Class of 2013 Bios

Enrique Betancourt photo

Enrique Betancourt

Enrique Betancourt is Director of the Violence and Crime Prevention Initiative for Chemonics International based in Washington, D.C. He is a trained architect and urban planner who once served as Executive Director at the National Center for Crime Prevention and Citizen Participation in Mexico.

As an expert in urban innovation, Enrique co-founded CONTEXTUAL, an agency developing creative solutions to complex urban problems through collaborative and participatory design. CONTEXTUAL works to bridge the gap between research, policy design, and successful implementation. Previously, Enrique served as Deputy General Director of Social Policy for the Presidency of the Republic of Mexico.

He holds a Masters of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard.

Prodyut Bora photo

Prodyut Bora

Prodyut Bora is an Indian politician and Founder and Chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party of India. Previously, he was the National Executive Member of the Bharatiya Janata Party, India's principal opposition party and State General Secretary for BJP Assam, the National Convener of BJP’s Information Technology Cell, and a member of BJP’s National Media Cell. He directed a private software company for six years before entering politics.

Prodyut is also a prolific writer—his opinion pieces have been carried in the Indian Express, The Times of India, The Economic Times, and The Pioneer.

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Janet Dalziell

Janet Dalziell is an experienced NGO leader and consultant, committed to working for a just and sustainable world. Until November 2019 she served on Greenpeace International's Strategy and Management Team, most recently as the International People & Culture Director.

Originally from New Zealand, she has led the international Greenpeace campaign to stop climate change, has represented Greenpeace at intergovernmental negotiations, and led three expeditions to Antarctica. She was one of the key architects of a major re-design of Greenpeace's global operating model, focusing on the development of human capacity within the organization and aimed at making Greenpeace more effective in achieving just and sustainable global change to protect the environment.

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Mohamed ElFayoumy

Mohamed ElFayoumy is an Egyptian diplomat with extensive experience in the Middle East. He currently serves as Political Adviser for the United Nations Special Envoy to Syria.

Mohamed served as his government’s representative to the Syrian Opposition and he was the Consul in the Egyptian Embassy in Syria where he was instrumental in evacuating thousands of Egyptian nationals from Syria during the conflict in 2011-13. He is also active in a number of civil society organizations working toward the political development of Egypt.

'Tokunboh Ishmael photo

'Tokunboh Ishmael

'Tokunboh Ishmael is an impact investor with over 20 years' experience spanning investment banking, private equity investing, technology, and new business development in Africa, Europe, and the North America. She is Managing Director and Co-Founder of Alitheia Capital, a Nigeria-based investment management and advisory firm focused on channelling private equity investments into small and medium sized businesses in West Africa. In 2015, she co-founded Alitheia Identity to scale investing in women-led SMEs across Sub-Saharan.

'Tokunboh is a CFA Charter-holder, corporate financier and M&A banker, having worked on over $5.6 billion transactions in the UK, USA, and Africa. She is now focussed on investing in and building sustainable growth businesses across attractive, consumer-led sectors including agribusiness, financial services, retail, technology, and telecommunications – mainly on behalf of discerning institutions, development organizations and corporates looking for a mix of responsible investing, economic impact, and social responsibility.

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Diala Khamra

Diala Khamra is CEO of the Haya Cultural Center in Amman, an organization that impacts the lives of nearly 50,000 Jordanian children every year through education, arts, and culture. She is passionate about the roles art and culture play in bringing about meaningful social change and development.

Previously, Diala founded the Justice Center for Legal Aid based in Amman, Jordan. The Center provides the poor and the vulnerable with access to counsel and representation through legal aid clinics across the country. Diala has worked as a private consultant focusing on broad issues related to rule of law and governance, and has worked with USAID, the World Bank, and the Basel Institute on Governance in Switzerland.

Raheela Khan photo

Raheela Khan

Raheela Khan is Director of Business Development and Strategy at R2 Business Advisory Consultants, a multidisciplinary consultancy. She facilitates value chains and the strategic implementation of DEI frameworks between Canada, Pakistan, and the Middle East, promoting effective, responsible funding for financial inclusion to bring about profitable social change.

Currently based in Vancouver, Raheela has initiated and led community awareness programs on the importance of cultural confidence, integration, diversity and avoidance of self-exclusion. Her current initiatives are borne of her experiences of being a mother of two, which she uses to offer support to new mothers with postpartum depression as well as new immigrants and refugees. Canada's open border policies, offering every newcomer the chance to share their cultural diversity and thereby add to the national 'cultural mosaic', are perfectly aligned with her own diversity initiatives and has inspired her to work on publishing a children’s book based on empowering cultural confidence.

Before moving to Canada, Raheela managed a portfolio in excess of US $600 million for Doha Bank, one of Qatar’s largest banks in Dubai. Previously, she was instrumental in transforming the investment culture in Pakistan through senior roles at the Pakistan Mercantile Exchange and KASB, one of Pakistan’s largest financial services firms, as Group Head of Fixed Income and Money Markets.

She is currently working on two projects going beyond national boundaries, one using social media as a resource to revolutionize Pakistan’s cultural milieu, to break through current social disparity and restore civic sense in the general population. Her second project is ensuring framing of equity practices, diversity and inclusiveness, empowering women and youth development to unlock growth potential and social sustainability in the developing world.

 

Lidia Kolucka-Zuk photo

Lidia Kolucka-Zuk

Lidia Kolucka-Zuk serves as Vice President of Forum Energii, a European think thank supporting a fair, secure and effective energy transition towards climate neutrality.  She plays a leading role for the legal and financial affairs of Forum as well as a development strategy of programs and internal governance.

She previously served as Director of PELION SA, leading in policy, regulatory strategy, public affairs, sustainable development and corporate responsibility and as Executive Director for the Warsaw-based Trust for Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe. Lidia is a lawyer by training and has worked as a strategic advisor to the Polish Prime Minister on issues of state efficiency, reforms in the judicial and legal sectors, and the creation of a digital society in Poland.

Since July 2014, she has served on the Advisory Council to Google on the Right to be Forgotten. The Council collaborated with government, business, media, academia, the technology sector, data protection organisations, and others to identify and discuss the challenging issues at the intersection of the right to information and privacy. She was also a member of the Council for Digitization for the Ministry of Administration and Digitization of Poland. Lidia sits on the Board of the Modern Poland Foundation, Women Leadership in Business Foundation, and Digital University Foundation and serves as the Chairwoman of the Board of The Civil Rights Congress Foundation.

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Saul Kornik

Saul Kornik has a varied background ranging from healthcare to technology to finance to machine learning to culture change. He is Co-Founder and CEO of Healthforce, an augmentation of technology and doctors that turns nurse-led clinics into effective and specialist health centers. Healthforce is a web application that enables real-time video connections between patients and nurses (or other primary care workers) with higher-level clinical skills (doctors) for the delivery of multi-disciplinary team-based care. The technology reduces care costs, increases care access, and monitors clinical and patient-centric care quality in real-time. Healthforce-supported nurses have run over 1 million consultations and have completed over 80,000 telemedicine consultations with remote doctors.

Prior to Healthforce, in 2006, Saul co-founded Africa Health Placements (AHP), an organization that works to get doctors to where they are needed most and to make them effective when they are there (through improving their clinical skills, their ability to fix systems and their resilience working in tough conditions). During his time, AHP placed over 4,200 doctors who served over 34 million people, mostly in rural Africa in public service. He served as CEO of AHP until the end of 2017 and served as chairman of the organisation until 2020.

Saul has a postgraduate degree in machine learning and is a Chartered Financial Analyst. He has been awarded the Archbishop Tutu African Leadership Fellowship (2008) and Rainer Arnhold Mulago Fellowship (2016).

Renzo Martens photo

Renzo Martens

Renzo Martens is a Dutch artist and filmmaker and currently serves as Co-Founder and Director of the Institute for Human Activities. The Institute has launched a five-year program in the Congolese interior, bringing together artists, thinkers and specialists. With a nod to precedents set in cities like New York and Berlin, the Institute aims to turn art production into an engine of economic growth in Congo, hoping to improve the lives of the people around its settlement.   

In his first film, Episode 1, Renzo travels to Chechnya to adopt a rarely defined role in contemporary war: that of its spectator. Episode 3, also known as Enjoy Poverty, is a meditation on the political claims of contemporary art and the result of Renzo's two-year journey in the Congo. In the film, aided by a giant, portable neon sign reading "Enjoy Poverty," Renzo sets up an emancipation program to encourage local communities to think of their poverty as a resource.

Renzo's films have been shown at the 6th Berlin Biennial, Tate Modern in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Van Abbe Museum Eindhoven, Kunsthaus Graz, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, as well as at numerous film festivals and on public broadcast channels.

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Katherine Pustay Currie

Katherine “Kat” Pustay Currie is a lead associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, a global consultancy firm. A graduate of Yale’s School of Management, she previously served as Deputy Staff Director to the Steering Committee in the U.S. Senate and as policy staff to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior in Washington, D.C. While at the Department of the Interior, she represented DOI in the 2010 oil spill response and served on the White House Council for Women and Girls.

Kat spent the previous five years in Anchorage, Alaska advancing political, legislative, and environmental initiatives through work in the Alaska State Legislature and political campaigns.
 

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Abhik Sen

Abhik is a senior adviser with the United Nations on innovation and partnerships that can help accelerate sustainable development at the national and international levels. Previously, he was the first Head of Innovation and Partnerships at the Commonwealth Secretariat, the inter-governmental organization for the Commonwealth of Nations. In this role, Abhik provided capacity building assistance to governments, facilitated system-wide innovation, mobilized resources and managed the Commonwealth’s partnerships with other international institutions. He also launched and led the Commonwealth Innovation Ecosystem Program to foster digital transformation and sustainability, scale public innovation, support grassroots innovators and ignite partnerships between the public, private and not-for-profit sectors.

Prior to this, as Head of Policy and Research with a focus on equitable socio-economic development and youth empowerment, Abhik developed evidence-based national policies and implementation strategies in cooperation with the governments of countries in Africa, Asia, Americas and Oceania. He is the lead author of the Global Youth Development Index and Report (2016), a ground-breaking study that the United Nations Human Development Report Office called an “admirable and timely contribution to fill a critical gap in the global development landscape.”

Abhik has served in leadership roles at The Economist and Bloomberg and worked as a journalist and policy analyst in India. He has been a member of the board of trustees at Apples and Snakes, the UK's national organization for poetry and spoken word artists, and is also a Fellow at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford.

Daniel Shin photo

Daniel Shin

Daniel Shin is a venture capitalist and senior luxury fashion executive, overseeing corporate and business development at MCM, a German luxury brand. He is also a founding member and partner of KingsBay Capital, a cross-border venture capital firm based in San Francisco.

Prior to that, Daniel served in various executive roles at Hanwha Group (DreamPlus), Korea Telecom (Strategic Investment Group) and Daesung Group (BiNEXT Capital). He has published several books and is a frequent speaker on subjects related to innovation and tech entrepreneurship around the globe.

He currently teaches at Korea University on an adjunct basis. He was nominated as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum at Davos in (2016-2021) and became a Policy Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2020-2021).

Carlos Vecchio photo

Carlos Vecchio

Carlos Vecchio is a Venezuelan lawyer, activist, and politician and was named by Juan Guaidó—and accepted by the United States—as Chargé d'Affaires of the Government of Venezuela to the United States. He is Co-Founder of Voluntad Popular, a Venezuelan social and political movement aimed at youth and working to eliminate poverty peacefully and within a democratic framework.

A former Fulbright Scholar, Carlos has worked to expose constitutional and human rights abuses in his country and edited a documentary on political discrimination called The List. 

WANG Xingzui photo

WANG Xingzui

WANG Xingzui has over two decades of experience in rural development and serves as Vice President of the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, one of the oldest and largest NGOs in China and one of the few working outside the country.

Under his leadership, the Foundation grew from a small, largely unknown organization to one that is well recognized and respected for its pioneering work and professionalism by governments, corporations, beneficiaries, and peer NGOs both at home and abroad. Xingzui oversees the Foundation's strategies and microfinance and is working to expand the Foundation's operations to other countries and to transform the Foundation into an international NGO.

Xingzui is committed to promoting transparency, unity, and partnerships in the Chinese NGO sector. 

Daniel Weisfield photo

Daniel Weisfield

Daniel Weisfield is a founder of Three Pillar Communities, a values-driven real estate investment firm. Three Pillar Communities acquires and operates manufactured housing communities in the United States. The firm has a two-part mission: to deliver safe, reliable housing to residents and safe, reliable returns to investors. As a consultant at McKinsey & Company, Daniel co-authored the McKinsey Global Institute’s report on tackling California’s high housing costs. His research on real estate and housing has been featured in the New York Times, the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Daniel holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.B.A. from Yale School of Management, and a B.A. in humanities, magna cum laude, from Yale.  A former U.S. diplomat and a licensed attorney, Daniel is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and the U.S. State Department’s Meritorious Honor award.

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Lai Yahaya

Lai Yahaya is a lawyer, political economy analyst, and public policy policy advisor with more than 20 years’ experience advising development finance institutions, senior government officials, and leading corporatations in Sub-Saharan Africa on infrastructure development, public private partnerships, and energy sector reform. He is currently Senior Special Assistant (Planning and Strategy) to President Muhammadu Buhari in Nigeria and was most recently Senior Policy Advisor to Rt. Hon. Raila Odinga, in his role as African Union High Representative for Infrastructure Development in Africa.

Lai previously led the Senior Advisors Group of the Power Africa Initiative, working with a group of former Heads of State and industry leaders, advising them on how best to accelerate progress with major energy projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. He was also Team Leader of the Facility for Oil Sector Transparency and Reform, a donor-funded initiative designed to support the restructuring of the oil and gas sector and to increase transparency and accountability in oil sector governance in Nigeria. He has served as Policy Advisor to several government Ministers in East and West Africa and worked as Deputy Director to three successive Directors General at the Bureau of Public Enterprises in the Presidency in Nigeria, driving major sector reforms and privatization transactions in the power, transport, and telecommunications sectors.

Lai originally qualified as a project finance attorney with the New York law firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, worked as Special Advisor to the Chairman of Afren Plc  and was General Counsel of Gasol Plc in London. He received his BA (Hons) and MA from Balliol College, Oxford University, and was a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales. He is a Fellow of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu/Oxford Business School Programme, was selected as one of the “New Leaders for Tomorrow” by the Crans Montana Forum, and was named as one of the “25 Africans to Watch” by the Financial Times.

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Sawsan Zaher

Sawsan Zaher is a Palestinian citizen of Israel, a feminist, and a human rights lawyer currently with Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, serving as the Director of the Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights Unit since 2005. Through her work with Adalah, Sawsan litigated several landmark cases before the Israeli Supreme Court challenging discrimination and racism against the Palestinian minority in Israel.

Sawsan has received several fellowships and honors, including being selected as a 2015 Young Global Leader, an integral part of the World Economic Forum, a 2012 Fellow at the Women in Public Service Project at Wellesley College, and a 2008 Fellow of the Public Law Program in the Public Interest Law Institute at Columbia University. In January 2015, Sawsan was appointed to serve as the Acting General Director of Women's Center for Legal Aid and Counseling (WCLAC) in Ramallah, Palestine.

Prior to her appointment as an Acting General Director at WCLAC, Sawsan served on the center's board of directors. In 2004-2005, she established the first legal department for Arab women's rights in Kayan—Feminist Organization. In July 2012 she was named by Israeli The-Marker Magazine as one of the 40 promising people under the age of 40 in her field of expertise.

Sawsan received an L.L.M. in International Legal Studies with a concentration on human rights and gender from the American University, Washington College of Law in 20014.
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