This Thursday at Change, Kushal Chakrabarti will be discussing his work bringing student loans to the developing world through the power of person-to-person microfinance. Please note the new room number. "Kushal is the co-founder and CEO of Vittana. Vittana makes it possible for students around the world to get a student loan to finish college. We work with microfinance organizations to develop student loan programs from scratch, often for the first time ever in their respective countries. Students from those programs appear on http://vittana.org and, because of tiny $25 and $50 loans made by people around the world, are able to attend college, get real degrees, and find better jobs. Today, there are student loans in Peru, Paraguay and Nicaragua because of Vittana with new programs spinning up Mongolia, Cambodia, Philippines and many other countries. In past lives, Kushal was a computational biologist (we couldn’t make that up if we tried) and artificial intelligence expert. Most recently, he ran the recommendations team (“We thought you might like Y because you bought X”) at Amazon.com. He was recently voted as the “#1 game-changer” in philanthropy by Huffington Post." What: Kushal Chakrabarti on Enabling Student Loans in the Developing World When: Thursday, January 7 at Noon Where: UW, Paul Allen Center, Room 203