Dr. Tererai Trent

Dr. Tererai Trent, PhD, is a senior consultant with more than 18 years of international experience in professional program and policy evaluation. Her work focuses on issues such as the intersection of HIV transmission with gender based violence, food insecurity, women’s empowerment and education.

Dr. Trent is a Zimbabwean-American woman whose unlikely educational success has brought her international fame including being Oprah Winfrey’s “all-time favorite guest.” She is the founder of the organization, Tinogona (Shona for “it is achievable”), which builds and repairs schools in rural Zimbabwe. Dr. Trent also serves as a fellow at the University of California San Francisco conducting research in HIV/AIDS prevention with a special focus on women and girls in Sub Saharan Africa.

Her work has taken her to five continents, including working for the major global humanitarian organization Heifer International as a Deputy Director Evaluation. Born in rural Zimbabwe, Dr. Trent brings to the field of evaluation viewpoints from both the developing and developed world. Her life story was featured in the book "Half the Sky," by Nicholas Kristof and will soon be told in her autobiography The Girl Who Buried Her Dreams in a Can, set for a fall 2014 release.

Dr. Trent holds a doctoral degree in Interdisciplinary Evaluation from Western Michigan University, a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology from UC Berkeley and a Master’s in Plant Pathology from Oklahoma State University.

Dr. Rashad Shabazz

Assistant Professor, University of Vermont

Dr. Shabazz's academic expertise brings together theories of race and racism, gender studies, Black cultural studies, and critical prison studies, within a methodological framework that draws on history, human geography, philosophy and literature. His research explores the ways in which race, class, sexuality and gender articulate through geographies of anti-Black racism.

A long time anti-prison activist, Dr. Shabazz cites activism as a catalyst for his scholarly work. He is an editor for the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (a Canadian-based journal that publishes the work of prisoners around the world) and an organizer for Critical Resistance.

He teaches courses such as Gender, Space and Environment; Black Space, Identity, Culture and Prisons, Cities and Black Masculinity. He has also taught at San Quentin Prison. His publications include: “Masculinity and the Mic: Confronting the Uneven Spatiality in Hip-Hop. Gender, Place and Culture” and “So High You Can’t Get Over it, So Low You Can’t Get Under it: Carceral Spatiality and Black Masculinity in the United States and South Africa.”

Dr. Shabazz holds a B.A. in Political Science and Philosophy from the Minnesota State University, Mankato (1999), an M.S. from the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at the Arizona State University (2002) and a Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz (2008).