Careers, Life, and Yale Thursday Show: Humanities in Action

Ayla Besemer ’19 serves as the communications coordinator for Water for Colorado, a coalition of nine western organizations dedicated to developing sustainable solutions to ensure lasting water resources in the West. In her role, she uses storytelling devices honed through her Humanities education to engage Coloradans on important issues surrounding agriculture, ranching, recreation, and conservation. Prior to joining W4C, Ayla taught writing and journalism at Stanford University’s prestigious Online High School, worked as the ocean science educator for nonprofit Ocean First Institute, and served as deputy director of communications for Colorado attorney general Phil Weiser’s victorious 2018 campaign. She has also written several freelance pieces of journalism, the most recent of which was an exploration of craft distilling’s impact on rural agriculture and economies in Colorado. While at Yale, in addition to being involved in the HUMS major, Ayla wrote for the Yale Daily News, shot on the Yale Skeet & Trap Team, and cofounded the Survivor Support Network. When not writing or reading about water conservation, Ayla can be found skiing, cooking, and singing the Hamilton soundtrack. She is also an avid scuba diver, Taylor Swift fan, and green chili enthusiast.

Charlotte Dobbs ’05 is the chief of staff at the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. Prior to joining PJMF last September, Charlotte was the chief operating officer at Incandescent, a small consulting firm that served philanthropic, corporate, and venture clients. Her work there—both internally and externally with clients—focused on firm-level strategy, social impact, ops and finance, management systems, organizational alignment, and people development. She was there for six years and in that time also served as the chief of staff, led the research and marketing functions, and worked with amazing clients in the philanthropy, nonprofit, tech, and financial services sectors. Prior to that, Charlotte worked in arts administration and as a professional singer with opera companies and orchestras around the world. Charlotte earned her BA in English from Yale and completed her graduate work at the Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute of Music.

Jensen Harris ’98 is cofounder and CTO of Textio, the innovative software startup he founded in 2014 with the mission of building technology that creates understanding between people. As the visionary behind breakthroughs like augmented writing and the Flow generative writing experience, Jensen has been at the forefront of building remarkable user interfaces on top of artificial intelligence technology. He leads Textio’s engineering, product, and design teams.

Jensen is known for designing beautiful, powerful, and forward-thinking products that are used every day by a billion people. In a fifteen-year career at Microsoft, he guided the creation of some of the most widely used and influential software in the world: the innovative Ribbon user interface of Microsoft Office, the often-imitated email design of Microsoft Outlook, and the pioneering touch-optimized software experience built for Microsoft Surface. A graduate of Yale and Interlochen Arts Academy with degrees in music composition, Jensen speaks worldwide on topics of human/computer interaction, user interface design, startup leadership, and software engineering. He lives in Seattle with his wife, three girls, and two cats.

Janelle Kellman ’95, who majored in history at Yale, is currently vice-mayor on the Sausalito City Council. She served several terms on the Sausalito Planning Commission, including as chair, and as a member of the General Plan Working Group and the General Plan Advisory Committee. Janelle began her career in private practice as a land use and environmental attorney in San Francisco before joining EPA Region IX to work on water-quality and species issues. She also spent six years in-house as the lead environmental permitting attorney for large renewable energy projects. Janelle has served on the boards of Baykeeper, a water-quality nonprofit, and the Ecotech Institute, a tech-based college focused on coursework in renewable energy. As an entrepreneur, she launched her own ecommerce platform and consults with startups across verticals in the ideation and early growth stage. Janelle is also a founding member of the Marinship Emergency Medical Manufacturing Group, which fabricated and shipped over 13,000 plastic face shields nationwide in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. An avid athlete, she played two Division I sports in college, has started and led three separate women’s cycling programs in the Bay Area, and is currently training for her eleventh ultramarathon.

Josh Mandell ’16 majored in history with a concentration in education studies. He captained Yale Club Swimming, held a student job in the Athletic Department, and represented Dwight Hall as a public school intern. Josh decided late in college to pursue a career in journalism and enrolled in Steven Brill’s seminar as a senior. After graduation, he landed a Yale-funded summer internship at the Sacramento Bee, then returned to his hometown in Virginia to work for Charlottesville Tomorrow, a nonprofit news organization. After a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville made global headlines in 2017, much of his reporting focused on the local impact of this event and the community’s racial reckoning in its wake. In 2019, Josh made a career transition to grant writing as a development associate at Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center.  Josh’s experiences in Charlottesville and his interest in history motivate his work to advance the museum’s mission: teaching universal lessons from the Holocaust to combat hatred, prejudice, and indifference. He uses his writing and research skills to help secure annual grants from a variety of funders. In his spare time, he covers music industry news as a senior contributor to Forbes.com.

Zelda Roland ’08, PhD ’16 is the founding director of the Yale Prison Education Initiative at Dwight Hall, which brings access to Yale classes and other campus programming to incarcerated students in Connecticut. Zelda conceived of and created this program after working with incarcerated students enrolled in the Wesleyan Center for Prison Education at Cheshire Correctional Institution while completing her doctorate in history of art and film and media studies. Over the last five years, she has worked to gain support for, organize, staff, and fund the program, which, with its inaugural courses in 2018, marked the first time any incarcerated student had ever earned Yale College credit for completed coursework. Zelda coordinates YPEI’s partnership with the Connecticut Department of Corrections and its facilities; relationships with other national and statewide prison education programs and criminal justice organizations; and a passionate and broad assembly of Yale faculty, administrators, staff, and students who believe that this program represents the best of Yale’s values and visions for the future. She is also an affiliated faculty member of the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law at Yale Law School.