Class of 2002 Bios

Emelia Arthur is a consultant and former Advisor to the President of Ghana from 2013 to 2017 where she assisted presidential appointees in aligning manifesto objectives with presidential objectives and specific sector policy goals. She took up this appointment after working as the Deputy Regional Minister for Ghana's Western Region responsible for coordinating development. A member of the Balaton Group, Emelia now focuses on working collaboratively to strengthen communities’ autonomous and sustainable capacities for development and influence.

Emelia previously worked as the District Chief Executive of the Shama District in the Western Region of Ghana. In the past, she has engaged in consulting and advocacy work in natural resource governance at the local, regional, and international levels, and served as the Global Team Leader for the British Council’s InterAction Leadership Program.

Emelia served on the board of the Open Society Initiative in West Africa; steering committee of FAO’s National Forest Program facility and steering committee of IUCN/IIED/FAO’s Growing Forest Partnerships. She continues to serve on the board of CARE International’s Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Advisory Group and IUCN/FAO’s Forest and Farm Facility.

Beatriz Boza leads the Corporate Governance and Sustainability practice at EY Peru. She is also Founder and Chair of Ciudadanos al Día, a Peruvian-based not for profit and market-maker for good-government best practices.

She has held several high ranking government appointments, including being a member of the Board of Directors of Peru’s Central Reserve Bank, Chief of Staff to Peru's Minister of Finance, President of PromPeru, Peru’s Investment and Tourism Promotion Board, and President of Indecopi, Peru´s Competition, Consumer Protection and Intellectual Property Office.

Prior to joining EY, Beatriz served as an independent director of publicly listed and private companies in retail, export, and extractive industries. She has extensive experience as a consultant in public policy and public management. She is a professor at the Law School of the Catholic University in Peru, where she heads the Ethics and Professional Responsibility Review Committee and is a Lecturer in Corporate Governance at Universidad de Piura.

CAI Yanmin spent her career working to transform legal teaching and the practice of law in China. She served as Vice Director of the Committee of Chinese Clinical Legal Educators and helped to train new clinicians from other universities around China and promoted academic research in clinical legal education and alternative dispute resolution.

Yanmin translated into Chinese the book Storming the Court: How a Band of Yale Law Students Fought the President and Won. She also co-authored The Global Clinical Movement: Educating Lawyers for Social Justice. Yanmin also translated an authoritative ADR textbook in the U.S. into Chinese and her textbook, Negotiation, which is the first on the subject in Chinese legal education, was published in China in April 2011.

Neide Maria da Silva is Founder and Executive Director of Equipe Técnica de Assessoria Pesquisa e Ação Social, one of Brazil's most important non-governmental organizations. She has played a crucial role in building community organizations and civil society especially in the context of resistance to military rule.

The organization's activities focus on gender, violence, human rights, and land security issues and is active in monitoring state and municipal government urban policy. They work to protect children, youth, and families in slums, monitoring orphanages and protecting urban squatters from being evicted and brutalized.

Neide has also been involved in global youth projects meant to encourage the social inclusion of vulnerable children and teens.

Mustafa Damdelen is President of the Cyprus European Union Association, which works on European Union-funded projects and aims to achieve a united Cyprus within the EU.

Formerly, as director of the Turkish Cypriot Chamber of Commerce, Mustafa was one of the leaders and spokesmen of an NGO movement of 103 organizations, having led a successful “Yes” campaign for a UN plan for the solution of the Cyprus problem. The success of the “Yes” campaign convinced the EU and UN that the Turkish Cypriot community should not be isolated, and with the free movement of people on the island, Mustafa and his colleagues in the Chamber of Commerce played an important role in the start of trade between the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities.

Mustafa is also a founding member of the Cypriot Voice, a pro-solution bi-communal think tank promoting reconciliation and full economic integration in Cyprus.

Taalaibek Djoumataev is Chairman of the Managing Board of one of Kyrgyzstan’s private commercial banks, JSC Bank of Asia. He also serves as a Member of the Supervisory Board of the Union of Commercial Banks of the Kyrgyz Republic and chairs the Board of Directors of the local Credit Information Bureau.

Taalaibek is a former board member of the Kyrgyz Republic National Bank who played a critical role in the structural and regulatory changes made to the Kyrgyz financial system during his country's shift to a market-based economy.

Dr. Mary-Ann Etiebet is a physician, researcher, and strong advocate for women's health, with extensive experience working with international development partners to design, manage and evaluate programs that address the needs of vulnerable and at risk populations. As the Executive Director of Merck for Mothers, Mary-Ann is responsible for successfully implementing a robust set of innovative programs across the globe, designing new high-impact partnerships, managing relationships with important external stakeholders, and serving as an internal and external ambassador of the initiative.

She combines clinical expertise as a Board Certified Infectious Disease physician with global experience in healthcare strategy, health systems strengthening and performance improvement in the private, public and non-profit sectors.

Mary-Ann earned her MD and MBA from Yale University and completed her residency and fellowship training at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital System.

Tali Farhadian Weinstein is the General Counsel of the Kings County District Attorney’s Office (Brooklyn). In that capacity, she oversees the office’s Appeals Bureau, Post-Conviction Justice Bureau, Civil Litigation Bureau, and Law Enforcement Accountability Bureau, leads several reform initiatives of the District Attorney’s Justice 2020 plan, and counsels the District Attorney of an agency comprised of 1,200 employees.

She is also an Adjunct Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Clinical Law at NYU Law School, where she teaches “Criminal Justice Reform and the District Attorney” and was previously a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law.

Tali served in the United States Department of Justice from 2009 to 2017. For six years, she was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York, where she investigated and prosecuted federal crimes in nearly every area of the office’s practice. Previously Tali was Counsel to the Attorney General of the United States, advising AG Holder on a range of criminal law, immigration policy, and other issues, and working closely with senior officials at the White House and executive agencies.

Tali began her legal career as a law clerk for the Honorable Justice Sandra Day O’Connor at the Supreme Court of the United States (October Term 2004 and October Term 2005), and for the Honorable Merrick B. Garland at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (2003-2004). She has taught immigration law and policy at Columbia Law School and worked in private practice.

Tali is a graduate of Yale College, where she won the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize, and Yale Law School, where she was a recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. A Rhodes Scholar, she received her M.Phil in Oriental Studies (Modern Middle East Studies) from Oxford University. She serves as a Trustee of the New York Public Library, on the Board of Directors of UJA-Federation NY, the Yale University Council, and the Board of Advisors of the Center on Law and Security at NYU Law School.

Philip Gain works on human rights and environmental issues in Bangladesh, combining investigative journalism with a systematic pursuit of policy change. The outputs of his research and investigations–books, monographs, special reports, documentary films, and photographic works are widely used as readings in general and in classrooms. He is also an adjunct faculty member at a private university in Dhaka where he teaches environmental communication, development communication, and advanced reporting. With a number of reporting guides and resource books he has authored and edited he also teaches working journalists skills of in-depth reporting.

For the past decade his work with tea plantation workers, indigenous peoples, and other excluded communities of Bangladesh has resulted in a great number of landmark books, monographs, many investigative reports, documentary films, and a number of photography exhibitions and has drawn significant attention to the situation of some 6 million people who are among the extremely poor people of Bangladesh.

The landmark books from his three decades of work on environment and with the indigenous and excluded of Bangladesh include: Stolen Forest; Survival on the Fringe: Adivasis of Bangladesh; Slaves In These Times: Tea Communities of Bangldesh; Lower Depths: Little-Known Ethnic Communities of Bangladesh; On the Margins: Images of Tea Workers and Ethnic Communities; The Chittagong Hill Tracts: Man-Nature Nexus Torn; Energy Challenges and Phulbari Crisis; State of the Excluded and Marginalized Communities; Modhupur: The Vanishing Forest and Her People In Agony; Bangladesh: Land, Forest and Forest People; Shores of Tear; Bangladesh Environment: Facing the 21st Century; and The Story of Tea Workers in Bangladesh.

Philip's lifelong mission to promote investigative reporting and action-oriented research takes him close to the ground on natural history, climate change issues, the serious consequences of monoculture plantation, mining, exclusion challenges of vulnerable communities, and the struggle for democracy. He is now working to establish a resource center for the excluded communities of Bangladesh.

Christine Hogan was appointed Canada's Deputy Minister of Environment and Climate Change on September 30, 2019. Prior to her appointment, she served as Executive Director for Canada, Ireland and the Caribbean, at the World Bank Group (in Washington), from November 2016 to September 2019. From January 2015 to October 2016, Christine was Deputy Minister of International Trade. Between 2010 and 2015, Christine served in the Privy Council Office including as Foreign and Defence Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister.

Throughout her career of more than 30 years, Christine has contributed to a diverse set of public policy issues ranging from international relations and development to trade policy, science and technology, and environment and energy. She has held a variety of positions within the Government of Canada, including Vice President of Strategic Policy and Performance at the Canadian International Development Agency (now Global Affairs Canada) and Director of International Affairs at Environment Canada.

Christine has also been a visiting executive with Encana and an Advisor to the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi, Kenya.

She holds a Bachelor of Public Administration (Honours) from Carleton University. In 2017, Christine was awarded the Bissett Alumni Award for Distinctive Contributions to the Public Service from the Carleton’s School of Public Policy and Administration.

Scott Kleeb is Director at Morgan Ranch Beef International, a cattle farm in Nebraska. He previously ran as a Democrat for the United States Congress in 2006 and 2008 on a platform advocating more assistance for education programs and aid to family farms, energy independence, and a healthcare reform.

Before entering politics, Scott was the CEO and President of Energy Pioneer Solutions, a company focused on energy efficiency for homeowners and utility companies.

Born in Turkey and raised in Italy, Scott has worked on campaign politics in New Mexico and also worked at the United Nations. Earning a PhD in history from Yale, Scott studied the international influences, both cultural and economic, on the development of the late nineteenth century American West.

Rozina Mistry works as an independent health consultant and as a visiting faculty and course director at Ziauddin Medical University and APPNA Institute Of Public Health in Karachi. She has also served as the temporary advisor on the World Health Organization's Global Vaccine Action Program.

Rozina's areas of expertise include global health, population health, maternal and child health and nutrition, immunization and monitoring and evaluation. As the former Director for Community Health and Health Promotion for the Aga Khan Health Service in Pakistan, she was responsible for technical oversight of more than 127 health care facilities.  

Trained as a doctor in Pakistan, she first worked as an obstetrics clinician in the slums of Karachi. After observing firsthand how unethical health practitioners thrived on the ignorance of the poor, she dedicated her professional career to community health promotion and disease prevention.   

Rozina has been the Global Southern CSO representative until March 2017 and worked as a senior consultant with on many programs of strategic importance including Family Planning and Reproductive Health Project of Marie-Stopes Society, provincial intersectoral nutrition strategy, and strengthening of district intersectoral nutrition coordination committees in Sindh.

Rozina is the founding member of the Pakistan Health and Immunization Coalition. She was also a consultant and third party monitor for the Oxford Policy Management Program on the Norway-Pakistan Partnership Initiative. She has served as an expert member on the WHO-SAGE working group and has been a member of the steering committee for the establishment of the early childhood development network in Pakistan. She earned a Master's degree in health promotion from the University of Toronto.

Adamu Musa is Founder and Managing Director of AM Communications, an international consultancy in strategic and crisis communications, governance, and investment guidance in public policy and management. He is a well-known media and communications figure in Cameroon, where for more than 25 years he anchored the national prime time news broadcast by the Cameroon Radio Television Corporation (CRTV) and created and anchored two high-profile investigative news magazine programs, X-TRA MILE and CRTV CLUB. He also carried out authoritative investigations on corruption, human rights abuses, governance lapses and other societal ills.

Adamu also anchored a popular CRTV flagship weekly radio program, CAMEROON CALLING. He managed a news service of both English and French speaking journalists and reporters and worked to advance press freedom in his country through new information and communication technologies. From 2004-2008, he managed communications and outreach for the World Bank country office for Cameroon and Central Africa.

He earned a MPA in Public Policy and Management from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 2010.

Alonso Perez-Kakabadse is Managing Director working in the Emerging Markets Fixed Income team at UBP. He is an experienced macro strategist and portfolio manager in the emerging markets space, with prior tenure at prestigious firms like Wellington Management, Caxton, SAC and Moore Capital.

Alonso was Founding Partner and Managing Director of ECADSE Ltd, an independent consultancy firm dedicated to providing advice to institutional clients and sovereigns on the assessment and independent consultancy firm dedicated to providing advice to institutional clients and sovereigns on the assessment and resolution of economic and financial crisis.

When serving as Vice Minister of the Economy of Ecuador and as Economic Advisor to the President, he played a pivotal role in the stabilization and recovery of his country’s economy following the 1999 economic collapse, helping to lead Ecuador through its financial crisis by enacting a program of dollarization, a highly controversial but ultimately successful endeavor.

He holds a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics.

Henrique Pinto da Costa is Director of Nexus Consulting, an organization working on land use management, watershed management, urban development, and biodiverse conservation. The organization takes a broad, integrated approach to addressing ecological issues to create new land-use policies in support of sustainable development in São Tomé & Príncipe.

Previously, he directed a non-profit organization whose mission is to engage the youth of São Tomé & Príncipe in finding sustainable development solutions through education. He acts as an independent consultant for a number of companies and international organizations. Before that Henrique served as an advisor to the São Tomé & Príncipe President on development policies and was director of ECO-STP, the country’s first NGO devoted to sustainable development.

He was also Vice President of The Connections Group, a consulting firm that advises foreign companies (primarily in the oil and banking sectors) on corporate social responsibility. Earlier, Henrique served as a Minister and Chief of Staff to the President of São Tomé & Príncipe, helping to guide the country's transition to democracy.

Pablo Amílcar Sandoval Ballesteros is a Mexican politician and activist serving as State Coordinator of the Development Programs of the State of Guerrero. He was previously Coordinator of the Morena Parliamentary group and President of the Political Coordination Board (2018).

He was a member of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, serving as Secretary of national organization. He was national delegate of the CEN of the PRD in the campaign for the government of Guerrero and the state of Mexico in 2005.

In the public sector, Pablo has served as director of Control and Evaluation in the Federal District Government and was part of the Andrés Manuel López Obrador Advisory Council in 2003, when he was head of government. During the 2006 presidential campaign, he was Andrés Manuel López Obrador's coordinator for the state of Guerrero, and in 2012 he joined the National Coordination of Attention to Civil Organizations.

In 2012, he founded and directs the Organization "Todos Contamos," the first citizen observation organization that was in litigation against Mexican political parties for concealing electoral propaganda, the result of which was two fines imposed by the electoral authorities.

In 2014, he was elected promoter of Morena's national sovereignty in Guerrero. For the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), he was a candidate for Governor in the 2015 Guerrero State Elections. From 2015 to 2018 he served as President of the Morena State Executive Committee in the State of Guerrero.

An economist by training, he graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Chetna Gala Sinha is an activist, farmer, and banker. In the early 1980s, while still a student in Mumbai, she joined the Jayaprakash Narayan movement and travelled through the country championing land rights and other social issues. In 1996, Chetna founded the Mann Deshi Foundation in Mhaswad, a drought-stricken area of Maharashtra, with the aim of economically and socially empowering rural women. In 1997, she set up the Mann Deshi Mahila Sahakari Bank – India’s first bank for and by rural women.

Today, the Mann Deshi Bank has over 100,000 account holders, has loaned over $50 million, and regularly creates new financial products to support the needs of female micro-entrepreneurs. It has received the 2006 Microfinance Process Excellence Award, the 2014 Best Eco-Tech Bank Award by the Indian Bank Association and the 2015 'Best Bank Award' by the Maharashtra Urban Cooperative Banks Federation.

In 2006, Chetna founded the first Business Schools for Rural Women and in 2013, she launched the first Chambers of Commerce for women micro-entrepreneurs in the country. In 2012, she set up a Community Empowerment Programme for Farmers that supports Water Conservation. It has built 13 check dams and impacted 50,000 people. Mann Deshi Foundation also has a Sports Programme for talented athletes and a women-owned Community Radio that reaches over 50,000 listeners. In 2013, Mann Deshi Foundation was awarded the Best Innovation Award by the National Rural Livelihoods Mission. To date, Mann Deshi has supported over 400,000 women in India.

Chetna has received many accolades for her work. She was awarded the 2005 Jankidevi Bajaj Award for Rural Entrepreneurship, the 2005 Ashoka Changemakers Award, the 2009 Godfrey Phillips Bravery Award, the 2010 EdelGive Social Innovation Honors (Livelihood Category). She has won the the Schwab Foundation’s Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award (2013), the Forbes Social Entrepreneurs of the Year Award (2017) and was included by Fortune India as one of the country’s 50 top businesswomen (2018). She is the recipient of the Nari Shakti Puraskar, India’s highest civilian award for women who work in the area of women’s empowerment. She has served as a Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum in Davos (2018) and as a Co-Chair of Financial Inclusion at the W20 Summit (2018) in Argentina.

Jake Sullivan is the national security advisor to President Joseph R. Biden, a visiting lecturer in law at Yale Law School, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Jake served in the Obama administration as national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and director of policy planning at the U.S. Department of State, as well as deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He was the senior policy adviser on Secretary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and previously served as deputy policy director on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential primary campaign and as a member of the debate preparation team for Barack Obama’s general election campaign.

Jake has also been a senior policy adviser and chief counsel to Senator Amy Klobuchar from his home state of Minnesota, worked as an associate for Faegre & Benson LLP, and taught at the University of St. Thomas Law School. He clerked for Judge Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

He holds both undergraduate and law degrees from Yale and a master’s degree from Oxford.

Abdul Tejan-Cole is Executive Director of the African Studies Association (ASA), an association of scholars and professionals in the United States and Canada with an interest in the continent of Africa. Prior to joining ASA, he was Senior Campaign Director of Waxman Strategies, focused on ending deforestation in Africa across all industrial agriculture and on fighting for the rights of workers and communities. A noted human rights lawyer and activist, he has over 25 years of experience fomenting progressive development of human rights, anti-corruption, environmental and social justice, post-conflict reconstruction, transitional justice, and the rule of law.

As head of the Anti-Corruption Commission of Sierra Leone, he worked on and prosecuted a number of high-level corruption cases and prioritized fighting corruption especially in the fishing and maritime sector in Sierra Leone.

He also served as Deputy Director of the International Center for Transitional Justice’s Cape Town office, and as Executive Director of the Open Society Initiative for West Africa. Abdul has worked with, founded, and been on the board of a number of organizations that work on a broad range of environmental issues including land tenure, land grabbing, and food security and climate change. He was Board Chair of West Africa Democracy Radio and Timap for Justice.

He is a strong advocate for the prosecution of the destruction of the environment, the illegal exploitation of natural resources or the illegal dispossession of land as a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute. He served as Secretary General, Vice President, and President of the Sierra Leone Bar Association, as well as president of the West Africa Bar Association. Abdul was a war crimes prosecutor in the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

He taught land law and the environment at the University of Sierra Leone and holds a Bachelor of Laws (Hons) Degree from Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, a Master of Laws from University College London, and a post-graduate diploma in International Trade Law from the University Institute of European Studies. He was a Human Rights Teaching Fellow at Columbia University in New York, was a recipient of the 2001 Human Rights Watch Annual Award, and is a member of the Africa Group for Justice and Accountability. He has published widely on human rights and international justice issues.

Abdul played cricket at school, university, and at the national level and sponsored a junior cricket team in Sierra Leone.

Jan Jakub "Kuba" Wygnanski is sociologist serving as President of Board for Shipyard – Centre for Social Innovation and Research.

Kuba starting his career as a Solidarity activist in Poland. He was participating in historical Round Table talks. After 1989, he became deeply involved in numerous initiatives aiming to support civil society in Poland and other countries.

He has started several NGOs including the KLON/JAWOR Association and the Forum of Nongovernmental Initiatives, which plays a key role as representative of Polish Third Sector. Kuba was initiator and coordinator of a multi-year systemic project of Polish Model of Social Economy.

For over 25 years Kuba has been deeply involved in the research field of the non-profit sector in Poland and for several years was a Board Member of Civicus (Global Alliance for Citizens Participation). Since 2018 he is Senior Ashoka Fellow.

Ambassador Temuri Yakobashvili is President of TY Strategies, a boutique consulting firm advising governments, non-governmental institutions, and businesses across the U.S., Europe, and Eurasia. He also Founder and President of the New International Leadership Institute, non-for profit organization, dedicated to reforms, good governance, and anti-corruption. Temuri was previously Executive Vice President of the global strategy consultancy, PASS, LLC. Until fall of 2014, he held position of the Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the US.

From early February 2011 to March 2013 he served as an Ambassador of Georgia to the United States. Prior to his posting, he was Deputy Prime Minister and State Minister for Reintegration in the Government of Georgia. Temuri is a career diplomat who joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia in 1991 and held various positions, including that of a Director of the Department for USA, Canada and Latin America. He holds a diplomatic rank of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary granted by the President of Georgia.

Temuri is the co-founder and has served as Executive Vice-President of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, the leading think tank in the Caucasus region. He now chairs its governing board. Temuri is co founder of the Atlantic Council of Georgia, as well as of the Council of Foreign Relations of Georgia. He is a member of the Governing Board of the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs and the Europe House of Georgia.

Temuri is a graduate of the Department Physics from the Tbilisi State University. In 1998 he was trained on Mid-career Diplomatic Courses at the Center of Political and Diplomatic Studies at Oxford University. In 2006 he was visiting researcher at the Silk Road Study Center of Uppsala University, Sweden.

Temuri frequently contributes to Georgian and international media on issues of regional security and transformation. I February 2012 Temuri was decorated with Presidential Medal of Excellence. He is married to Ms. Yana Fremer, and they have two children. He speaks Georgian, English, Russian, and Hebrew.