In 2018, Ronan Farrow won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service because of his investigative reporting, which exposed rampant sexual misconduct in Hollywood during the nascent stages of the #MeToo movement. No stranger to Tinseltown, he is the son of actress Mia Farrow and renowned filmmaker Woody Allen. A brilliant child, he graduated from Bard College at the age of 15 and later received a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Before turning to journalism, he held several notable public service positions. He served at UNICEF as a spokesperson; at the State Department as Special Adviser for Humanitarian and NGO affairs in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan; and at the White House as Special Adviser for Global Youth Issues, having been appointed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, as a journalist, he has authored op-eds, essays, and reports for some of the world's top publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The Atlantic, just to name a few. In 2018, Time magazine included him in their list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

When he was just 16, he qualified to study at Yale Law School, making him one of the youngest students to ever enter the prestigious program. But if he was intimidated by the New Haven campus, he certainly didn't show it. During his first year at Yale Law, he took a class on international business transactions taught by Amy Chua, author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," a child-rearing manifesto. “I was told somehow that he was 16, but honestly I just quickly forgot about that,” Chua recalled. “He was incredibly precocious. I don’t think anybody noticed, which is amazing, because we have students at Yale Law School who are in their 30s and 40s.” On top of that, during the summers he gained valuable legal experience by interning at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell and in the Office of the Chief Counsel at the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs. In 2009, he graduated from Yale Law School, where he was editor of the Yale Journal of International Affairs.

In 2013 he returned to New Haven, his resume already significantly thicker than when he left after graduation. The purpose of his visit was to take part in the student-organized TEDxYale conference, which is an independently organized event licensed by TED. Audience members from the Yale and New Haven communities packed the Shubert Theater for the seven-hour event, called “Solve for y" – the key ingredient to their work and inspiration. Farrow, who was among more than 20 speakers from around the world, spoke on the need for younger people to have a voice in society. After examining his own life as a young person, he concluded, "I saw how people don't take us seriously a lot of the time. And I saw how painful that can be. And how we all need to work together, old and young, to overcome that, for our own sakes, and also for all of our security and prosperity."