The 41st Annual Everett C. Parker Lecture & Awards Breakfast

Rosenworcel became a commissioner in 2012 and was designated as the agency’s acting chair and later permanent chair by President Biden in 2021. Previously, she served as senior communications counsel for the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.  Under her FCC leadership, the agency has worked to promote greater opportunity, accessibility, and affordability for communications services to help ensure that all Americans get a fair shot at 21st-century success.

From fighting to protect net neutrality to ensuring access to the internet for students caught in the Homework Gap, Chair Rosenworcel has been a consistent champion for connecting all. She is responsible for developing policies to help expand the reach of broadband to schools, libraries, hospitals, and households across the country. Under her leadership, the FCC adopted two orders improving access and affordability of communications for incarcerated people and moved quickly to implement the Affordable Connectivity Program, providing high-speed broadband internet subsidies to low-income people.

Duckworth was elected to the Senate in 2016 after serving two terms in the U.S. House. In 2004, she lost her legs and partial use of one arm during service with the Illinois National Guard during the Iraq War. She later advocated for veterans as director of the Illinois Department of Veterans’ Affairs and as an assistant secretary of Veterans Affairs in the Obama administration. She is a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. After she became the first senator to give birth while in office, she sent a symbolic message to the rest of the country by working for historic rules change that allows senators to bring their infant children onto the Senate floor.

During a fellowship at Public Knowledge, Dr. Valentin published a hard-hitting blog #TechPolicySoWhite and reformed the organization’s annual Emerging Tech Conference, renaming it Emerging Tech for Social Change. While serving as a special advisor to FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, she focused on issues such as broadband access and adoption, prison phone justice, and future of work policies that center communities of color and low-income people. In response to the country’s movement for racial justice, she assisted Commissioner Starks in launching the FCC’s Early Career Staff Diversity Initiative to diversify the tech and telecommunications policy space by providing paid internships to underrepresented students and increased recruitment from HBCUs and other MSIs. In her current position at the National Urban League, Dr. Valentin is once again spotlighting how technology policy impacts people of color, particularly when it comes to economic empowerment in areas ranging from spectrum policy to artificial intelligence.