.