Brown Class of 2022

Zoë Balestri is a Brown ‘22 undergraduate activist, writer, farmer, and filmmaker, studying Literary Arts and developing an Independent Concentration in Agricultural Humanities. An aspiring screenwriter, she is the Head of Production for Brown Motion Pictures. In 2020, she was awarded the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial for the best poem by an undergraduate or graduate student. Zoë became an activist for reproductive rights in high school when she designed and modeled a dress she fashioned from condoms and Planned Parenthood stickers, garnering accolades from Cosmopolitan and Teen Vogue as well as the attention of Breitbart. A city-dwelling Manhattanite, she has worked summers since age nine on a third-generation, women-run dairy farm in rural Pennsylvania where she learned about heifer midwifery and pasture rotations and developed her passion for animal husbandry, sustainable agriculture, and the workforce that sustains its increasingly fragile way of life. Through her writing, farm work, and studies, she examines how policy, politics, and culture can repair both rural communities and humanity’s ethically fraught relationships to animals and the earth.

Brown Class of 2022

Isaiah Paik is an internet politician, an independent musical artist, and an undergraduate Sociology concentrator at Brown. In one year, his passionately progressive political advocacy has gathered 60,000 followers to his TikTok page (@paik4president). Isaiah has previously performed journalism work with his local NPR affiliate, and currently performs geographic analysis of historical archives for the Brown Population Studies and Training Center. In his self-published academic analyses, songs, and videos, Isaiah represents a new wave of political youth advocacy, with millions of views and likes to his name.

Chief Executive Officer of Solugen

Gaurab Chakrabarti is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Solugen, which he co-founded with Sean Hunt in 2016 with the mission to decarbonize the chemicals industry. Gaurab is a physician-scientist focused on using biology in unconventional ways to solve incredibly complex problems. As CEO, Gaurab is using his insights from enzyme engineering to develop and scale chemienzymatic process technologies.

Gaurab studied computational neuroscience as an undergraduate at Brown University and received his MD & PhD in cancer biology and enzymology at the University of Texas. Gaurab is an author or co-author on more than 20 peer-reviewed publications and patents and an alumnus of Y Combinator and Forbes 30 Under 30 in Industry and Manufacturing. Gaurab lives in Houston with his wife, daughter, and Goldendoodle.