Staff

As the Executive Director of CET, Gabriela brings inspiration from her own experience growing up as an immigrant in the United States to the Cortex Innovation Community. In addition to running CET’s flagship training program for entrepreneurs, Square One, she is responsible for an array of programs and services to support the entrepreneurs in residence at CET and throughout the St. Louis ecosystem. Through her podcasts,  Auténtico and We Live Here Auténtico in collaboration with St. Louis Public Radio, she empowers and showcases bilingual Latinx professionals and small business owners and through her work at the BALSA Foundation she promotes social equity and prosperity

Gabriela has dedicated her career to empowering others to improve their personal and professional well-being through professional and business development.  She has been recognized as a thought-leader in social innovation and entrepreneurship and was named one of the Top 100 people to know in St. Louis to succeed in business as well as a Diverse Business Leader in the St. Louis region. She is also an author, a marathon runner, and business owner.  Gabriela holds a bachelor’s degree in Marketing from the University of Missouri – Columbia and an MBA from Lindenwood University.  She is a Diversity Initiative Fellow and just graduated from the 2021 Leadership MO class.

As program manager, Rikki is critically important to the development and coordination of CET’s programming for entrepreneurs.

Rikki comes to CET with 15 years of higher and adult education experience particularly in life-long and self-directed learning along with operations and logistics. She received her Bachelor of Science degree from Tennessee State University,  Masters of Public Administration degree from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and Doctor of Philosophy in Education degree focusing on adult education from University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Prior to joining CET, Rikki was responsible for daily and special operations at Harris Stowe State University.  Additionally, she provided mentoring, training and development of students through their college matriculation.  She maintained operational and capital budgets, developed internal process and procedure for programming, and maintained organization procurements. Rikki is extremely passionate in adult learning, evaluation, assessment, mentoring, leadership, training and development.