These women show ‘superpowers’ through courage, curiosity and bold ideas 

Women Who Empower summit honored 31 innovators, celebrating human leadership, resilience and community in an AI-driven era.

by Alena Kuzub

November 14, 2025

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From brochures and stage decorations, to lipsticks, dresses and purses, the ballroom on the 17th floor of the East Village building of Northeastern University’s Boston campus was accentuated with bold shades of red Thursday afternoon — the signature color of Women Who Empower.

The space vibrated with invigorating, joyful energy and collective pride, as members and guests of the university’s global, women-led entrepreneurial initiative and ecosystem gathered for the annual summit, celebrating 31 honorees of the 2025 Women Who Empower Innovator Awards.

The Innovator Awards recognize Northeastern students, graduates and affiliated entrepreneurs making an impact in fields such as health, technology, sustainability and social innovation. Over the past five years, Women Who Empower has invested more than $1.8 million in the winners as they build and grow their ventures.

“The Women Who Empower community has always embodied the very best of what makes us human,” said Diane Nishigaya MacGillivray, Northeastern’s senior vice president for university advancement and co-founder of the initiative, referring to the theme of the summit, “Human leadership in the age of AI.”

Opening the summit, she said human leadership is more important than ever, and human attributes such as curiosity, creativity, empathy, persistence, the ability to connect, encourage, form friendships, and take risks distinguish great leaders and make people “robot-proof.” 

MacGillivray said that curiosity, a core Northeastern value, requires courage when individuals grow comfortable in their expertise and multiyear experience, tempted to act with a lot of certainty.

“Curiosity really pushes you out of your comfort zone and into the unknown,” she said. “It is our superpower, our strategic enabler, our key to adaptation, the ability to learn, unlearn and relearn.”

The program for the summit included a series of moderated discussions with leaders in professional investment, entrepreneurship, hospitality and education.

Anna Palmer, co-founder of Fashion Project, XFactor Ventures and Boston Legacy Football Club, the new National Women’s Soccer League team, shared her journey into entrepreneurship, highlighting her life’s mission to create economic opportunities for disadvantaged populations. 

Palmer stressed the importance of getting to know oneself, saying yes, taking as many great people along as possible, identifying unique opportunities and pushing through when things get hard.

“Anyone in this room who started something knows you have to be a little delusional,” she said. “Because if any of us knew how hard the thing was, we wouldn’t do it to begin with.”

Doing something new that has the potential to make a big impact, Palmer said, is going to be hard. Her advice was to find co-founders who can lift each other up, help lighten the burden and step up when “your tank is on empty.”

Karen Akunowicz, a chef, restaurateur and television personality who won the 2018 James Beard Award, spoke about applying to a culinary school instead of graduate school, working in restaurants, learning to raise capital to open her own place and her commitment to maintaining a personal touch despite using AI for recipe formatting.

She emphasized the importance of resilience, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she pivoted to boxing pasta and shipping pasta kits nationwide with an online marketplace for gourmet food called Goldbelly.  

“As women, as anyone who has ever been othered — women, queer people, people of color — we are elastic, because we have to be, because no one has ever said, ‘Here you go. This is for you. You take this,’” she said. “When you have that in you, it’s something that you can utilize, you pull out when you need it.”

Akunowicz also discussed her “why,” what motivates her to keep going and take on new projects. She said it was twofold. First of all, she was creating a better life for her family and her 3-year-old daughter. 

“My other ‘why’ is ‘why not?’” she said. “If there’s an opportunity, why not me? Chances are people don’t want to give me that opportunity, but I’m going to go after it, because somebody’s going to get that opportunity … somebody’s going to do the things that I have interest in doing, and why shouldn’t it be me?”

Meghan Hughes, head of workforce development and arts and heritage at Bank of America, spoke about her journey of self-reinvention and pivots from a reluctant art historian to becoming the first female president of the Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI). She highlighted her efforts to transform CCRI, achieving the highest graduation rates in 20 years and significantly improving completion rates for Black and Hispanic students. 

The impact she could make by helping a student with enormous capacity and potential find their way forward, Hughes said, was what drove her on her path.

“My truest path when I really was serious about what got me out of bed in the morning, it was about the first-generation students who had so much intelligence, so much promise, so much drive, and they just needed the same thing I was born into, which was access to social capital and someone that really believed they could do it and was going to work hard to help them get there,” she said.

Hughes emphasized the importance of partnerships between academia and industry, noting Bank of America’s commitment to hiring 8,000 community college graduates over the next five years.

She also praised Northeastern University for providing students with access not only to a world-class education but also to the workforce through real-world training.

“Northeastern is really one of the most, if not the most, disruptive, important universities in the United States,” she said.

This year, the Innovator Awards expanded to provide long-term support for the top honorees through a new fellowship program and a new Innovator Follow-on Fund that will provide capital and strategic support for past recipients.

“No matter what happens to your innovation and your project that you work on now, know and remember this is for the rest of your life,” said Betsy Ludwig, executive director of women’s entrepreneurship at Northeastern. “We believe in you. We think you’re going to go on to great things.”