Meet Some of the Young Leaders on the Forbes 30 Under 30 List 2025

Forbes has just unveiled the 2025 30 under 30 List for North America.

Every year, Forbes releases a 30 under 30 listicle featuring trailblazers from various industries. The 2025 North American list of honorees has been published, and as usual, it features 600 trailblazers. The list highlights young leaders changing the world in media, sports, healthcare, and many other fields.

Here are some young Black people on the list who are driving progress through equity, leadership, and innovation.

CJ Harrington

At Hogan Lovells, one of the world’s largest law firms, CJ Harrington counsels corporations considering joint venture transactions, entrepreneurs trying to start companies, and sports franchises putting together sponsorship deals or having salary disputes.

He has been involved in deals involving the recent purchases of the Washington Commanders, the Denver Broncos, and Olympique Lyonnais Féminin.

Joel Bervell

Fourth-year med school student Joel Bervell, known online as the “Medical Mythbuster,” is a Ghanaian-American creator who uses social media to educate his 1 million followers about racial disparities in medicine. 

In 2023, he was a TED Fellow, an honoree on the Forbes 30 Under 30 local list for Seattle, and a TikTok Changemaker Award recipient. He was also named to the UN-recognized Most Influential People of African Descent list for health and wellness. 

Bervell has spoken with the Today Show and Good Morning America, been called a “revolutionary” by Scientific American, and published commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine, NPR, the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, and the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

Kahlil Greene

Kahlil Greene is the founder and CEO of Gen Z Historian, a TikTok channel and educational media company dedicated to uncovering “hidden history” often overlooked in standard curricula. He has won a Peabody Award and two Emmy nominations. He also has a book deal with Penguin Random House and is producing a docuseries for National Geographic, which boasts over 23 million subscribers on its YouTube Channel. 

In just three years, Kahlil has secured over $1 million in brand deals and contracts. Last year, the State Department sent Greene to Angola, Africa, to help teach young people to create history videos about the dangers of government corruption.

Golloria George

Golloria George is a beauty influencer focused on promoting makeup inclusivity and representation to her 2 million followers on TikTok. Originally a refugee from South Sudan, she came to the U.S. at the age of 5. 

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While in college, Golloria started posting videos of herself testing makeup on her skin. She has since consulted for major beauty brands like Patrick Ta and Rhode, helping them expand their makeup offerings to be more inclusive.

Jared Quincy Davis

Jared Quincy Davis first faced a shortage of GPUs (powerful chips that run AI systems) as a computer science PhD student at Stanford when he had to use Google Sheets to reserve time slots on a block of hardware. 

A former research scientist on Google DeepMind’s deep learning team, Davis started Foundry in 2022 to provide AI builders access to cloud-based GPUs. The platform is reinventing the public cloud to make state-of-the-art compute accessible to every AI researcher and engineer. 

Backed by Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, M12 Ventures, NEA, Redpoint, and others, Foundry has raised $80 million in venture funding. Davis also chairs Foundry Institute, a nonprofit that aims to address the gaps in compute resources available to academia.

Chinasa T. Okolo

Chinasa T. Okolo is a researcher and policy advisor on AI governance in the Global South. She works as a fellow in the Center for Tech Innovation at Brookings and recently received her computer science Ph.D. from Cornell University. 

Her research examines how African governments can enable effective AI and data governance. The study investigates the impact of data work in the Global South and analyzes algorithmic marginalization in Africa. 

Okolo has recently worked on the International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI, the African Union’s strategy for responsible AI adoption, and Nigeria’s national AI strategy.

Carlynn Greene

Having earned 30 scholarships totaling $125,000 toward undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of North Texas, Carlynn Greene began posting YouTube videos in 2017 and now runs a Scholarship Guru business. Through this business, she offers resources and free training sessions and posts advice on social media on navigating the scholarship landscape. 

Her TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram accounts—where she uses ESP Daniella as a nod to education, scholarships, professional development, and her middle name—exceed 1 million followers and have featured collaborations with Microsoft, Walmart, and Amazon, among others.

Bradford Jones

Jones started his VC career at Insight before joining SignalFire as a principal in 2023. He now leads SignalFire’s New York office and spearheads investments in companies like Tofu, Shade, and Invoke.ai. 

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Beyond his dealmaking, Jones champions founder development through SignalFire’s Founder Performance Mastery platform, which helps startups scale their teams and impact. He also serves on the Harvard Business School’s Rock Summer Fellows and UpRound Ventures boards at his alma mater, the University of Michigan.

Rebecca Carter

Carter is a vice president of corporate development at JPMorgan Chase. She focuses on the bank’s consumer auto business and is responsible for pitching new partnerships, managing clients, and negotiating transactions. 

Carter started her career in equity trading and sales at Morgan Stanley before entering the tech startup scene. She was a senior manager at health insurance startup Oscar Health. From there, she took on a manager role at Carta software development firm, where she worked for two years before joining JPMorgan.

Safir Monroe

Airports have invested millions in building vast parking lots and staffing to manage taxis and shuttles and collect fees from drivers. Monroe has created an AI-powered platform that eliminates the need for these lots, allowing drivers to queue virtually. 

The system alerts drivers when it’s their turn to head to the terminal and pick up passengers. It automatically charges ground transportation fees. Monroe, a Howard University engineering graduate, started UnDelay in 2018 while working as a software engineer at Delta Air Lines. Users include Tulsa International Airport, Columbia Metropolitan Airport, and Asheville Regional Airport.

Read more about the 2025 Forbes “30 Under 30” honorees here.

Main image: Joel Bervell .