Abess Makki, a first-generation high school and college graduate whose family hails from Sierra Leone, earned his bachelor’s in nutrition and food science at Wayne State University in 2014. Since graduation, he participated in the Summer Venture and Management Program at Harvard Business School and in a TechTown Detroit business incubation program for college students and recent graduates aspiring to launch technology startups. He is founder and CEO of CityInsight, LLC, which builds agile mobile applications for municipal governments to better communicate with their constituents and streamline their own operations. CityInsight’s first product, CityWater™, empowers residents of Detroit to track their water usage on a daily basis. As a student at Wayne State, he was president and co-founder of the National Student Water Association, which built a gravity water system for 100 homes in El Retiro, Honduras. His policy areas of interest include social entrepreneurism and information and technology management.