Sophia Kianni

Sophia Kianni is an Iranian-American social entrepreneur and activist. She is the co-founder of Phia, a forthcoming digital fashion platform, alongside Stanford University peer Phoebe Gates.

She is also the founder of Climate Cardinals, the world’s largest youth-led climate nonprofit, with 16,000 volunteers in 80-plus countries. She is the youngest United Nations advisor in
U.S. history and was most recently appointed to serve on the EPA’s National Youth Advisory Council.

Sophia has amassed a following of over 300,000 across social media platforms, and her work has been profiled by The New York Times, CNN, Vogue, Business Insider, BBC, NPR, ELLE, The Guardian, NBC and even on the front page of The Washington Post. She has also authored opinion pieces for outlets such as TIME magazine, MTV News, Cosmopolitan, Teen Vogue and Yale Climate Connections.

Sophia is a prolific public speaker and has spoken at major events, including FORTUNE Impact Initiative, Coachella, IBM Think, Arch Summit, Bermuda Climate Summit, Web Summit, The Washington Post Climate Summit, WIRED Green and The New York Times Climate Forward. She has spoken at universities across the world, including Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Yale, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Cambridge and Princeton. Sophia’s debut TED Talk as the closing speaker at the inaugural TED Countdown Conference has 2-plus million views.

Sophia has sat on boards and advisory councils for The New York Times, World Economic Forum, Ashoka, American Lung Association, REFORM Alliance and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way
Foundation. She has been named VICE Media’s youngest Human of the Year, a National Geographic Young Explorer, on Business Insider’s Climate Action 30, among BBC’s 100 Women
and to Forbes 30 under 30.