People We Got To Know in August 2026

Bonnie Herrmann is the kind of person who leans into the conversations most of us spend our whole lives avoiding, and somehow makes them feel less frightening. She talks openly about illness, dying, and grief, not because the subjects are easy, but because she believes we lose something when we only speak about them in whispers. Her own words say it best: she wants to talk about death and "gently push the euphemisms aside." That comfort with hard things started early. Her mom was a hospice nurse when Bonnie was growing up, and the compassion she watched in her mother is something she says she has "proudly absorbed." While she is fortunate to still have her mom with her, she has now counseled many who cannot say the same.

Thoughtful, warm, and unafraid of the dark moments, Bonnie has carried that inherited compassion through her entire professional life, and it is the reason someone who has worked with her describes her as an incredibly thoughtful clinician, skilled at sitting with clients in their hardest moments and offering compassion and sincerity. This is not work she found later in life. She was sitting with grieving children at summer camps in Texas before she was old enough to have a license to do it, and she never really left. In the years since, she has kept company with people facing cancer, dementia, and the end of life, and she says she has dedicated her entire career to this work. She means it. There was never another career.

Map Your Care is what happened when all of that came together. The idea, she has written, had been stewing in her brain for years, building a little more with each hike and each backpacking trip. Nature is what drew her to Colorado in the first place, and the longer she sat with the dying, the more she saw the two speaking to each other: the aspens connected underground by far more than we can see on the surface, the forest devastated by fire until it grows anew. So she built a practice where those lessons come along, where a session might weave in mindfulness, storytelling, or even a guided hike.

Outside the office, you will find her camping, backpacking, biking, packing a good picnic, or hunting down the most beautiful Colorado sunset spots. It fits. Bonnie has spent her whole life helping people find their way through unfamiliar territory. She just happens to love maps, trails, and open skies in her own life too.

Dominika Staniewicz describes her work as the place where neuroscience meets firecracker charisma, and anyone who has seen her on stage would tell you the description fits. People who have watched her speak talk about an energy that is contagious, a warmth that makes brain science feel like a conversation with a friend, and the sense that she is not delivering a speech so much as sharing a part of herself. One group that had her for only thirty minutes walked away with tools whole families could put to use that same evening.

Warm, endlessly curious, and quick to believe in people, Dominika has carried those qualities through more than twenty years of teaching, coaching, and speaking across the United States and Europe, and it is the reason people who have worked alongside her tend to describe her not by what she has built, but by what she helped them see in themselves. One client remembered it simply: she was always open to listen and build me up.

In many ways, Dominika has been a teacher her whole life. Long before she was coaching executives, she was standing in front of classrooms in Warsaw, growing a small language school of twenty students into a community of more than fifteen hundred, and later teaching at a university where students rated her among the top one percent of hundreds of lecturers. Poland's Ministry of Labor appointed her a mediator and negotiator, the kind of trust that only comes to someone both sides of the table believe will listen. Somewhere along that road she found the question that now drives everything she does: what if we could perform at our best not by pushing harder, but by understanding the brain doing the work?

Today that question is her life's work. Certified as an Elite Brain Coach under Dr. Daniel Amen and a specialist in neuroencoding, she helps leaders understand how their brains shape their decisions, their stress, and their resilience, then hands them practical tools they can use the moment they walk out of the room. She has a particular heart for women in leadership, helping them step into demanding roles with clarity and confidence. And when she brought her program Fall in Love with Your Brain into schools, aggression and emotional dysregulation among students dropped by forty percent.

The same care shows up far from any stage. Dominika has spent years on call as a disaster volunteer with the American Red Cross, managing shelters and sitting with people on some of the hardest days of their lives. And though she has headlined stages of her own, she still volunteers as crew at events serving thousands of participants, just as happy working as an usher if it means being part of someone's breakthrough. Her book is called The Magic of Dreaming Big, Acting Small, and Achieving Success, and it may be the best description of how she lives: dream big, take the next small step, and bring everyone around you along for the ride.

Hardworking, service-minded, and quick to act when he sees a way to help, Kamal pays attention to what would make life better for the people around him, and then he quietly goes and does it. You can see it in the small things. Somewhere overseas, an American service member is unwinding after a long deployment with a golf club Kamal helped put in their hands through a charity called Bunkers in Baghdad. He does not make a fuss about it, and that is exactly the point.

That instinct kept turning into companies, three of them before he even finished college, and every one started the same way, with Kamal noticing people who would be better off knowing each other. College students and the family-owned restaurants down the street. Artists and the neighbors who would love their work. These days most of that energy goes into Drip Art Solutions, which began when Kamal saw murals transforming cities overseas and thought his own community would love them too. So he teamed up with a classmate and a Hartford muralist, set up shop a few steps from his old campus, and got to work making it simple for anyone, a homeowner, a business, a whole neighborhood, to bring a wall to life.

When his college asked him why he chose it, Kamal kept his answer simple: Trinity had a great atmosphere for both sports and academics. That might be as close to a personal motto as he has, because Kamal has never seen a reason to choose between working hard and enjoying the people you work beside. He grew up in Missouri City, Texas, where his father, a former Arizona State baseball player, passed the game down to him, and Kamal found his own way onto the field, eventually anchoring the defensive line for Trinity's Bantams. He is still early in his story, and that may be the most exciting thing about him. Wherever he lands next, something will get built, and somebody will be better off because of it.

Warm, organized, and easy to talk to, Roneil has carried those qualities into every room he has entered, and it is the reason people who spend time with him tend to describe him not by what he knows about the markets, but by how well he listens and how simple he makes the complicated feel.

That way with people showed up early. At Baylor University, Roneil took a student startup club that existed mostly as an idea and turned it into something with a life of its own, a place where students who wanted to build things could actually find each other. Around the same time, he spent his senior year as an ambassador for the business school, walking prospective students and their families around campus each week and helping them picture a future there. Building something from the ground up and making people feel at home: those two threads have run through everything he has done since.

Ask him about his work today and you will probably hear the idea he keeps coming back to: most people do not have an investment problem, they have a coordination problem. The families and business owners he works with are usually doing plenty of things right. What they need is someone who can get all the pieces, the investments, the retirement plan, the taxes, the estate, talking to each other. That is what Roneil does at Wells Fargo Advisors, and when a question calls for a specialist, he knows exactly who to bring to the table, because behind him sits one of the most established financial institutions in the country. More than anything, he wants people to walk out of a conversation with him feeling sure about the decision they just made.

In some ways, it is not far from what he was doing on those campus tours, walking alongside people at a big moment in their lives and helping them see where they are headed. The setting has changed. The instinct has not. Roneil Patel is the kind of person who seems to measure success not by the numbers on a statement, but by how much clearer people feel about their future after sitting down with him.

"Roneil comes across as someone willing to fight for what is right regardless of the personal cost. That matters." ~ Charles J de Guara

Ted Vincent is a project and organizational transformation leader with more than three decades of experience bringing structure to complicated initiatives, preparing organizations for change, and keeping large programs moving toward a defined result.

Practical, disciplined, and direct, Ted has worked across telecommunications, healthcare, energy, and enterprise technology, developing a reputation as an engaging consultant with strong people skills and a clear understanding of what it takes to move a project from planning through execution. He understands that timelines, processes, and deliverables matter, but also that even the strongest plan will fail when the people responsible for carrying it out are not properly prepared.

That combination of project discipline and workforce readiness has shaped much of his career. At one point, Ted was responsible for guiding the professional development of eighteen thousand employees across an eight-state region. Today, as the leader of Houston-based Ascend Transformation Partners, he helps organizations manage demanding projects and major periods of change with greater clarity, accountability, and control.

Ted originally studied radio and television performance at Ashland University, where he was also a member of the Golden Eagles baseball program. That early communication training remains visible in his work today, including the project management podcast he produces for PMI’s Houston chapter and his annual conversations with Creighton University business students about leadership.

Outside of consulting, Ted has spent more than a decade supporting approximately one hundred Girl Scout troop leaders as a community leader, and he continues to referee high school basketball. Both roles suit someone accustomed to knowing the rules, watching the whole floor, making decisions in real time, and keeping things moving.

Ted summarizes his professional value plainly: he can manage any project to success. After more than thirty years of doing exactly that, he has earned the confidence behind the statement.

The way Nikhil Prajapati talks about his company tells you a lot about the man himself. His clients, he says, stay because they want to, not because they signed a contract. It is a simple line, but it carries everything he believes about business: that trust is earned, that good work speaks for itself, and that people can tell the difference.

Confident, kind, and deeply knowledgeable about how businesses actually run, Nikhil is at heart someone who simply wants to help people solve their problems, and he has carried that spirit through nearly a decade in technology. It is the reason clients tend to describe him not by the systems he builds, but by how much clearer everything feels once he is in the room. They talk about a team that feels like an extension of their own, about transitions they had been hesitant to make turning out to be painless, about help that is always one call away, and, in the case of one nonprofit, about finally having the freedom to focus fully on its mission. Someone who worked with the team summed it up in two words: true partners.

He came by that clarity the long way. Houston, where he trained as an engineer and where his company makes its home today, has always been a city of builders, the kind of place that sent astronauts to the moon and keeps energy moving around the world. There is something fitting about a man whose gift is making complicated things simple calling a city like that home. Before building anything of his own, Nikhil spent years inside some of the most recognizable companies in the country, strengthening the systems that thousands of people depended on every day. He learned the work from every angle, and somewhere along the way he noticed a pattern he could not unsee. The businesses that thrived were not the ones with the most technology. They were the ones whose technology was simple, connected, and built around the way people actually work.

NP Ventures is what happened when he decided to build a company around that idea. The businesses that find their way to Nikhil usually have plenty of demand and people working harder than ever, yet growth has quietly stalled and nobody can say why. He listens first, finds what is really going on, and fixes it, and he keeps everything simple enough that his clients always know what they are paying for and why. Many of them have stayed with him year after year.

Warm, steady, and quick to see what someone could become, Bill has carried that way of looking at people through more than two decades in technology, and it is the reason people who have worked alongside him tend to describe him not by what he has built, but by what he helped them see in themselves. A friend who has worked alongside Bill once said he had always looked up to him for the kindness and generosity he brings to the community, and that he has known him as a coach, a mentor, someone who is always helping somebody do something. He is a teacher at heart. Trained as an electrical engineer at Washington State University, he found his way into networking when the company he now leads, International Communications Management, first hired him to teach Cisco classes. More than twenty years later, he is still explaining how the internet actually works, guided by a belief he states simply: once you understand the foundation, you can build just about anything.

You can see that belief at work in how Bill builds his team. Few things catch his eye faster than the person standing right in front of him, and what a few months of good training could unlock in them. He wanted, in his own words, to be "a bridge between companies that needed work done" and people who were not the perfect fit yet, but who could be, given three to six months. He has built much of ICM around that idea, with a special heart for veterans returning to civilian life. He likes to tell the story of an ordnance officer whose job was loading bombs onto planes on an aircraft carrier, work where every item on the checklist has to be right, and how that discipline translates beautifully into technology. When he heard that some 270,000 veterans transition out of the military every year, his response said everything: "let me have all of them." The same thinking reaches all the way down to a tutoring company he also owns, where junior high and high school students learn coding and robotics on Saturdays, and where some of his best math tutors, once trained in coding themselves, grew into his best consultants.

Spend a little time with Bill, and you discover that everything he has built rests on something deeper. "I'm a child of God, a believer, a father, and a husband," he once said, "and those are the most important things in my life." The company is not separate from that; it is one of the places where those commitments come to life. He serves on the board of a church ministry that houses people recovering from alcohol and drug addiction, gives them work, and trains them for a year, and he and his wife both preach there. It is, he says, some of the most rewarding work in his life. Which, for a man who has spent his career helping people become more than they thought they could be, sounds exactly right.

Bill Treneer is the kind of person who seems to measure success not only by the company he leads, but by how many people are standing a little taller because they crossed paths with him.