Class of 2010 Bios

Eliot Abel photo

Eliot Abel

Eliot Abel leads commercial sales & project development at Namasté Solar, a solar energy company based in Colorado, guiding the development of solar projects ranging from 100kW to 10MW.

Prior to joining Namasté Solar, Eliot was Founder and Principal of Abel Clean Energy Advisors, a consulting firm that helps commercial property owners and developers utilize innovative financing, such as C-PACE, to implement renewable energy and energy efficiency solutions that increase value, reduce operating costs, and enhance the sustainability of their properties. Earlier in his career, Eliot worked in business development roles at a UK-based thin film solar startup, GE’s global Renewable Energy business, and San Diego-based Renovate America.

Eliot serves on the Board of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association, on the Building Healthy Places committee for the Urban Land Institute of Colorado, and holds a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from the Yale School of Management.

May Akl photo

May Akl

May Akl is a founding member of the Free Patriotic Movement and advises the President of Lebanon, Michel Aoun, on a wide range of political and media issues.

Earlier in her career, May worked as a reporter at An-Nahar newspaper and as a press officer in the office of the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
She is a lecturer at the Université Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth, where she also earned her BA, MA, and PhD degrees. May is also a member of the Media and Communication Committee of the Free Patriotic Movement, where she served on the party's Central Committee in 2007.

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Subhashini Chandran

As Vice President, Social Impact, Asia Pacific (AP) at the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth (CFIG), Subhashini Chandran is responsible for overseeing, executing, and scaling the Center’s strategy in Asia Pacific, contributing to global and regional objectives. In her role, she drives all regional CFIG activity covering programs, data and insights, strategic engagement, and partnerships. 

Subhashini has 25+ years of experience spanning the private and development sectors. She began her professional journey as an entrepreneur, growing her family’s tea farm in South India, to be one of India’s largest privately owned tea companies, employing ~7000 women. More recently, she has focused on the inclusion of small businesses and women-led enterprises in global value chains, sustainable livelihood solutions, business models to promote shared prosperity and catalyzing multi-stakeholder partnerships. Her areas of expertise include implementing market systems approaches with strong potential for generating jobs and income earning opportunities, and commercial and impact investments in frontier markets. She has worked closely with national and sub-national governments, a broad range of public and private sector actors, industry bodies and trade unions. 

Prior to joining Mastercard, Subhashini led social impact at Yara International across Africa and Asia markets. She set-up Yara’s first social impact vertical, crafted a five-year strategy and mobilized teams across both regions. Earlier, she was EVP India at Xynteo and Director of Vikaasa – a business-led coalition of nine global companies including Unilever, Aditya Birla, Shell, State Bank of India and WPP, convened to accelerate India's progress on the UN SDGs. Subhashini has broad social impact experience from her previous work as Principal Adviser for Private Sector & Agribusiness Development leading CONNECT, the economic development component of UK Aid’s flagship infrastructure project, Rural Access Programme 3 in Nepal, and as a Senior Adviser to AgDevCo, a UK-based social venture capital fund investing in agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. She has also served as an Adjunct Professor at XLRI Jamshedpur, one of India's premier business schools. She read Economics at the London School of Economics, Law at City University UK, and is a Member of the Bar Council of India. Subhashini is a graduate of the Chevening Gurukul Fellowship for Leadership and Excellence, and an alum of the Young Global Leaders program of the World Economic Forum.

Lumumba Di-Aping photo

Lumumba Di-Aping

Lumumba Di-Aping is a Sudanese diplomat and has served in the Sudan Mission to the United Nations since 2008.

Lumumba has dedicated his career in both the public and private sectors to addressing the inequality that hinders the development of the Global South. Starting as a strategy consultant and investment banker at Greenwich Capital, from 2006 to 2012, he served as Ambassador and Deputy Head of the Sudan mission to the United Nations. During that tenure, he was Lead Negotiator for Developing Countries on Energy, Environment, Trade and Global Governance and Chairman of the G77+China group of 132 developing nations and led the block's negotiation on reform of the International Financial Institutions (IMF/WB) and at the Copenhagen climate conference. He served as chairman of the African Group and chief negotiator for developing countries.

Lumumba is a member of the National Liberation Council of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and political Bureau, a group that helped end 20 years of civil war when it signed the comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005.

Ana Paula Hernández photo

Ana Paula Hernández

As Program Officer for Latin America at the Fund for Global Human Rights, Ana Paula worked on a portfolio that provides strategic support and funding to over 55 human rights organizations in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. She also promoted a broader initiative across Mesoamerica to defend land and resource rights and increase corporate accountability, particularly in the extractive industries. As a leading human rights advocate in Mexico, Ana Paula supported drug policy reform aimed at more balanced approach, emphasizing prevention, treatment, and human rights rather than enforcement and criminalization. She was the deputy director of the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center in the state of Guerrero, located in a mostly indigenous region and one of the poorest in Mexico. She was a consultant to the Angelica Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the Mexico Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. 

Courtney Hostetler photo

Courtney Hostetler

Courtney Hostetler is Counsel at Free Speech for People, an organization working to fight big money and unchecked corporate power in politics. She was previously a legal fellow with the ACLU of Massachusetts, working on school-to-prison pipeline issues and the criminalization of school discipline.

Courtney graduated from Yale Law School in 2011 and afterwards clerked for Judge James Dennis of the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. While at Yale, she participated in human rights fact-finding missions in Tanzania and Senegal and worked on U.S. prison reform projects. Prior to attending to law school, she managed the Close Up Foundation's national youth voting program and worked as a research analyst for the Genocide Intervention Network.

Courtney has researched or worked with peace-building and human rights initiatives in Ireland, Uganda, and Sierra Leone.

Sergey Lagodinsky photo

Sergey Lagodinsky

Sergey Lagodinsky is a German Member of the European Parliament in the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance. He chairs the EU-Turkey Delegation and is a member of the Legal Affairs and Civil Liberties/Home Affairs committees.

Until June 2019 he was the Head of European Union and North America Division of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, an independent political organization affiliated with Germany's Green Party. Prior to joining the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Sergey Lagodinsky worked as a lawyer for Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP. From 2003 to 2008, he served as Program Director, later as Advisor, to the Board for the Berlin Office of the American Jewish Committee. His expertise lies in transatlantic relations, international and constitutional law, as well as law and politics of diversity and integration.

Sergey is a regular guest and commentator in numerous media. In his 2014 book Contexts of Antisemitism, he explores the relationship between anti-Semitism and freedom of expression in Germany and in international law. In 2008 he was a Fellow at the New Responsibility Foundation. Sergey graduated from Humboldt University and is a graduate of the Law Faculty of the University of Göttingen and Harvard University (Masters in Public Administration).

Fares Mabrouk photo

Fares Mabrouk

Fares Mabrouk is Country Director and Fund Manager for Yunus Social Business (YSB) in Tunisia. Founded and led by Professor Muhammad Yunus, YSB helps create social businesses around the world by setting up incubator funds and providing services to companies, governments, foundations, and NGOs.

Previously, Fares founded a number of for-profit and nonprofit organizations in North Africa focused on mobile banking and oil logistics. He is a co-founder of and advisor to HuffingtonPost Maghreb, a French language edition of the Huffington Post covering Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.

Fares has degrees from Pierre and Marie Curie University, ENSAE Paris, and Havard's Kennedy School of Government.

Kala Mulqueeny photo

Kala Mulqueeny

Kala Mulqueeny is an Australian environmental and energy lawyer at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) where she leads the law, policy, and development program relating to the environment, energy, climate change, and legal empowerment. She also leads ADB's Asia Pacific Dialogue on Clean Energy Governance and Regulation among energy policy-makers and regulators in Asia and USAID, the International Energy Agency, and World Resources Institute. She has also initiated the establishment of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Energy Regulators Network.

Kala was a lawyer on the first Integrated Gas and Combined Cycle Project in China (and the developing world) and is responsible for ADB's work on the regulation of the important Carbon Capture and Storage technology. She has been recognized for her work as a 2011 Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, an Asia 21 Young Leader of the Asia Society, and Queensland University’s Young Alumnus of the Year for 2011. Australasian Legal Business: Legal News named her one of the Top 40 Lawyers in 2010.

Alexey Navalny photo

Alexey Navalny

Alexey Navalny is the leader of Russian opposition and the founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. He has become well-known for his anti-corruption investigations against Russian state corporations and senior officials. Alexey participated in Russian presidential election in 2018, and in the course of the campaign he opened 81 regional headquarters all over the country. 41 of them are currently in operation, which makes his network the biggest opposition organization in Russia. In August 2020 Alexey was attacked with a Novichok nerve agent by Russian operatives and later sentenced to 9 years in a maximum security penal colony on charges of fraud and contempt of court.

Due to fabrications of criminal cases, he is now deprived of the right to participate in the elections, despite the fact that European Court of Human Rights annulled his sentences. Alexey Navalny’s YouTube channel, his main social media platform, has 3.5 million subscribers.

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Wolfgang Proissl

Wolfgang Proissl is a journalist and Head of Communications and Chief Spokesperson for the European Stability Mechanism, an international organization founded by the 17 Euro-area member states whose purpose is to provide financial assistance to member countries in difficulty.

Previously, he reported and wrote on monetary policy, international finance, and the financial crisis for the Financial Times Deutschland (FTD). As a journalist, he worked to promote European integration and was responsible for defining the editorial line on European affairs and global governance for the FTD and its affiliated news magazines. Through the FTD, he advocated for a stronger European Union, less energy dependence on Russia, EU membership for Turkey, and strong transatlantic ties. He was previously Foreign Editor for the FTD and European Editor for Die Zeit.

Wolfgang was educated at the University of Cologne, the Kölner Journalistenschule für Wirtschaft und Politik, and the Centre de Formation des Journalistes, Paris.

Marvin Rees photo

Marvin Rees

Marvin Rees was elected Mayor of Bristol in the United Kingdom in May 2016. As Mayor he sits as one of the leaders of the UK Core Cities and on the Steering Committee of the Global Parliament of Mayors. He is a popular public speaker on issues of race, class, faith, and social mobility.

Marvin worked previously in public health as a BBC broadcast journalist and radio presenter and for the international development agency, Tearfund. In 2012 Marvin founded the The City Leadership Programme, a Yale World Fellows-inspired program which targets and equips high ability, high aspiration young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds for national and global leadership.

He is a graduate of Operation Black Vote (OBV), a national program designed to support people from black minority ethnic backgrounds as they try to move into public leadership. OBV suggests he is Europe's first directly elected Mayor of African descent.

Azizullah

Azizullah "Aziz" Royesh

Azizullah "Aziz" Royesh is a leading advocate for equal access to primary and secondary education and Founder of Marefat High School for Afghan refugees in Pakistan. With a focus on critical thinking and human rights, the school flourished and eventually moved to Afghanistan in 2002, where it now teaches more than 3500 Afghan students, about half of whom are girls. Marefat High School has become a highly respected and well-known model for a new approach to community-building in Afghanistan.

Aziz has written textbooks on humanism, human rights, democracy, social studies, and Quranic interpretation and is a frequent speaker on the concept of a tolerant community. Aziz and his colleagues established the Marefat Civil Capacity Building Organization (MCCBO) which is working to strengthen and expand democracy and civil norms of life. It was recognized as the "Best Private School of 2014 and 2016" by Afghanistan's Ministry of Education.

As a 2011-2012 Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Aziz worked on his memoir, Let Me Breathe, which feature three decades of change and developments in Afghanistan after the Communist Coup in 1979. In 2014, Aziz participated in the Global Teacher Prize contest through UK-based Varkey Foundation and acquired the position of Top 10. He was accredited as the "Afghanistan Hero of Education" in EU calendar of 2016 and won the membership of the International Association for College Admission Counseling in 2017.

Ricardo Terán photo

Ricardo Terán

Ricardo Terán is a serial entrepreneur who believes in the power of business to change the world. He helps accelerate the growth of small- and medium-sized companies, advising them on business-model strategy, partnership and business development, team building, and venture funding. He is currently Director of Business Development for Avanti Way, one of the fastest growing and most disruptive real estate ecosystems in Florida.

Ricardo is also Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board of Agora Partnerships, a non-profit social enterprise that provides access to investment capital, strategic consulting, and a global community of support to entrepreneurs looking to solve the world’s most pressing social and environmental challenges. He also co-founded and managed the Agora Venture Fund, one of first Impact Investment venture funds in Latin America.

Since 2013, Ricardo is a Visiting Lecturer on Entrepreneurship and Social Enterprise at Georgetown University’s Global Competitiveness and Leadership Program, where he has helped over 100 of Latin America’s most promising leaders launch and grow social ventures. Ricardo is a Fellow of the inaugural class of the Central American Leadership Initiative (CALI) of the Aspen Institute and in March 2011, the World Economic Forum named Ricardo to its Young Global Leaders network. Ricardo was part of the team who brought the TedX conference to Nicaragua for the first time in 2012.

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Diana Tsui

Diana Tsui has served as Head of Global Philanthropy for Asia Pacific at J.P. Morgan since 2014, working to develop grant-making and corporate responsibility strategies across 14 countries in the region. Previously, Diana was the Head of CSR and Diversity for KPMG China and Hong Hong. In 2008, Diana also oversaw the establishment of and served as CEO of the KPMG Foundation.

Her previous positions include working as Managing Director of Mercy Corps East Asia, and as Head of Community Affairs for Nike's Asia Pacific region. She has worked closely with multinationals, governments, and international organizations such as the European Commission, ILO, Asia Development Bank, and the World Bank China, in addressing issues in the area of poverty alleviation, microfinance, economic inclusion, as well as in providing humanitarian assistance to post-conflict countries.

She is a 2011 Young Global Leader and the chairperson of the Global Dignity Hong and China (a YGL initiative under the World Economic Forum). She also sits on various charitable boards and advisory councils including the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation.  

Edward

Edward "Ted" Wittenstein

Edward (“Ted”) Wittenstein is a Lecturer in Global Affairs and the Executive Director of International Security Studies, a research and teaching hub of the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. In that capacity, he helps oversee a number of programs dedicated to international history and global security, including the Schmidt Program on Artificial Intelligence, Emerging Technologies, and National Power; the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy; and the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. A former diplomat and intelligence professional, Ted teaches undergraduate, graduate, and law courses on intelligence, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and national security decision-making. He also serves as Co-Director of the Yale Cyber Leadership Forum, a Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, and a visiting faculty fellow at Yale Law School’s Center for Global Legal Challenges.

Ted is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School. Prior to returning to work for Yale, he held a variety of positions at the U.S. Department of Defense, Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of State.

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Thembi Xulu

Dr. Thembi Xulu is a health care and health policy professional serving as Senior Technical Specialist at Right to Care (RTC) Health Services, a company focused on the delivery of holistic health and wellness solutions for employers. In this role, Tehmbi is leading the organization's response and delivery of services pertaining to COVID-19.

Right to Care is one of the largest HIV and TB treatment and prevention centers in South Africa. RTC partners with the government, private sector, and NGOs in improving access to safe, effective, and affordable treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS and TB. The organization operates at more than 170 sites providing comprehensive HIV services and supports more than 105,000 patients who are actively on antiretroviral therapy.

Thembi has degrees from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the University of Witwatersrand.

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Arif Zamhari

Arif Zamhari is a social activist based in Indonesia working to promote moderate and progressive Islam. He is committed to engaging civil society in countering terrorism and promoting tolerance through dialogue and education. Serving as Deputy Director of the International Conference of Islamic Scholars, Arif is devoted to interfaith discourse and is involved in Track II diplomacy through leadership of the International Conference of Islamic Scholars Forum.

Arif is also a lecturer in theology and psychology at the State Islamic University in Jakarta and the State Islamic Institute in Surabaya.