Emily Musil Church, PhD, is a senior director at the Milken Institute, where she leads MI Philanthropy's Environment & Social Equity portfolio. She also leads innovation competitions for the Milken Institute.   

Church spent over a decade in academia where, as a college professor, she specialized in African history, global development, and human rights. She then joined the XPRIZE Foundation, operating large-scale global competitions that brought together entrepreneurs, researchers, programmers, designers, engineers, and philanthropists to develop new technology solutions to solve global challenges. As the executive director of the XPRIZE human equity domain, she worked on and oversaw a suite of prizes and initiatives. Church has a broad portfolio of experience in political, non-governmental, entertainment, and academic sectors on strategy, outreach, and operations. She is passionate about exploring the ethics of our rapidly advancing technology and advocating for human equity.  

Church has a PhD and MA from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and graduated with honors from Drew University. She was a Fulbright-Hays Scholar and has conducted in-depth research in over a dozen countries on three continents. She is a public speaker and served on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Senior Advisory Group for Blended Finance and the Advisory Board for CompTIA’s Center for Technology & Workforce Solutions. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees of Drew University.