Antoinette Banks

Antoinette Banks is a woman of faith, award-winning cognitive scientist, and founder of Expert IEP, an educational technology company that has served over 4,200 families across 40+ school districts. She is completing her Ph.D. in Learning and Mind Sciences with a Designated Emphasis in Computational Social Science at UC Davis. Her dissertation, "Rewriting the Rules: Computational Detection of Linguistic Barriers to Family Agency in IEPs," uses large language models to analyze how language patterns in educational documents shape family decision-making. This research directly informs Expert IEP's AI-powered tools. Her work has earned over $1.4 million in funding, including the Black Ambition $1 million grand prize, NewSchools Venture Fund award, and Yass Prize, along with fellowships from Ford Foundation, Pahara, Halcyon, and Camelback. She is the author of Better Than a Diagnosis: A Single Parent's Guide to Autism and creator of the Family Mattering Framework. What started as a way to help her own daughter has helped thousands of others. Her daughter is now studying biological systems engineering with aspirations in nanotechnology, proof of what's possible when families have the tools to fight for their children's futures.