Chris Eide Azevedo has been a leader in education and nonprofits over the past two decades. His experience is deep and wide-ranging, starting in the classroom where he taught middle school mathematics for five years, to nonprofit founder and executive director, university lecturer, author, senior government official, and school and school network leader. During COVID-19, he led a successful turnaround of one of the country's historic charter school networks in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and recently led a successful turnaround of the Meeting Street Academy in Charleston, South Carolina.

At Topminnow, Chris is the architect of our Data Together work. By combining his experience as a certified data analyst and former school leader, Chris can not only bring traditionally siloed data into one hub, he can analyze aggregated data in a school’s context, which is essential to quality data analytics. Together with the thought-partnership that Chris is able to provide to Topminnow’s school partners, data analysis and corresponding action-planning becomes streamlined as schools move toward a schoolwide culture of collaboration around data-inspired decision-making.

As a nonprofit founder and leader, Chris built and led political movements around the country at the state and local levels to change policy to better ensure that all students have access to a high-quality education. As an appointed senior government official, he directed New Mexico's statewide vision for educator quality and later additionally led strategic communications for its Public Education Department.

Chris sits on boards of directors for several nonprofit organizations locally and nationally focusing on education and politics, and loves to play music, hike, sail boats, scuba dive, and fly airplanes. Chris’ work has been published or mentioned in books, research findings, and newspapers across the country over the past fifteen years. He is a Pahara-Aspen Institute Fellow, a member of the Royal Society of the Arts and the British-American Project in the UK, and a Teach For America alumnus. He holds bachelors degrees in chemistry and philosophy from the University of Washington and a master’s degree in education policy and management from Harvard University. Chris is a member of the inaugural cohort of EdLEADers at Stanford University and is a Google-certified data analyst.