Elio Torres is a student at Harvard College where he is an A.B. candidate in Government on the Public Policy track with a secondary in Energy and Environment. He attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City where he was exposed to education policy as Class President and Hispanic Student Union President; he was a founding member of an interscholastic effort to diversify NYC’s specialized schools and served on a non-profit for education equity in Brooklyn. Winning an award from Scholastic for Best Teen Writing of 2021, his activist journalism helped pass legislation to expand permit access for New York’s street vendor community, earning him a speaker acknowledgement from the City Council.

Elio arrived at Harvard ready to develop his appreciation for policy in the context of his wider entrepreneurial spirit, ultimately working both muscles throughout his first three years. Within his first month, he joined the Harvard Kennedy Institute of Politics economic policy team to reform Massachusetts Opportunity Zones and subsequently became a team lead of the climate policy team, working on food deserts with the World Wildlife Fund’s Market Institute. He then discovered his passion for Indigenous policy, tied to his Guaraní ancestry. At the top of Sophomore year, he worked on a policy project with the White House Council of Native American Affairs, preparing a team brief on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Alongside his professor, he was a founding policy chair of the Quechua Initiative of Global Indigeneity at Harvard, a post he has used to incubate policy projects like the one that inspired his Mountaintop-Rivet application. He is excited to continue to explore the domain of Indigenous policy, library innovation, and archival, comparative policy research.

Separately, Elio is no stranger to the advent of Artificial Intelligence and spent his Sophomore year learning about the plethora of AI development at Harvard-MIT; he is now working on a related newsletter education initiative to connect those interested in building projects that change the world. Most recently, he has joined the Harvard Legal Hackers at the Harvard Law School and is working on his own temporary battery company with a local incubator.