Our People Are Our Strength
Board of Directors
President
Srinivas Jallepalli is the co-founder of Higher Orbit Foundation. Srinivas has a B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin in Electrical Engineering. He is currently a Technical Director at NXP Semiconductors and holds four US patents and has contributed to over fifty papers in IEEE conferences and refereed journals.Â
Srinivas has an abiding passion for understanding the latest research findings in child development and the challenges that are preventing us from bringing this research to our schools. This passion has led him to conduct an extensive meta-analysis of current research and to also author a broad ranging survey of parents and teachers. Srinivas has been happily married for over twenty years and is the proud father of two beautiful school going children.
Secretary
Swetha Balasubramanian is a parent, poet and product manager. She started her career as an engineer for Microsoft and went on to work as a product manager in online advertising at Microsoft and Facebook after her business studies. She later switched gears to focus on alternate learning and edtech after a gap year of self exploration. She currently resides in Austin and is working on her startup around alternate livelihoods.
Treasurer
Rownak Jyoti Zaman received her BSc from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka in 1994 and MS from the University of Texas at Austin in 1996 in Electrical Engineering.
She worked at Advanced Product Research and Development Laboratory in Motorola. She received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin while working in International Sematech. She was a visiting scholar at Stanford University and later at Aixtron and PDF Solutions. She is a co-founder of two startups.
Director of Projects
Akhila Jallepalli is a rising senior at Liberal Arts and Science Academy in Austin, TX. Dr. Srinivasa Chakravarthy’s “Demystifying the Brain” unlocked her fascination with the human brain. She is passionate about a research career in neuroscience. Akhila is currently a research intern at the Computational Neuroscience Lab at IIT, Madras. She is a co-founder of the LASA Research Club (that hosts researchers from multiple disciplines) and the Higher Orbit Foundation. She is also a Texas Music Scholar, an accomplished violinist, and an enthusiastic Carnatic vocalist. In addition, she is a Cho Dan (1st degree black belt) in Tang Soo Do. Exploring new foods and playing with Jhansi, her German Shepherd, are a few of her favorite pastimes.
