Nadia Lopez is the founding principal of Mott Hall Bridges Academy, where she is showing the world how underprivileged communities can beat the odds and create positive institutions that have a global impact.

Through blended courses Anant Agarwal is pairing online education with face-to-face student-faculty interactions, reshaping the university campus experience.

Stuart Firestein teaches students and “citizen scientists” that ignorance is far more important to discovery than knowledge.

Rita F. Pierson spent her entire life in or around the classroom, having followed both her parents and grandparents into a career as an educator.

Kandice Sumner thinks we've been looking at the "achievement gap" in education all wrong.

Diane Wolk-Rogers has been a Florida public school teacher for more than three decades.

Tyler DeWitt recognizes that textbooks are not the way to get young people interested in science. Instead, he teaches science by making it fun and fantastical.

As a high school chemistry teacher, Ramsey Musallam expands curiosity in the classroom through multimedia and new technology.

Inspired by Mister Rogers, Sara DeWitt strives to make every child feel special by charting the forefront of new digital mediums where kids spend their time.

Ayah Bdeir is an engineer and artist, and is the founder of littleBits and karaj, an experimental art, architecture and technology lab in Beirut.

Pearl Arredondo helped establish a pilot middle school that teaches students to be good communicators in the 21st century.

Ben Ambridge is the author of "Psy-Q," a sparkling book debunking what we think we know about psychology.

Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya is the founder and president of Kakenya's Dream, an international nonprofit organization leveraging education to empower girls, end harmful traditional practices and transform communities in rural Kenya.

Eduardo Sáenz de Cabezón links science with humor and stories.

In her groundbreaking book Girls & Sex, Peggy Orenstein explores the changing landscape of modern sexual expectations and its troubling impact on adolescents and young women.

ShaoLan want to help people understand China's culture and language, and to bridge the gap between East and West.

With Coursera, Daphne Koller and co-founder Andrew Ng are bringing courses from top colleges online, free, for anyone who wants to take them.

Suki Kim's investigation, "Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite," chronicles her six months undercover in Pyongyang during Kim Jong-Il's final six months. She worked as a teacher and a missionary in a university for future leaders -- all while writing her book.

Despite an attack on his daughter Malala in 2012, Ziauddin Yousafzai continues his fight to educate children in the developing world.

Through education and technology-focused community centers, Aleph Molinari empowers the 5 billion people who cannot access or use the Internet and other technologies.

Shai Reshef wants to democratize higher education.

As the co-founder of Reverb Technologies, the maker of the online dictionary Wordnik, Erin McKean is reshaping how we interact with language itself.

Taylor Mali is one of the most well-known poets to have emerged from the poetry slam movement and one of the few people in the world to have no job other than that of poet.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Angela Lee Duckworth studies intangible concepts such as self-control and grit to determine how they might predict both academic and professional success.

At the Afghan Institute of Learning, Sakena Yacoobi provides teacher training to Afghan women, supporting education for girls and boys throughout the country.

Peter Doolittle is striving to understand the processes of human learning.

A prolific short story writer and blogger since age seven, Adora Svitak (now 12) speaks around the United States to adults and children as an advocate for literacy.

For over 15 years Diana has been a secondary social studies teacher in Wisconsin, Kansas, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Thomas Suarez, a 12 year old, taught himself to build iphone apps.

In 2004, Sal Khan, a hedge fund analyst, began making math tutorials for his cousins. Twelve years later, Khan Academy has more than 42 million registered users from 190 countries, with tutorials on subjects from basic math through economics, art history, computer science, health, medicine and more.