UberMENTOR: one ride, endless opportunity

Larry Edelman oversees coverage of local, regional, and business news. He was editor of the Business section from May 2015 to May 2017. Before that he was a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News. A graduate of Cornell University, he first worked at the Globe from 1989 to 1999, including five years as business editor. He lives in Dorchester.

Meghan Verena Joyce is the Regional General Manager of Uber’s US & Canada city operations. Her responsibilities include overseeing business outcomes as well as rider and driver experience in 244 Uber markets across the US and Canada. Meghan supervises a team of over 450 operations and marketing professionals and has been a leading voice in Uber’s culture turnaround efforts. Meghan joined Uber in 2013 as the General Manager of the Boston market, where she oversaw unprecedented growth of the market and expanded coverage throughout New England. During her tenure, she launched Uber in Rhode Island, Cape Cod, and Western Massachusetts. She later served as Regional General Manager of the East Coast, and spearheaded a global effort to scale Uber’s carpooling option, uberPOOL, by coordinating product and operational teams. Prior to Uber, Meghan worked at the US Treasury on the financial crisis response team, Bain Capital, and Bain & Company. Meghan is a member of the Robert S. Brookings Society at the Brookings Institution and the Executive Advisory Council of WBUR, Boston's NPR news station. She received her Bachelor of Arts in the History of Science from Harvard College and her MBA at Harvard Business School.

Anne Morriss has spent the last twenty years building high-performance teams with a focus on launching and scaling mission-driven enterprises. She is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at GenePeeks, a computational genomics company that addresses the urgent need for better personal health information. Anne founded the company after her son was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease.

Anne is driven by an infectious commitment to help people realize their full potential as leaders and change-makers.  She started her career in rural Latin America, where she worked to support the development of local leaders in remote communities. She has worked with social entrepreneurs, companies and governments throughout the United States and Latin America on strategy, leadership, and institutional change. Her clients and collaborators have ranged from early-stage tech founders to Fortune 50 executives to public-sector leaders working to build national competitiveness.

Anne received her BA in American Studies from Brown University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She served as a senior advisor with the OTF Group, founded the Concire Leadership Institute, and is the best-selling co-author of Uncommon Service: How to Win By Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business (Harvard Business Review Press).

Anne has appeared on 60 Minutes and CBS This Morning to discuss GenePeeks and its mission to protect future generations from disease. She is regularly invited to write and speak on the intersection of leadership, technology and innovation.

Panos is the Vice President for Innovation and Strategy at Berklee College of Music, the Managing Director of the Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (BerkleeICE) and a passionate entrepreneur, educator and startup mentor. 

As the founder of Sonicbids, he created the leading platform for emerging artists to connect with music promoters, resulting in over 1 million gigs booked in over 80 countries around the world . He led the company as CEO for 13 years, from its inception until after its successful acquisition in a deal backed by Guggenheim Partners.

Panos is also the co-founder of the Open Music Initiative, which has brought together over 170 leading music, media, technology industry organizations and academic institutions to create an open protocol for uniform identification of musical rights owners and creators.

At Berklee, his work and approach to entrepreneurial and innovation pedagogy builds heavily on the concepts of music thinking as a catalyst for innovation and creative breakthroughs in business, life and art; and has spearheaded multi-disciplinary collaborations between Berklee and MIT Media Lab; the design firm IDEO; and Brown University. 

Awards include: Fast Company's "Fast 50" honor; Inc Magazine's "Inc 500”; Mass Hi-Tech All Stars; Berklee College’s Distinguished Alumnus Award; and Boston Business Journal’s “40 under 40”, BostInno's 50 on Fire and Boston Globe's 2017 Game Changers. Sonicbids and Panos were also profiled in a chapter in the Financial Times-published book "Outsmart" by best-selling author Jim Champy.

He writes frequently about startups and entrepreneurship for blogs and publications such as Forbes, WSJ Accelerators and Fast Company; and guest lectures and speaks at many universities and events around the world.

Passion point: reaffirming the value of contemporary music education in a fast-paced, globalized technology driven world.

A visionary leader with intuitive business insight and foresight, Latson Gittens has succeeded in building causemedia, Inc. recently rebranded as MORE Advertising, into a boutique advertising agency with a unique mission. Since 1997, her company has designed public awareness campaigns to influence attitudes and change behaviors on topics such as smoking, substance abuse, HIV prevention and diversity in the workplace along with advertising campaigns promoting, higher education, healthcare, and professional services.  

Gittens launched the company following a ground-breaking, twenty-year career as a corporate executive at WCVB-TV (Boston’s ABC affiliate) an innovator in community programming.  While there, she developed and managed nationally-syndicated public service campaigns and strategies to expand local programming into defined growth markets. Gittens' television work won numerous local and national awards, including a Gabriel for "Success By 6", a United Way campaign promoting children's well-being which was syndicated to sixty television markets.  Both the Gabriel and Emmy Awards honored "A World of Difference," a campaign to reduce racial, ethnic and religious prejudice. She also received the National Education Association Award for "Great Expectations:  The Education Project."

She has received numerous awards and honors including the Pinnacle Award for Achievement in Entrepreneurship presented by the Women’s Network of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, and the 1st Annual Jackie Robinson Award for Most Valuable Diverse Business Partner from the Boston Red Sox and Major League Baseball and was named the winner of the Greater New England Minority Supplier Development Council’s 1st Annual Shark Tank competition in 2014.  

Latson Gittens is a member of the Massachusetts Marketing Partnership appointed by Governor Charles Baker. She serves on the Board of the Associated Industries of Massachusetts, is a C-Suite member of The Partnership and is a member of the Greater Boston Chambers’ Executive Leadership Institute, Class of 2017.  She is a frequent panelist and guest speaker at symposia, meetings and conferences on topics that range from women business entrepreneurship, marketing/communications and leadership.  

Ms. Latson Gittens holds a BA from Park University, an MBA from Northeastern University and is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Elms College in Springfield MA.

Dr. Sahin is a neuroscientist and neurotechnology entrepreneur. He holds degrees in neuroscience from Harvard (PhD), MIT (Master’s), Williams College (BA), and completed post-doctoral fellowships at UCSD Medical School and the Salk Institute in San Diego, and a visiting year at Oxford. His academic work has been published in journals such as Science and Nature Neuroscience, and he has been invited and presented his research and his innovations in dozens of cities in over two dozen countries. His PhD dissertation, investigating the neural intricacies of the human language system via intracranial electrodes placed insider the brain as part of epilepsy surgery, won the prize for the best dissertation across all departments at Harvard that year. 

He also worked at Bell Labs and in startups and mid-sized companies, in Boston, San Diego, London, and Dublin; and has been the Principal Investigator for seven government contracts for wearable brain monitoring systems to assess and improve cognitive/mental states. Dr. Sahin founded Brain Power, LLC to bring neuroscience ideas and technological innovations to people with special challenges who can directly benefit from them the most.

Dr. Sahin is a hands-on leader of the growing Brain Power team, actively participating in all aspects of the business. Since founding Brain Power, he has won awards such as “40 Under 40” business people from both Boston Business Journal and Medtech Boston, the Scientific Achievement Award from Birch Family Services (autism services collective running for 40 years throughout New York), “50 on Fire” notable people in Boston, the Research Award from ANCA Naturally Autistic (an international community run by and for people who identify as autistic), and other honors such as from Cynopsis Media and South by Southwest (SXSW). He has been covered in hundreds of media articles or TV appearances since founding Brain Power a few years ago. 

At the helm of this science-based startup, Dr. Sahin maintains collaborations with Harvard, MIT, and Stanford; supervises scientific studies and clinical trials of the underlying technology; and superintends an array of internship programs including for high school students and for people with autism. 

Dr. Sahin is deeply passionate about the Mission of Brain Power, and honored to work amongst the great Team members who take that mission “from potential to reality”!

Jon Chesto covers the leaders who shape Boston’s business community. He has been reporting on business and politics in New England for the past two decades. Before joining the Globe, he was managing editor at the Boston Business Journal. Prior to that role, he was the business editor at The Patriot Ledger in Quincy. His weekly Ledger column, “Mass. Market,” won several national awards with the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. A graduate of Wesleyan University and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, he has also worked as a business reporter at the Boston Herald and as a political reporter with Ottaway Newspapers.

Nathan Rothstein is one of the co-founders of Project Repat. Repat is creating jobs in the USA by upcycling people's old clothes into memory blankets. Since launching in 2012, Repat has prevented over 3 million t-shirts from getting dumped in landfills and created 70 jobs in Massachusetts and North Carolina. Over 200,000 people have bought a t-shirt quilt. In 2016 Inc Magazine named Repat the 9th fastest growing retail company in the US, and the company has been featured in Fast Company, the Boston Globe, WBUR, CNN, Today Show, MSNBC and Entrepreneur Magazine. Mr. Rothstein served as a Americorps volunteer in post-Katrina New Orleans after he graduated from the UMass-Amherst Honors College in 2006. He spent four years in New Orleans working on different recovery related projects.

Brian Dacey is an experienced real estate executive and entrepreneur who has overseen a wide range of commercial, hospitality, retail, and residential projects during his career. Brian has an extensive history of involvement in government, not for profits, and charitable organizations. He is currently President of CIC.  He was a founding member of the Board for the Kendall Square Association and serves as a member of A Better City, and the Kendall Square Masterplan Committee and the Transit Advisory Committee for the City of Cambridge. Brian has his B.A. from Boston College and an M.B.A. from Boston University.

Erin McAleer is President of Project Bread - The Walk for Hunger, the leading statewide anti-hunger organization committed to providing people of all ages, cultures, and walks of life with sustainable, reliable access to nutritious food. Project Bread approaches hunger as a complex problem with multiple solutions. With funds raised through the Walk for Hunger, the oldest continual pledge walk in the country, and other sources, Project Bread pioneers innovative initiatives and supports effective programs to eradicate hunger in our state.

Prior to Project Bread, Erin worked for Be The Change, Inc. as Director of Opportunity Boston, an initiative focused on developing a comprehensive strategy to improve opportunity for children living in poverty in Boston. She was a senior member of Governor Deval Patrick’s team, serving as Director of Cabinet Affairs; has also served as Legislative Director for the Executive Office of Health and Human Services; Chief of Staff at the Department of Transitional Assistance; Senior Associate and Government Affairs Consultant at Charles Group Consulting; Fiscal Policy Analyst in the Executive Office of Administration & Finance; and Research Analyst for State Legislature’s Joint Committee on Mental Health and Substance Abuse.

She received her MSW from Boston College and her B.A. in History from the College of the Holy Cross.