Meet the 2025/26 Global Awards Finalists

Selected through a rigorous review process, 2025/26 She Shapes AI Global Awards finalists represent a remarkable group of leaders developing and using AI to address real-world challenges and deliver tangible, positive impact. Learn more about their work across the following sectors:

Winners will be announced in London on 16 April at the She Shapes AI Conference and Awards Ceremony, hosted in partnership with LSE Generate. We’d love to see you there!

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AI + Climate recognises leaders using AI to advance climate mitigation and adaptation, strengthening environmental resilience, protecting vulnerable communities, and accelerating accountable, low-carbon systems.

AI + Climate

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Georgia Kalantzi
CEO
AlongRoute, Greece

Georgia leads AlongRoute, delivering physics-informed AI marine weather intelligence that improves forecast accuracy in extreme sea states, helping fleets cut fuel use, reduce CO₂ emissions, and strengthen maritime safety.

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Ntasha Bhardwaj
Lead, Suraksha Lens
South Asian Institute of Crime and Justice Studies, India

Ntasha leads Suraksha Lens, a community-first AI early-warning platform that anticipates climate displacement hotspots and detects predatory recruitment risks across South Asia, embedding human protection into climate adaptation.

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Sorina Uleia
Founder & CEO
Recycllux, Romania

Sorina founded Recycllux, combining satellite Earth Observation, AI, and blockchain to detect marine plastic hotspots, coordinate low-carbon community cleanups, and deliver transparent, audit-grade climate impact data.

AI + Education recognises leaders using AI to expand access to high-quality education, strengthen learning outcomes, and ensure technology serves learners equitably across contexts.

AI + Education

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Dr. Pauldy Otermans
Head of Research AI
Otermans Institute, UK

Pauldy co-created the world’s first public, privacy-first offline AI teacher, reaching learners across 17 countries and achieving ~95% completion rates in contexts where digital education often fails.

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María Sierra
COO
Propel, US

María is equipping Latin America’s nonprofits with practical AI tools and training, supporting 400+ organisations across 27 countries and strengthening digital capacity for social impact at scale.

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Mumbe Mwangangi
CEO
Nyansapo AI, Kenya

Mumbe is using speech recognition, computer vision, and predictive analytics to help teachers assess literacy and numeracy in real time, enabling earlier support for learners and improving foundational education outcomes across underserved communities in Kenya.

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AI + Creative Industries recognises the use of AI to expand the possibilities of the creative industries, exploring how intelligent systems can shape new forms of artistic expression, storytelling, and cultural dialogue while engaging critically with the societal implications of AI.

AI + Creative Industries

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Chantal Pisarzowski
Founder
forward stud.io, Germany

Through her project Parallaxe, Chantal is developing an AI-mediated dialogue system that structures and de-escalates conversations between people with opposing political views, while her interactive installations explore how AI intersects with identity, grief, and democratic discourse.

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AI + Food recognises leaders using AI to strengthen food systems from improving agricultural resilience and sustainability to reducing waste and increasing transparency across global supply chains.

AI + Food & Agriculture

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Simana Paul
Founding CTO
Ocean Orchestra, UK

Through Ocean Orchestra, Simana is building an AI-powered platform that integrates data from across the global seafood ecosystem to improve traceability, detect risk, and enable more sustainable decision-making across a $500B industry.

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Dinah Buyeke Masanda
Founder and CEO
Urban Roots, Kenya

Dinah’s Urban Roots AI platform combines sensors, satellite data, and AI analytics to help smallholder farmers monitor soil health, optimise water use, and build climate resilience while protecting biodiversity.

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Dalma Szabo
Co-founder & CEO
OH, a potato!, Romania

Dalma’s AI-powered meal planning app uses intelligent agents to help households adapt recipes, manage ingredients, and prevent food waste, already supporting over 30,000 users across 174 countries.

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AI + the Future of Work recognises leaders using AI to shape more inclusive, equitable, and forward-looking labour markets from bias-aware hiring systems to workplace transparency and AI-enabled skills development.

AI + the Future of Work

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Anna Cejudo Mercado
Co-founder & Co-CEO
Founderz, Spain

Anna is transforming AI education at scale, training 300,000+ learners globally through AI-powered, hyper-personalised learning systems designed to ensure no one is left behind in the AI era.

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Hannah Töpler
CEO
Intrare, Mexico

Hannah leads Intrare, a bias-minimising AI recruitment platform that has supported 18,000+ marginalised job seekers in Latin America, increasing income mobility while counteracting systemic algorithmic discrimination.

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Barbara Stolorz
CEO
Levelly.ai, Poland

Barbara is building AI-driven pay equity infrastructure across Europe, using explainable and predictive analytics to detect and close gender pay gaps while aligning organisations with the EU Pay Transparency Directive.

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AI + Health recognises leaders using AI to strengthen healthcare systems, expand access to care, and improve health outcomes through responsible, human-centred innovation.

AI + Health

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Joyce Henderson
Lead Advanced Practice Physiotherapist - Innovation Fellow
NHS Fife / Exo Inc, UK

Joyce is pioneering a handheld, real-time AI-powered ultrasound solution to detect developmental hip dysplasia in newborns, aiming to prevent lifelong disability through a simple 30-second scan accessible even in low-resource settings.

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Karina Rios Michel
Chief Creative & Technology Officer
Girl Effect, UK

Karina leads the development of culturally grounded, safeguarded generative AI chatbots that provide sexual and mental health support to over 2.5 million adolescent girls and young women across Africa and South Asia.

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Ghislaine Zinzindohoue
Co-founder
Ayooka, Benin

Ghislaine co-founded Ayooka, Guinea’s first fully integrated AI-driven blood transfusion management system, improving national supply predictability, reducing shortages, and strengthening patient safety.

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AI + Safety recognises leaders using AI to protect people from digital harm, strengthening resilience against abuse, exploitation, harassment, and AI-enabled threats, while embedding human dignity and oversight at the core of technological systems.

AI + Safety

Eman Metwally
Founder
SheShield, Egypt

Eman bridges national cybersecurity strategy with grassroots protection, training thousands of women and public institutions across MENA to counter AI-driven deep fakes, social engineering, and gender-based digital violence through her human-centred “She Shield” framework.

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Jacqueline Comer
Founder & Cheif Product Officer
Areto Labs, New Zealand

Jacqueline leads the development of AI systems that detect microaggressions, harassment, scams, and misinformation in real time, pioneering fairness-weighted moderation tools that have analysed over 23 million interactions to make digital spaces safer and more inclusive globally.

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Naadiya Moosajee
CEO
Cybherfence, South Africa

Naadiya leads CybherFence, an AI-powered cybersecurity platform securing Africa’s small and medium enterprises through affordable vulnerability diagnostics, bias-aware protection models, and proactive digital resilience.

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AI + Security recognises leaders building the infrastructure, governance frameworks, and defensive architectures that make AI systems secure, accountable, and resilient at scale.

AI + Security

Brooke Motta
Co-founder & CEO
RAD Security, USA

Brooke leads RAD Security’s agentic AI platform, deploying autonomous AI Workers that triage incidents, generate compliance-ready reports, and maintain fully auditable security workflows, strengthening trust and accountability in complex cloud-native environments.

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Priya Guliani
CEO
EarthID, UK

Priya founded EarthID, an AI-powered, privacy-preserving digital identity platform that has completed 1.2M+ verifications, reduced onboarding fraud by 70%, and strengthened digital trust for underserved communities across multiple regions.

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Shanita Sojan
Team Lead - Cybersecurity Compliance
Darktrace, UK

Shanita operationalised ISO/IEC 42001, the world’s first AI Management System certification, embedding governance, risk, and security controls into multi-layered AI systems while advancing global standards for trustworthy AI adoption.

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Thought Leadership in AI

Thought Leadership in AI recognises individuals shaping how society understands, governs, and engages with AI. Through research, public dialogue, policy influence, and education, these leaders are helping ensure AI is developed and deployed responsibly.

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Renée Cummings
Professor
University of Virginia, USA

A global voice on responsible AI, Renée bridges technology, ethics, and governance through research, policy advising, and education that equips institutions and communities to build accountable AI systems.

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Maha Jouini
AI Ethics & Policy Advocate
The Global Center on AI Governance
Tunisia

Maha advances a decolonial approach to AI governance, bringing Arab, Muslim, and African perspectives into global policy conversations through writing, public dialogue, and culturally grounded AI ethics advocacy.

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Julia Pahina
CEO & Co-founder
Fibre Fale, New Zealand

As Co-Founder of Fibre Fale, Julia is building Pacific-centred AI literacy and leadership, ensuring Pacific communities are empowered to shape AI rather than simply experience its impacts.

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AI Wild Card recognises bold, boundary-pushing work that does not fit neatly into traditional sectors. These finalists are using AI in creative and unexpected ways to address urgent societal challenges and expand what responsible AI can achieve.

AI Wild Card

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Rhiana Spring
Executive Director & Founder
Spring ACT, USA

Through Spring ACT, Rhiana built Sophia, a multilingual AI companion that helps survivors of domestic violence anonymously access legal information, assess their rights, and connect with support services across 172 countries.

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Marine Collins Ragnet
Head of Innovative Research
New York University, Peace Research and Education Program, USA

Marine is pioneering community-controlled AI infrastructure across the Global South, building data commons and governance systems that enable communities in Malawi, Kenya, and the Philippines to design, govern, and benefit from AI systems themselves.

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Dinah Buyeke Masanda
Founder & CEO
Project GLO, Kenya

Dinah’s AI platform GLO (Guiding Light and Opportunity) helps homeless women and children access shelters, legal aid, counselling, and job opportunities through multilingual conversational AI built around dignity and consent.

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