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.

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) and NASA. 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 in 2023, where he studied the atmospheres of planets hundreds of light-years away using a technique called transmission spectroscopy. He then transitioned from studying the atmospheres of planets far from us to improving the conditions in our own atmosphere. He first worked for a land-use and monitoring climate startup. Now he has founded his own startup that captures CO2 while simultaneously making one of the most used raw minerals in the world: calcium carbonate.

Chima has tutored and taught many students across different age ranges, from middle school students through undergraduates, and from intro maths to quantum physics. He loves engaging with students and helping them find success through each student’s unique learning style. 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."

Gianni Sims is a fourth-year PhD candidate at Florida Atlantic University. Her research mainly focuses on understanding the seeding mechanisms of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) by studying the active galactic nuclei (AGN) occupation fraction in galaxies as a function of galaxy mass using data from the Deep-Drilling Fields Extended Chandra Deep Field South (ECDFS) Survey, XMM-Newton Survey (XMM-LSS), and Elais-S1 (ES1) Survey. This work aims to distinguish between different SMBH seeding mechanisms by quantifying their distribution in this extensive extragalactic survey. She is originally from Bronx, New York, and obtained her bachelor's degree at Penn State University. Gianni likes to read comic books and write poetry in her spare time.