Astrophysicist and artist Nia Imara founded Onaketa as an outgrowth of her commitment to create more educational opportunities for black and brown youth. Nia is a graduate of Kenyon College and UC Berkeley and was a prize postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. A passionate advocate for black and brown students, Nia has led and participated in many initiatives to create access in science.

Dr. Brown holds an M.A. in African American Studies, Ph.D. in U.S. History with an emphasis in Early American, African American and U.S. Women’s history from The Ohio State University, and is a two-time Fulbright scholar. Her work examined the role of African spirituality in the history of resistance to slavery in Salvador Bahia, Brazil, and on post-apartheid resistance and justice movements in South Africa. As a passionate and committed educator, Dr. Brown has been teaching African American and Ethnic Studies at the community college level, and as a part-time faculty at UC Berkeley in Ethnic Studies for over 25 years. She has served in administration, including over 4 years as the Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs and Student Success for the Peralta Community College District, and 10 years as the Chair of Ethnic Studies and Social Sciences at Merritt College. While at Merritt, she developed an annual study abroad program for underserved African American students, which has taken hundreds of students to Jamaica, Ghana, Cuba, and more to learn about the history and culture of these countries and globalize their understanding of the Black world. She also established two Africana Studies Centers at Merritt College and McClymonds High School, which hold an original digital and interactive curriculum on African and African American History that is bilingual and exceeds district ADA requirements. Dr. Brown is also founder and CEO of Global Academics, a non-profit organization that continues her study abroad program for underserved African American students.

LaNell A. Williams received her PhD from Harvard University as a NSF GRFP Fellow studying soft condensed matter physics/biophysics. Her research focuses on understanding the self assembly of RNA-Viruses, in particular, the Bacteriophage MS2. She graduated from Wesleyan University with her BA in physics, and she went on to receive her MA in physics from Fisk University before coming to Harvard. LaNell has also been heavily involved in programming with the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP). As of January, she serves on the American Physical Society Council of Representatives representing the Forum on Graduate Students & the Forum on Early Careers. She's the founder of the Women+ of Color Project and hopes to encourage more BIWOC to pursue academic careers.

Nehanda Imara is a dedicated activist, organizer, environmentalist, and educator. She created the first Environmental Racism/Justice course at the Peralta Community College District. In her role as an organizer with Communities for a Better Environment (2007 – 2017), she engaged residents and youth in fighting environmental racism and for clean more sustainable environmental policies and programs. In 2009, she organized the first CBE “Love Yo Mama Earth Day” event, in collaboration with community partners in deep East Oakland, a community suffering deeply from the global ecological crisis. Nehanda was part of the leadership team at the inception of East Oakland Building Healthy Communities in 2009 and served on the interim steering committee. After leaving EOBHC in 2021, she joined the Black Cultural Zone as the Community Engagement Lead.

Oakland native currently living in NYC, Adia has dedicated her career to both leading creative strategy at top marketing agencies and serving her community through non-profit consulting. She brings that experience to Onaketa through vibrant storytelling of black and brown communities.

Within her adventure through the working world, her constant delight has been crafting!

Ian earned his PhD in Astrophysics from Harvard University, where he used some of the world’s largest telescopes to investigate new worlds around other stars. As an undergraduate, he was an an active tutor for the Academic Excellence Program (ACE), which is dedicated to increasing the diversity of students earning their bachelors degrees in STEM. During grad school, he helped start and lead the Harvard chapter of the science outreach organization, theopenlabs.org, a graduate-run group dedicated to providing bite-size TED-style talks to the community about active areas of research.

His interests include STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) outreach, citizen science, and hosting star parties at different national parks with SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). In his free time, he enjoys going to see live music, playing beach volleyball, and getting lost on bike rides.

Dr. Chima McGruder obtained his PhD from Harvard, where he studied the atmospheres of planets hundreds of light years away using a technique called transmission spectroscopy. He will continue to do this work, as a research scientist at the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. There he will analyze data from the James Webb Space telescope to study exotic atmospheres and potentially find other habitable atmospheres.

Chima has tutored and taught many students at all different age ranges, from middle school students through undergraduates. He loves engaging with students and helping them find success through each student’s unique learning style. He tutors all levels of math, including algebra, calculus, and differential equations. He also tutors physics up through the undergraduate major level. His goal is to make sure his tutees have engaging and fun sessions by adapting his tutoring style to the specific student.

Beyond academics, Chima does a variety of activities, such as flying single-engine planes, snowboarding, rock climbing, hiking, and running. He loves science fiction, and his favorite book series is the "The Expanse."

Haley Carrasco is a medical student at Kent State University College of Podiatric Medicine. She is particularly interested in foot and ankle surgery. In 2022, Haley graduated with a BS in biology with a bioethics minor. Her undergraduate research was with RCN-UBE: Yeast ORFan Gene Project which focused on identifying the function of unknown genes in the model organism S. cerevisiae (baker's yeast).

Filipe Cerqueira graduated from the University of Michigan with his PhD in Microbiology and Immunology. His research focuses on the biochemistry of starch-active proteins expressed by the human gut bacterium Ruminococcus bromii.

When he isn’t crystallizing proteins in the lab, he studies the social justice-guided art that is effective facilitation. He practices his facilitation skills in his work with the DEI Taskforce, an organization for which he is a co-founder and whose mission is to foster inclusion in the biomedical research environment at UMich.

He is proud of his Brazilian nationality and his Texan upbringing.

Gregory Cunningham is a GEM PhD fellow and applied physics PhD student at Harvard University as well as a graduate student researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on control and readout schemes for superconducting quantum computing, in an effort to increase robustness and scalability to large numbers of qubits.

He enjoys playing/ listening to music, indoor/sand volleyball, and movies/theatre.

Gianni is a third-year physics Ph.D. candidate at Florida Atlantic  University. Her research entails understanding the seeding mechanisms of  supermassive black holes by computing the AGN occupation fraction. She  has previously earned her bachelor's degree in Astrophysics with a minor in Philosophy at Penn State University. 

She  loves writing poetry, watching videos, and going to the gym in her free  time.

Pheona Williams is a 2021-2023 IBM PhD fellow and an applied physics PhD student at Harvard University, and graduate student researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has a keen interest in solid-state physics and quantum materials, and her current work focuses on the growth and characterization of topological insulators and superlattice systems. She enjoys math and science and loves the way the marriage of the two can be used to explain and improve the world around us.

In her spare time, she works out and enjoys rock climbing (bouldering specifically), West African dancing, and Salsa dancing.