Tory Burch Innovation Scholars

The Tory Burch Innovation Scholars at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study is a program that blends project-based, entrepreneurial work with leadership training. Through direct funding and mentorship, we aim to support work that empowers women, particularly in areas of need of gender diversity. Scholars receive funding, grant application support, and career mentorship, as well as becoming part of a supportive network of scholars, entrepreneurs, artists, and educators. 

2024-2025 Scholars

izabella Rodrigues 

The Accessible Modular Synthesizer is an innovative project led by Izabella Rodrigues as part of the Tory Burch Innovation Scholars Program. With a semester-end goal of producing a fully functional prototype by May 2025, this project reimagines modular synthesizers for accessibility, incorporating tactile and auditory feedback mechanisms to support BLV musicians. The initiative includes usability testing at the Filomen M. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School and emphasizes inclusive design, aiming to break down barriers in music technology and stem fields broadly. Beyond prototyping, this project seeks to advocate for accessibility in creative fields, collaborating with music institutions, advocacy groups, and technology companies to drive systemic change. Inspired by Haptic Hero, Sound Without Sight, and Arp Modular Synthesizers, the design prioritizes intuitive, multi-sensory interaction. With key collaborators such as Maddy Mau, Luke DuBois PhD, and William Payne PhD, the project benefits from expertise in accessibility and hardware design. Aligned with the Tory Burch program’s mission to empower underrepresented voices, this work not only amplifies the presence of women and non-binary individuals in STEM and music technology but also fosters a more inclusive future for BLV musicians. Through leadership training, mentorship, and funding, this initiative has the potential to transform music technology, creating pathways for BLV artists to fully engage in music-making, professional opportunities, and advocacy.

Muthia Khairunnisa

“Our Kind of Future: Celebrating Women and Girls” is an initiative that provides a platform for children and youth, particularly girls, to advocate for women’s empowerment and gender equality while sharing their visions for an inclusive future. The pilot project, in collaboration with the United Nations Association Indonesia (UNA Indonesia), will launch an e-book featuring short stories, poems, letters, and other forms of artwork. The open submission received 247 submissions from across Indonesia, which will be curated for inclusion in the e-book. Additionally, a virtual creative writing workshop was conducted for girls from an informal education community serving lower-income families, providing them with an opportunity to express their voices through storytelling. The initiative has received positive responses from the United Nations in Indonesia and the Ministry of Sports and Youth in Indonesia. In the long term, it aims to inspire young people to use art as a tool for advocacy through workshops and showcases.

Santana Kavanaugh

Eatin’ Good is a community-driven initiative focused on addressing food insecurity by providing low-cost EBT-friendly food boxes filled with fresh, locally sourced produce to low-income families in rural areas. Our model prioritizes accessibility and sustainability by partnering with local farmers and eliminating transportation barriers that often make healthy eating out of reach. Initially, we have concentrated our efforts in Kentucky, where food insecurity disproportionately affects single mothers and families in Appalachia. By offering a direct-to-door food delivery service, we are creating a viable alternative to traditional food pantries and dollar stores, which often lack fresh and nutritious options. Through the Tory Burch Fellowship, we aim to refine our nonprofit model, strengthen partnerships, and develop a sustainable strategy for expanding food access. In addition to our work in rural areas, we have recently been researching ways to apply this initiative to urban food deserts, particularly in New York City, where nutritional inequity remains a significant issue.

Amelia Kopp

InSearchOf is simplifying resale for Gen Z by seamlessly connecting style-focused, price-conscious buyers with curated inventory from vetted resellers. Our marketplace matches buyers’ style preferences with seller inventory through precise data exchange, streamlining discovery while reducing customer acquisition costs and listing friction for resellers. This semester, we’ve made significant strides. Funding from the Tory Burch Foundation has fueled our seller growth campaign. To recruit sellers and deepen industry insights, I’ve attended major vintage markets in Boston, Connecticut, and NYC, with plans to visit ThriftCon in Atlanta in April. These events help us engage sellers, identify pain points, and recruit participants for our upcoming beta pilot. We were also accepted into NYU’s Entrepreneurship Lab Spring Startup Bootcamp, helping us conduct effective market research throughout this process to refine the platform’s design. Launching in late April, our beta test will pair five resellers with 50 customers. We will manually match seller inventory to buyer style preferences. This experiment will provide essential data to inform the optimal design and functionality of our marketplace’s app and website.

2023-2024 Scholars

Jaimez Vo

Jamiez Vo is a junior at Gallatin studying digital design and psychology with a minor in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Studies. She dreams of creating meaningful healthcare and educational technology for young children. Her Burch Scholar project is Engage You(th), in which she is collaborating with students from different NYU schools to create an early intervention for Asian American adolescents’ mental health. In the team, she is mainly responsible for leading the organization’s main products on mental health mobile apps and psychoeducational resources. She hopes that with the collaborative effort with her team, these products and services will be able to bring more accessible, affordable, and reliable mental health resources for Asian American adolescents.

 

Anne Yasmine Larasati

Anne Yasmine Larasati is a Master student at Gallatin studying Psychology in Film & Acting for Social Change, and a person with Thalassemia-Trait herself. Yasmine seeks to elevate #GadisThalassemia (translated–#ThalassemiaGirl) to go international through her Burch Scholars project and spread awareness in New York City. Together with a Thalassemia foundation and collaborating with many children and youth people with Thalassemia, the movement #GadisThalassemia aims to utilize media, performances, and other creative platforms in breaking stigma, bridging knowledge from the community to broader audience, and building individual’s self-efficacy to do early Thalassemia screening. Her dearest motto is that we may not experience the consequences instantly, but we will experience the consequences in the future, through our loved one, future children, and the future generations. Follow #GadisThalassemia through your socials now and get updated soon.

Damely Abreu

Damely Abreu is a senior at Gallatin studying Maternal Healthcare and Birth Work In immigrant Communities. Her project is an online learning environment that invites birth workers to join me as we discuss varying topics of reproduction through nutrition. Including mental health, grief from loss, fertility/infertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and more. It is a journey of learning and unlearning that she wants future mothers, supportive partners, young girls, and interested people to join on as we prepare culturally informed and delicious meals.

 

Kaitlin Davis is a Gallatin MA student studying community-engaged theater, education, and performance. As a Burch Scholar, she will be creating a multimedia project that focuses on the importance of connection and conversation in early motherhood. Her goal is to help women feel the therapeutic properties of sharing our transformative stories during a time that can often feel profoundly isolating.

 

 

 

Mia Gradelski

Mia Gradelski is a senior at Gallatin studying fintech and entrepreneurship. As a Burch scholar, she strives to de-stigmatize personal finance and break down the gender and wealth gaps within investing to promote financial literacy among students through her team’s fast-growing startup, Atticus. In an effort to democratize investing, a subject traditionally not taught in the education system, Atticus is on a mission to provide investment support and financial resources in the most simplified, inclusive, and enjoyable way possible.

 

 

Estella Struck

Estella Struck is a Gen Z innovator, thought leader and social media influencer in the sustainability and climate action field. Her Burch Scholar project is Viviene New York — the world’s first Gen Z run sustainable product marketing agency. Estella and her team empower sustainable brands across industries to bring them to the forefront through the power, reach and influence of social media. She is currently a junior at NYU Gallatin studying the effect of digital marketing and social entrepreneurship on social change with an emphasis on climate.

 

 

Gabrielle Narcisse

Gabrielle Narcisse is a junior at Gallatin studying Creative Direction with a focus in magazines, art curation, and fashion. She is an artist that utilizes multiple mediums such as painting and collage. Through the Burch scholar program she will continue to grow her organization Black Girl Fight Club. Black Girl Fight Club started in June of 2020. BGFC is an organization dedicated to the betterment of black women. They strive to provide a safe personal and professional support network of black women. BGFC has fostered a community by hosting several events including an art show/BGFC magazine release party showcasing all art and writing by black women. Through the Burch scholar program Gabrielle will have another artist showcase this spring, as well as fund other smaller events.

 

 

2021-2022 Scholars

Siegrid Tuttle

Siegrid Tuttle is a sophomore at Gallatin studying equity and social change. Over the summer she and three co-founders launched Arcturus Community Endeavors, a nonprofit dedicated to building stronger communities by helping small businesses. Her Burch Scholar project focuses on creating a program within that nonprofit dedicated to addressing issues faced by woman business owners.

 

 

 

Kate Guardino

Kate Guardino is a senior at Gallatin studying fashion design and sub-cultural aesthetics. Her Buch Scholar project is an exploration of handmade clothing and sustainable practices in the fashion industry. Kate and her collaborator Alyson Cox are developing a collection of knitwear and silk garments made by them personally, sourced entirely in the New York Garment District. Their goal is to raise awareness on the subject of fashion waste and highlight practices that everyday consumers can partake in to reduce their fashion carbon footprint and encourage global brands to make changes for a healthy future.

 

Anastasia Vlasova

Anastasia Vlasova is a first-year at Gallatin studying Design, Spaces, and Mental Health. Her Burch Scholar Project is Mellow, the world’s first pop-up children’s museum of mental wellness. Mellow revitalizes mental health education through design, community, and technology, teaching children through interactive art installations. Anastasia’s goal is for Mellow to become a wellness destination for family outings, field trips, and after-school programs.

 

 

 

Jennifer Qian

Jennifer Qian is a masters student at Gallatin studying art and data science. She looks to examine agency and impact on artistic creation through the lens of humans and environments in the age of artificial intelligence. In the past year she started exploring the meaning of food and cravings as well as their primitive forms through space and time. Hence the journey of project “Hugge” began. Her Burch Scholar project “Hugge” will focus on knowledge, food, and recipes that embrace a mood of coziness and comfort with feelings of enjoyment and contentment through neurobiology, psychology, and food science.

 

Pilar Cerón

Pilar Cerón is a junior at Gallatin studying art, theater, fashion, and media with a focus on highlighting marginalized voices and stories. As a Burch Scholar, she is creating a digital/physical archive of recipes from friends and family that explores the ways gender, ethnicity, cultural background, sexuality, etc. impact and are connected to cooking and food. This archive is an investigation of the ways we can use food and cooking to reclaim power and express ourselves! 

2020-2021 Scholars

Ayden Mallory

Ayden Mallory is a senior at Gallatin studying political mobilization. As an Innovation Scholar, Ayden is developing Scrappy Interns: a clothing brand rooted in upcycling. The products are dyed with 100% natural dyes made from food scraps donated by local restaurants. At the core of Scrappy Interns is its commitment to sustainability, accessibility, and community. Scrappy Interns opens its social platform to interns (influencers) to not only promote the brand but to create a space for passionate and scrappy individuals to share and interact with one another. Scrappy Interns also has a seminar series that teaches different communities how to dye using their own compost. It is a project all about slow fashion and the value of working with your hands.

Victoria Montenegro 

Victoria Montenegro is a senior at Gallatin studying Creative Entrepreneurship through Female Empowerment. Her Spring 2021 project is a Youtube channel chronicling her NYU student debt repayment journey. This series is meant to show viewers just how expensive college really is. By showing all of her loans, Victoria hopes that others will be inspired to take control of their own student loans and build a community of financially literate young adults. She will be sharing all of her tips and tricks for staying motivated while in repayment as well as share some of the ways she’s been able to save money while still in school.

 

 

 

 

Mekleit Dix 

Mekleit Dix is a second-year Gallatin MA student writing a thesis titled “Employing Mechanisms of Black Kinship and Cultural Specificity in Medical-Resource Scarce Communities as a Catalyst for Effective Trauma Informed Sexual Wellness  Intervention.” Mekleit’s Spring 2021 Project, Everyone You Date Is A Loser, is a triple threat: a podcast, an online resource library, and a digital sexual wellness community for persons healing from sexual trauma. Everyone You Date Is A Loser strives to create a tonally safe and welcoming digital space to affirm persons on their sexual healing journey. In this fragmented and hyper technological era, EYDIAL’s intention is to become a medium for positive sexual reclamation for all people but is dedicated to centering sexual wellness resources for black and brown women, femmes, and gender non conforming people.

Sara Fuchs 

Sara Fuchs is a junior studying Financial and Social Economics at Gallatin. Her Spring 2021 project, Independent Contractors & Inequity, is a grassroots movement with a twofold purpose: to raise awareness about the absence of sexual harassment and other anti-discrimination workplace protections for workers who are independent contractors, and to remedy this inequity. Sara’s goal for her project is to bring attention to this timely issue, encourage people to coalesce, and help spark change by working to pass legislation that provides independent contractors with the right to work in an environment where they are legally protected from sexual harassment and other forms of discrimination.

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2019-2020 Scholars

Rita Rui Ting Wang

Rita Rui Ting Wang’s Spring 2020 project, Soil Microbiome and Landscape Design of Reclaimed Sites: A Case Study of FreshKills Park, employed metagenomic analysis to investigate the complicated environmental assemblage of the once world’s largest landfill. She is interested in the idea of designing architecture and products as interfaces that connect different forms of life and consciousness, and enhancing biodiversity and inter-species play.

 

 

 

Jenna Scherma

Jenna Scherma’s Spring 2020 project, titled Neat, is a logistics application for local businesses that uses POS integration to create more easily managed tabs, data analysis, and automated supply control. An automated connection between a business and their customers provides the opportunity for enhanced communication, which, in turn, would inevitably provide the capability for customers to quietly communicate with staff and request for help if in unsafe situations. The application will also provide live mappings of 24/7 locations and running public transportation. Jenna hopes that her project will not only encourage female developers to pursue more entrepreneurial ventures, but also to create a future of technologies that prioritize the safety of their clients.

Varsha Lakshmi Yerasi

Varsha Yerasi’s Spring 2020 project was a podcast titled Office Happy Hour. The podcast focuses on creating more sustainable, empowered and successful communities of color through the exploration and discussion of the young professional, in and out of the workspace. With this project, she aims to make conversations and resources more accessible with the hopes of supporting young professionals of color in their pursuit of holistic success.

 

 

Alexia Leclercq

Alexia Leclercq’s Spring 2020, project, titled “Environmental and Climate Justice Curriculum,” seeks to address a well-known gap in environmental education programming by creating lessons around environmental racism, activism, and the politics of environmental policy and decisions. Alexia hopes that her project will bring more awareness about the dire consequences of environmental racism and encourage high school students to become more involved in community organizing and activism.