Our Founder

Stephanie Fine Sasse

Founder & Director

Stephanie is an experiential designer and storyteller driven by the art and science of opening minds.

Trained in neuroscience, psychology, and learning sciences at Harvard University and Graduate School of Education, she’s co-published on emotions and decision-making in leading academic journals, created award-winning courses on media literacy and science communication, and helped launch a global movement for equitable and evidence-driven policies.

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STEPHANIE IN THE MEDIA:

Back in 2010, I sat in a room with a handful of people who held the lives of hundreds of teenagers in their hands. I wasn’t one of them. I was a new research assistant studying the development of the human brain. I was also a college student volunteering with a local nonprofit as part of my thesis, which is how I ended up in that room. Turns out, those two worlds weren’t nearly as far apart as I’d expected.

I listened to the powers-that-were discuss the reasoning behind policies like mandatory minimums and treating 16 year olds as adults. I cringed as they discussed the culpability of adolescents that commit crimes in groups. All I could think about was what I was learning in the lab: Teenagers respond to peers very differently than children or adults. The adolescent brain is undergoing unique developmental changes that lead to behaviors that are, in many cases, unlikely to carry over into adulthood. Poverty, context, and others’ implicit biases can all disproportionately impact young people — particularly young Black and Latinx people — involved with the justice system.

Speaking strictly scientifically, the law wasn’t fair. And if I knew that after spending less than a year in the lab, why didn’t they? Where were the pipelines to ensure that these conversations were informed by the science of how people actually work? By responsible engagement with the evidence? And likewise, where were the pipelines to ensure that the science was being shaped by the experiences of people in the real world? And if the juvenile justice system was so deeply misaligned with our collective knowledge — what else was?

I spent the next ten years trying to answer those questions. I poured over decades of underutilized scholarship at the meeting point of science and society. I dove headfirst into the complex worlds of why we do — and don’t — change our minds, why we attach so adamantly to our beliefs, how our information ecosystems operate, the different ways of knowing beyond Western science, the spread of misinformation, and the critical distinctions between how we learn as kids versus how we learn as adults. I continued working in the lab, where I gained a better foothold on the role of emotion and social connection on our decision-making. And, eventually, I began synthesizing everything I’d learned to imagine what a path towards a more sustainable, equitable, and informed world might look like.

The Plenary is the first step on that path. Curious, compassionate, open, and engaged communities are the keystone of an informed democracy, and accessible knowledge is the glue. Through experimentation, radical collaboration, design, art, and the foundation laid by those who came before us, we’re committed to cultivating an inclusive culture of knowledge seeking, sharing, and integration into our lives.

We know that this isn’t where the work ends, but our hope is that, for many, this is where the work can begin.

Stephanie Fine Sasse

FOUNDER & CREATIVE DIRECTOR