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Uchenna Moka-Solana
"Making justice accessible to people who need it the most."
I was born and raised in Chicago, a first-generation Nigerian-American.
My parents made sure that my siblings and I never lost touch with who we are or where we came from. Every year, they brought us back to Nigeria to visit family, experience our other culture, and reconnect with the home and way of life that shaped them. At a very early age, I began to notice the stark disparities between the global south and the global north. I was privileged to come from both of those sides and that privilege came with responsibility. A responsibility to live life with empathy and purpose, with a mindset of service guiding how I show up and what I put into the world.
I studied biomedical engineering at Northwestern, driven to combat diseases like sickle cell and Type 2 diabetes that disproportionately affect Black and brown communities. I loved my time in research at the University of Chicago, but I realized I wanted to solve real-world problems in direct collaboration with people.
So I pivoted to private sector consulting, specializing in agile, lean, and human-centered software development. I went on to co-found Pan-African operations for a global firm, spending over three years building software alongside African technologists for African communities. Still, I found myself searching for a deeper kind of impact, one grounded in equity and scaled through public good.
That’s when I discovered 18F, a digital services team within the U.S. government. I hadn’t known that spaces like that existed where engineers, designers, and strategists worked with empathy and intention to serve the American public. It was exactly what I’d been looking for.
One of my proudest contributions there was helping redesign the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division’s public complaint portal. Just one week after launch, the average processing time dropped from 23 days to 7, and today, it’s down to minutes. That wasn’t just a tech upgrade, it made justice more accessible to people who need it most.
Public service is about using your skills to lead beyond yourself, not for profit, but for people and communities. And it’s about caring for your team and yourself, because meaningful service can’t come at the expense of the people doing the serving.
My parents were right: privilege does come with responsibility. And for me, that responsibility has meant using my skills to build systems that serve others with dignity, equity, and care.
