Jessica Ladd

Why you should listen

Jessica Ladd is the founder of Callisto, formerly Sexual Health Innovations, and a TED Fellow. She has been honored as a fearless changemaker by the Case Foundation, an emerging innovator by Ashoka and American Express, and as the Civic Hacker of the Year by Baltimore Innovation Week.

Before founding Sexual Health Innovations, Ladd worked in the White House Office of National AIDS Policy as a public policy associate at The AIDS Institute and as a sexual health educator and researcher for a variety of organizations. She also founded The Social Innovation Lab in Baltimore and a chapter of FemSex at Pomona College. She received her Masters in Public Health at Johns Hopkins and her BA in Public Policy/Human Sexuality at Pomona College. She left a PhD program in infectious disease epidemiology at Johns Hopkins in order to pursue work at Sexual Health Innovations full-time.

Ladd has created a platform, Callisto, for survivors of sexual assault to electronically document and report what happened to them. The platform helps identify serial sexual offenders, allowing victims to either (1) directly report to an institution or (2) store their identity in escrow and only release it to an institution if another victim names the same assailant.