HGSE Selects 2026 Education Entrepreneurship Summer Fellows

The Harvard Graduate School of Education has announced its Education Entrepreneurship Summer Fellows for 2026. Launched in 2013, the program provides funding to allow students and alumni to work full-time on their entrepreneurial ventures during the summer months.

The Education Entrepreneurship Summer Fellows program is designed to support transformative change in the field of education by encouraging innovative ventures aiming to reshape and reimagine the educational landscape.

This summer’s fellowship awards were available to current master’s and doctoral students at HGSE, along with alumni with graduation dates of November 2025 or May 2026. Winning fellows submitted a reflection about their entrepreneurial efforts and how a fellowship grant would benefit their venture moving forward.

Applications were reviewed by a committee of HGSE faculty and administrators based on the project’s demonstrated interest and commitment to education entrepreneurship, the viability of the venture and identified success measures, its potential impact, and progress that proved the summer months would advance its mission and impact.

The four alumni receiving fellowship awards of $10,000 for their projects are:

●    Ph.D. student Krista Galleberg for Emergent Inquiry Studio (EIS), a venture focused on bringing affordable, project-based learning into early childhood classrooms (ages 2–8) in India. EIS offers a scalable, cost-effective way to expand access to high-quality learning in underserved schools by using recycled materials to create structured “learning ecosystems” where children develop creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving skills through hands-on exploration.

●    Livia Fares, Ed.M.'26, for Opta, an AI-powered career development platform designed to help underserved Brazilian university students transition into the workforce. Opta aims to improve social mobility by replacing biased hiring filters with a competency-based pipeline that prepares students through a four-step process where they complete a self-assessment, explore career matching and opportunity mapping, and evaluate overall job readiness.

●    Daril Ndodjang, Ed.M.'26, for Village Labs, an AI-powered simulation platform that allows educational organizations to test programs and policies before implementing them in the real world. Grounded in emerging research on AI agent simulations, Village Labs simulates how different groups will react to proposed changes, highlighting potential conflicts and failure points early in the process. This approach helps organizations anticipate human dynamics, reducing costly implementation failures and improving program design.

●    Purva Parwani, Ed.M.'26, for Young Founders Lab, a school-based entrepreneurship program designed to equip secondary students in underserved communities with real-world problem-solving and leadership skills. Using a hands-on curriculum, students identify local challenges, conduct research, and build ventures with mentorship support. Young Founders Lab aims to create a scalable model for embedding entrepreneurial thinking in low-income education systems by emphasizing learning through doing, culminating in student-led projects and presentations. The program plans to pilot across multiple schools in India.