Nathaniel Xavier Dodson III

Nathaniel “Trey” Dodson is the son of Mary Dodson and a Niswonger Scholar from Jefferson County, Tennessee.  He helped with the preservation of African American culture in Jefferson County through various projects, including Nelson Merry Makeover and Stories in Stones.

Trey is a graduate of Vanderbilt University, where he earned a double major in organizational behavior and corporate strategy with a minor in leadership and organizational effectiveness.  At Vanderbilt, he was a member of the Black Student Alliance and president of Project I Am.  He was president and founder of Kenya Dig it?, an organization through which he traveled to Kenya to lecture at an all-girls boarding school, funded by social businesses. He received the WAVE Award for Diversity Awareness and the John T. and Lizzie Allen Upper-Class McGill Award.  He participated in the Vanderbilt Maymester Program in Switzerland and completed his senior capstone internship in London with MediaXchange.

After Vanderbilt, Trey joined Deloitte’s Human Capital Consulting Practice in Dallas, Texas, where he spent six years leading multimillion-dollar technology adoption projects across the public sector and Fortune 100 companies.

Trey earned his MBA from Stanford University on a full scholarship through Deloitte’s Graduate School Assistance Program (GSAP).   At Stanford, he was a 2023 recipient of the Impact Design Immersion Fellowship through the Center for Social Innovation for his project “Pay Me in Equity,” which examined equity-related interventions that senior finance executives can use to drive change within their firms and across portfolio companies.

Trey currently resides in East Tennessee and is laser focused on the role AI can play in democratizing access to opportunity, particularly for people and communities that have historically been left out of the technology conversation.  Drawing on his background in technology adoption and organizational change, he is working to close the gap between places like his hometown in Jefferson County and the innovation hubs of Silicon Valley by helping others build AI literacy through practical use.  He is working on a book titled From Dumpling Valley to Silicon Valley: Bridging the Last 2500 Miles, which explores that journey and mission.