Kristel Leif

KRISTEL LEIF is the CEO of the educational project Solaride and has a decade-long experience in the banking sector where she worked in the sales and marketing department and led different teams. She has a bachelor’s degree in history (University of Tartu) and a master’s degree in organisational behavior (Tallinn University).

Solaride is an interdisciplinary education and cooperation project which developed and built in 2021 the first solar car in the Baltic states. Since 2020, more than 300 students have been involved with the project and Kristel states that for Solaride the development of a solar car is, in its essence, also a tool for developing future talents and popularising technology education. For that reason, Solaride has a goal of creating a unique learning platform “Solaride Academy”. Furthermore, Solaride plans to build a next-generation solar car that would compete against the other solar cars constructed by the world's top universities in October 2023 in Australia Bridgestone World Solar Challenge. Kristel has been a member of the Solaride team since the beginning of 2020 when she started working there as a marketing mentor and helped to develop the project’s brand.

In addition, Kristel is also a mother to a 4-year-old Jete and thus challenges herself to find a healthy balance between her personal and family life and Solaride. She also loves to read and believes that besides reading books about business and self-help it is also important to read fiction because the latter cultivates creativity, general knowledge, and language skills, which those young people who only focus on business handbooks are often in great need of. Kristel sees herself as a seeker of opportunities, an innovator, and a designer or in other words, as a person who is excited to create something new and do things differently than they have been done before. “Solaride has offered me loads of these kinds of opportunities in the previous years,” she states.