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PANELISTS

Aisha Mills
Quality Assurance Training Specialist at Maximus

Aisha is a quality assurance training specialist for the New York Independent Assessors Project (NYIAP) program and has over 25+ years of clinical experience, five years in clinical education and has been with Maximus since 2022. Aisha obtained her Crucial Conversations facilitator certification in 2023 and regularly leads challenging discussions each month. She has a passion for empowering and engaging learners and mentoring students interested in careers in healthcare and sharing her experiences with student and adult learners, which led her to create Tomorrow is Right Now, LLC. Her passion for mentoring is rooted in connection which allows her to share her message with diverse audiences, leaving a lasting impression and motivating people to take action in pursuing their dreams. Aisha is a member of the Rochester Black Nurses Association (RBNA) as well as the Chi Eta Phi Nursing Sorority, and holds a master's in leadership and health systems administration and a bachelor's in nursing. In her spare time, Aisha enjoys cooking, baking and engaging in various RBNA community service projects. Additionally, Aisha is focused on personal growth and sharing her knowledge and experience to inspire others who would like to choose a career path within healthcare. Aisha has volunteered for “Kool Nerds,” an organization out of NYC that exposes middle schoolers to various careers in healthcare and volunteered as a speaker for the 2023 graduating class of the Rochester Educational Opportunity Center (REOC). Aisha has also been a panelist for the Open Arms Foundation, speaking to the youth at Hillside.

Julie Miller
Director of Thought Leadership for Financial Resilience at AARP

Julie Miller is director of thought leadership for financial resilience at AARP, where she propels new conversations and cultivates partnerships that challenge the status quo of longevity and empower people to have the financial and economic stability to live longer, healthier lives. Prior to joining AARP, Dr. Miller spent a decade as a researcher at the MIT AgeLab, where she advanced interdisciplinary and translational social science research about planning for longer lives. She has served as a Rappaport Public Policy Fellow through Harvard University’s Rappaport Institute with the Massachusetts Executive Office of Elder Affairs, a lecturer and program coordinator at Northeastern University, Boston University and UC Berkeley, and a contributor to major news outlets such as The New York Times, Barron’s, Rethinking65 and CNBC and numerous peer-reviewed academic journals. Dr. Miller received her doctorate of philosophy in social work at Boston College, her masters in social work from The University of California, Berkeley, and her bachelors of science from Northeastern University.

Colleen Flaherty
Senior Editor of Special Content at Inside Higher Ed

Colleen Flaherty, senior editor of special content, previously served as Student Voice editor for Inside Higher Ed. Prior to joining the publication in 2012, Colleen was military editor at the Killeen Daily Herald, outside Fort Hood, Texas. Before that, she covered government and land use issues for the Greenwich Time and Hersam Acorn Newspapers in her home state of Connecticut. After graduating from McGill University in Montreal with a degree in English literature, Colleen taught English and English as a second language in public schools in the Bronx, New York. She earned her M.S.Ed. from City University of New York Lehman College as part of the New York City Teaching Fellows program.

Aaron Guest, Ph.D., M.P.H., M.S.W.
Assistant Professor of Aging at Arizona State University

M. Aaron Guest is an interdisciplinary trained social-environmental gerontologist and assistant professor of aging at the Center for Innovation in Healthy and Resilient Aging at Arizona State University. Through his research, he seeks to develop novel, tailored health interventions that can be utilized to increase access and utilization of critical health programs and services for older adults and their families. In short, he aims to create the optimal person-environment fit for the most advantageous health benefits for individuals as they age. Dr. Guest serves as chair of the secretariat of the Age-Friendly University Global Network, a consortium of higher education institutions committed to promoting positive and healthy aging and enhancing the lives of older adults.

Ben Upton
Freelance Journalist and Deep Dive Report Author

Ben Upton is a freelance journalist based in Washington. He served as Times Higher Education’s Europe reporter between November 2021 and October 2023 and previously covered European research policy for Research Professional News. Before graduating from City, University of London’s journalism school in 2017, he worked in academic publishing and taught at a private university in Wuhan, China.

Rachel Hirsch
Vice President of Public Partnerships at the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL)

As vice president of public partnerships, Rachel Hirsch coordinates expanding CAEL’s relationship with policymakers by surfacing common goals and initiatives to engage public sector stakeholders with the organization’s vision and mission. She also focuses on directing the work of CAEL’s SNAP Education & Training grant initiative. Hirsch has a history of facilitating and forging partnerships across government, non-profit and the private sector to achieve common goals, and she also works at building broad support for reform and leads engagement with various state-level and government entities. She has brought attention to these issues through speaking engagements across the country and has authored several publications on numerous topics in the field, from work-based learning to financial aid. Experienced in public policy, Hirsch most recently served as a senior policy analyst, postsecondary education at the National Governors Association (NGA), where she was responsible for programmatic, staff and budgetary oversight and execution of multiple projects aimed at increasing equitable economic opportunity. She oversaw the final phase of the Policy Academy on Scaling Work-Based Learning, engaging 19 state teams over two years, and launched a related project focused on apprenticeship to support the transportation industry. She also led projects focused on partnerships with community colleges, equity and higher education for incarcerated students. Before that, Hirsch was a state network manager at National Skills Coalition (NSC), where she led the organization’s inaugural policy academy on work-based learning and organized multi-state coalitions to help expand access to and success in education and training programs. Hirsch also previously ran a research project at Northwestern University focused on helping underserved high schoolers improve their performance in job interviews, and served as a graduate intern with the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Hirsch received her Master of Public Policy from Georgetown University and earned her Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies from Northwestern University. She is on the steering committee for NEXTversity and the Southwest DC Community Center fundraising committee.