Alumni Awards

Jon Fasoli ’09 Brittany Hosea-Small Alumn WISCONSIN ALU Major: Art Artist and Teacher, artworxLA Carlos Eduardo Gacharná ’17 Wisconsin School of Business Adrian Gutierrez Major: Sociology Director of Research, Distributed AI Research Institute Alex Hanna MS’13, PhD’16

Forward Award

The Forward Award acknowledges rising stars in various fields who exemplify the Wisconsin Idea through an emphasis on service, discovery and progress. This award celebrates young alumni who have demonstrated exceptional early- career achievement and a positive impact on their professions.

Major: Business, Finance, Investment, and Banking Chief Product and Design Officer, Intuit Mailchimp Jon Fasoli’s passion for technology led him to Intuit’s Rotational Development Program in Mountain View, California, where he launched the company’s first-ever operating system for mobile devices. Within five years, he’d built the company’s global payment platform and was tapped to establish a new business in the company, dedicated to developing products and services for the self-employed. In 2019, Fasoli was named vice president of the company’s small-business segment, which grew rapidly under his leadership to more than 7 million small-business and self- employed customers worldwide. In particular, the QuickBooks Self-Employed platform grew from zero to 1 million paid subscribers in three years. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Fasoli mobilized his team to help connect QuickBooks customers with PPE loans and other tools to help keep their businesses afloat. He found himself deeply inspired by his clients’ resiliency and creativity during the bleakest months of lockdowns. In fall 2021, Intuit acquired Mailchimp, a leading marketing platform for small businesses. The $12 billion deal is Intuit’s largest acquisition to date, and Fasoli was named Mailchimp’s chief product and design officer. His team is on the forefront of developing generative AI capabilities for small businesses. Beyond Intuit, Fasoli has served as an adviser and early investor at several start-ups. He also holds 12 patents, which he says “are all very nerdy and will put an audience to sleep.”

Along with earning her doctorate in sociology, Alex Hanna minored in journalism and mass media. She’s Egyptian American, and her dissertation focused on the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. She also took part in the historic Madison 2011 labor protest against a bill to curtail collective bargaining rights for state employees. She found this a formative experience that later fed into her interest on the impact of AI on labor issues. Hanna became an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, but she realized quickly that she wanted to make a more direct impact on the technologies she was studying. “I really want to change things so that tech doesn’t do as much harm in the world,” she says. In 2018 she moved to the Bay Area, started at Google, and found her way to the Ethical AI team. When Hanna’s manager, computer scientist Timnit Gebru, was fired in a high- profile response to her public warnings about AI racism and other issues, Hanna followed her to work at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), which Gebru founded after her exit from Google. Hanna is a technologist for DAIR, which aims to both shine a light on current practices in Big Tech and to model community-rooted, rather than corporate profit-driven, methods for building and implementing AI tools. “I’m proud to be imagining different ways of doing research based in thinking about what technology can do for us, rather than being beholden to profits or a set of shareholders,” she says.

Carlos Eduardo Gacharná’s art is closely tied to his preoccupation with migration and identity-making in foreign or hostile places. This perspective makes him a deeply empathic teacher for at-risk youth in Los Angeles. Since 2020, Gacharná has facilitated 450 art workshops, both online and in person, that have Born in Bogotá, Colombia, during the peak years of cartel violence, Gacharná emigrated with his family at age seven. In Colombia, he was already a budding artist, using clay to create imaginative figures. But in Wisconsin, his adolescence was marred by culture shock, housing instability, and close calls with law enforcement. At 16, he took a ceramics class that changed everything. Gacharná spent all of his free time in the high-school studio, and his rekindled passion led to a precollege art program at UW–Madison, which tracked into a bachelor of fine arts degree. At the UW, Gacharná began to develop and teach workshops in juvenile detention centers, youth shelters, and other nontraditional classrooms. In 2017, Gacharná moved to Los Angeles, where he runs after-school teen programming at artworxLA, an arts nonprofit that annually serves 1,000 predominately low-income youth. According to UW assistant professor of glassworking Helen Lee, “Carlos Eduardo believes in the power of art to heal, and his work brings this to communities in deep need of this human magic.” served more than 1,000 students across 40 sites in Wisconsin and California.

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FORWARD AWARD // 15