Bruce Schearer

S. Bruce Schearer, a civic leader, former non-profit executive and expert in international development and philanthropy, has led efforts to build partnerships between government, civil society and private sector groups to address poverty, development and environmental challenges in over 30 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. As President of The Synergos Institute, he co-founded the Global Philanthropists Circle, establishing it to become what Business Week described as a new model of giving that links some of the world’s wealthiest families. He has advised the United Nations Development Program, Millennium Promise, the Magis system of Jesuit educational organizations in Latin America and other groups on strategy, programs and institutional development. He has worked with Joseph Jaworski and Otto Scharmer on large-scale change processes and with Deepak Chopra and the Alliance for a New Humanity on linking inner personal change to outer change in the world. Mr. Schearer is the author of books, policy papers and articles. He is an honors graduate of Lafayette College and earned his PhD in biochemistry from Columbia University, where he was also an International Fellow at the School of International and Public Affairs. He serves as a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Gabriela Sperl

Gabriela Sperl, Ph.D, producer, author, historian, is member of the Hochschulrat at the Munich Film School and serves on the advisory Board of the Munich Research center for Ethics, at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, headed by Prof. Julian Nida-Rümelin. Gabriela believes that compelling and entertaining films about history, social and political issues can make a huge impact on people. Good stories well told, can open eyes and hearts and ultimately make a difference – they can create awareness, help us see the world differently, and make it a better place. Gabriela studied History, Political Science and Languages (BA and MA) and obtained her doctorate under Professor Thomas Nipperdey, a renowned German historian. She was lecturer and assistant professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich at the age of 25. In 1982, she gave up her university career and started to work freelance for production companies and TV stations, as a dramatic advisor and script consultant. She was one of the teachers of the Berliner Drehbuchwerkstatt (School for Screenwriting), gave lectures at the Berlin Film School DFFB, and has been teaching at the Munich Drehbuchwerkstatt for many years. Throughout her teaching career, her aim has been to encourage young talented people to develop their own ideas and write stories that come straight from the heart and thereby influence audiences and markets. In 1998, Gabriela was appointed Head of the Drama, Fiction and Documentary Department at the Bayerischer Rundfunk/ARD, where she worked until 2002. During that time she was responsible for many award-winning theatrical and TV productions, most of which centered on socio-political issues. In January 2003, Gabriela Sperl left the Bayerischer Rund-funk/ARD in order to concentrate her energies on writing and producing. Together with teamWorx she produced, among other films, the award-winning historical event film “Stauffenberg” (director: Jo Baier) which inspired Tom Cruise to create “Valkyrie.” In 2007 she produced and wrote the ARD event “Die Flucht” (director: Kai Wessel). This film, starring Maria Furtwängler, about the flight of millions from East Prussia at the end of WW II had 14 million viewers in Germany and Austria and was the most successful fiction production of the ARD in the last 20 years. Her productions have brought her numerous awards, including several Grimme Awards; the Goldene Kamera; the Bambi; the CIVIS Medienpreis; the Deutscher Fernsehpreis; the Baden-Badener Fernsehpreis;, the Karl-Buchrucker-Preis; the 3-Sat Zuschauerpreis; the Shanghai Festival Award; the DIVA Award; the Nymphe d’Or at the International TV Festival in Monte Carlo; and the Deutscher Filmpreis. Her Latest films address harsh global, social and human issues, and reflect the last decades of German and European history, addressing controversial and often highly emotional issues.

Mohammed Alnabari

Dr. Mohammed Alnabari has been serving as the Mayor of Hura, one of the major Bedouin townships in Israel’s Negev desert, since 2004. Mohammed earned a PhD in Organic Chemistry from Ben-Gurion University, and brings with him extensive experience in the private sector, following a successful career in the pharmaceutical industry with a number of international pharmaceutical patents to his name. He represents a new brand of leadership in the Bedouin community and has been instrumental in developing close working relationships with various ministries of the Israeli government, private sector and civil society, introducing innovative new approaches for improving the lives of the Bedouin community in the Negev. Mohammed is a founding member and co-chairman of Project Wadi Attir, in partnership with Dr. Michael Ben-Eli. He also serves as the chairman and founding member of Desert Stars, a nonprofit organization established to nurture a new generation of leadership within Bedouin society. He is a founding member and chairman of Alsanbel Social Enterprise for the Employment of Women, in partnership with local NGO AJEEC-NISPED and Mr. Itzik Zivan. He is married and has 6 children.

Richard Zimmerman

Richard Zimmerman is a Senior Vice President, Relationship Manager for HSBC Private Bank in New York. He works with wealthy families in the U.S. and internationally. Richard has also held senior positions in Private Wealth Management at Bessemer Trust, Bank of America and J.P. Morgan. Richard has a passionate interest in how we can utilize wealth in more conscious, sustainable and transformative ways in the world today. He has served in strategic roles for a number of organizations in the area of transformational finance, impact grant making, AIDS and child advocacy. He is a Board Director of The Capital Institute, whose mission is to explore and effect economic transition to a more just, resilient and sustainable way of living through the transformation of finance. He is on the Core Development Team for The Sustainability Laboratories and its Global Sustainability Fellows Program. He has served as a Board Advisor to Start Fund, an impact grant fund that co-funds social business initiatives globally. He is a published author of What Can I Do to Make a Difference (Penguin Books USA), a guide to issues of sustainability and individual actions to make positive change. Richard is a Columbia University M.S in Sustainability Management candidate, a Sustainable Investment Professional Certification (SIPC) program candidate, and a graduate from University of Virginia with a BA in English Literature. Richard also has a background in personal development, meditation and Yoga. He is a Consciousness Coach and is certified by the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (IPEC). He lives in New York City with his two teenage children.

Dr. Fred Moavenzadeh

Dr. Fred Moavenzadeh served as the President of Masdar Institute of Science and Technology from July 1, 2010 to July 31^st, 2015. During his time as President of Masdar Institute he supported the Institute’s mandate of transforming the United Arab Emirates into a leading source of sustainable and advanced technologies, educating the human capital. Developed with the support and collaboration of MIT, the Masdar Institute is a not-for-profit, private, postgraduate research and education institute dedicated to clean energy, water, environmental and sustainable technologies.

Widely recognized for his innovative role in building global institutions and developing new models of teaching and research through international initiatives in education, science and technology, Dr. Moavenzadeh has a long and distinguished career at MIT. He has served as the director of the Technology and Development Program, and the Center for Technology Policy and Industrial Development.

Dr. Moavenzadeh received his master’s degree from Cornell University and his PhD from Purdue University. During his career, Moavenzadeh has conducted and supervised major research activities. He has served as a private consultant to the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank and various United Nations agencies including United Nations Center for Human Settlement and UNIDO. His research interests are in the areas of: “Role of Science and Technology in Socio-Economic Development.” He is the author and co-author of several books.

Irene Alvarado Van der Laat

Irene Alvarado Van der Laat graduated as an agriculture engineer from the University of Costa Rica. She received an MBA in Business Administration with a focus in Agro-Marketing from the Technological Institute Costa Rica and a Ph.D. from the Universidad Latina in Economical and Entrepreneurial Sciences. Irene became part of the EARTH University team in 1992, where she worked as an Academic Program Administrator and then as the Director of Marketing for EARTH University’s Products Program. In 2000, she became a full-time faculty member in the University’s Entrepreneurial Projects Program, where she is now a director and lead coordinator. In 2001, she founded the Young Entrepreneurs Club, and shortly thereafter was selected to represent Costa Rica at the US Department of State’s Environmental Protection and Sustainable Development Program. She is the recipient of the Best Investigation Prize at the VII International Entrepreneur Congress in El Salvador (2004), the Galpin Fellowship from Quinnipiac University in Connecticut (2010), and the highest prize from the Literati Network Awards for Excellence for her investigation on entrepreneurship (2011). Today, Professor Alvarado focuses her time researching environmental economics projects, sustainable value chains of agricultural products, and the promotion of entrepreneurship habits and disciplines to create a more just society.

Matthias Bittner

Matthias Bittner is an experienced strategic consultant and financial advisor. He was instrumental in gestation and implementation of several fundamental &strategic; moves, IPOs as well as financing and M&A transactions with leading automotive, chemical and industrial companies like VW, Daimler Trucks, Wacker, Continental as well as the 2009 Opel discussion in Germany. He has been a Senior Advisor to Morgan Stanley, a Partner at McKinsey & Comp. and a Vice President at Bain & Co. He is currently a Board Member of several automotive suppliers. Matthias Bittner holds an Economics degree (Diplom-Volkswirt) from the Mainz University and a French Baccalaureat Mathematiques.

Dr. Bernard Amadei

Dr. Bernard Amadei is Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He received his Ph.D. in 1982 from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Amadei holds the Mortenson Endowed Chair in Global Engineering and served as Faculty Director of the Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Communities from 2009-2012. He is also the Founding President of Engineers Without Borders – USA, and the co-founder of the Engineers Without Borders International Network. Among other distinctions, Dr. Amadei is the 2007 co-recipient of the Heinz Award for the Environment; the recipient of the 2008 ENR Award of Excellence; an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering; and an elected Senior Knight-Ashoka Fellow. He holds three honorary doctoral degrees.

Dr. Ashok Khosla

After post-graduate degrees in experimental physics from Cambridge and Harvard Universities, Dr. Ashok Khosla became Director of the Indian Government’s first Environment Office in 1972 and then Director of Infoterra at UNEP in 1976. Since 1983 he has been Chairman of Development Alternatives, a social enterprise that promotes commercially viable and environmentally friendly technologies. Dr Khosla is also Co-Chair of the UN’s International Resource Panel and of the China Council for International Environment and Development. He was President of IUCN (2008 to 2012) and Club of Rome (2005 to 2012) and is a recipient of the OBE, the UN Sasakawa Environment Prize, the Zayed Environment Prize, the WWF Duke of Edinburgh Medal, and the Schwab Foundation Outstanding Social Entrepreneur Award.

Ray Anderson

Ray C. Anderson (July 28, 1934 – August 8, 2011) was founder and chairman of Interface Inc., one of the world’s largest manufacturers of modular carpet for commercial and residential applications and a leading producer of commercial broadloom and commercial fabrics. He was “known in environmental circles for his advanced and progressive stance on industrial ecology and sustainability.” Anderson died on August 8, 2011 after a 20-month battle with cancer.

Ray was a friend of the Sustainability Laboratory and served on the Lab’s Advisory Board. He was featured on Michael Ben-Eli’s TVE’s video, CEOs on Sustainability. We hope you will take a moment to read the obituary of this truly great leader, written by Paul Hawken.

Ian Johnson

Ian Johnson has over thirty years experience in economic development. He spent twenty-six years at the World Bank, starting as an energy economist and financial analyst and working through increasing levels of responsibility. He was, for his last eight years, Vice President for Sustainable Development and, for five years, he was also Chairman of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Prior to joining the World Bank, he was an economist with the British Government and he spent five years in Bangladesh working with the United Nations and a non-government organization. Since leaving the World Bank Ian Johnson has been an advisor to the government of Chile, a member of the Swedish Commission on Climate Change, senior advisor to GLOBE and chair of its Ecosystems Services Panel, as well as consultant to a number of international organizations.  From 2010-2014, Ian Johnson served the Club of Rome as Secretary General.

Ian Johnson is married with two children.  He is an economist who has studied economics at the universities of Wales, Sussex and Harvard and business studies at Harvard.

Dr. Mariana Bozesan

Dr. Mariana Bozesan has earned an outstanding track record as an Integral Investor by de-risking early stage investments in high-tech and clean-tech using the Theta Model based on integral theory by Ken Wilber. The intl. member in the Club of Rome is also a philanthropist, a G8/G20 Advisory Board Member for the international Social Impact Investment Task Force, and a strategic advisor on integral finance and sustainability to various funds, governmental organizations, social businesses, and NGOs. Moreover, she is a prominent keynote speaker and an inspiring lecturer on the future of investing, business, finance, and economics at prestigious organizations including Stanford University, Oxford University, TEDx, and RIO+20. The trained computer scientist is also a successful serial entrepreneur, a widely published scientific writer, and the author of several books. Mariana is Founder of AQAL Capital, an integral investment consulting company and Founder of AQAL Investing (UN PRI signatory), a Family Office. As the leading authority on integral investing, the most advanced paradigm in integral sustainability, she provides the means and metrics to implement the parity between people, planet, profit, with purpose and passion. Her de-risking model integrates financial, ecological, social, cultural, behavioral, and human consciousness factors with beauty and joy. Dr. Bozesan is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Humboldt-Viadrina School of Governance.

Dr. Michael Ben-Eli

Prior to founding The Lab, Dr. Michael Ben-Eli worked as an international management consultant, pioneering applications of Systems Thinking and Cybernetics in management and organization. Over the years, he worked on synthesizing strategy issues in many parts of the world and in diverse institutional settings, ranging from small high technology firms to multinational enterprises, manufacturing companies, financial institutions, health care and educational organizations, government agencies, NGOs, and international multilateral organizations.

In recent years, he has focused primarily on issues related to sustainability and sustainable development. He is author of the widely acclaimed Five Core Sustainability Principles, and has been working to help inspire leaders in business, government, community, and youth to accelerate a peaceful transition to a sustainable future.

Dr. Ben Eli graduated from the Architectural Association in London and later received a Ph.D. from the Institute of Cybernetics at Brunel University, where he studied under Gordon Pask. He was a close associate of R. Buckminster Fuller, with whom he collaborated on research involving advanced structural systems, and issues related to the management of technology and world resources for the advantage of all.

Michael Gukovsky

Michael Gukovsky is a distinguished development economist with thirty years of extensive worldwide experience in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Latin America. His experience includes development and management of projects, financing for sustainable development, public-private partnerships, the environment, community-based initiatives, conflict resolution and peace-building.

During his professional career, Michael has been involved with pre-feasibility and feasibility studies of large infrastructure projects, including some in partnership with the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Central American Bank for Economic Integration, the Global Infrastructure Foundation of Japan, and the Japanese Institute of Global Environmental Strategies.

Over the years, his work focused on issues related to trade, water resources, energy, transportation, inland navigation, and river basin development including hydroelectric power development. Michael served as manager of UNDP Operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, and later as Senior Advisor to the Administrator of the UNDP. He was UNDP’s lead negotiator in establishing the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and co-managed it with the World Bank and UNEP in the initial operational phase. He subsequently served as the UNDP Executive Coordinator of the GEF.

From 1992-93, Michael served as Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations and Deputy Chief of Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL). His responsibilities included facilitating conflict resolution, and implementation of the social, economic, land transfer and electoral supervision of the Chapultepec Peace Accords. He was an active participant at the Rio Earth Summit and subsequently led the UNDP delegations to the first Conferences of the Parties for the Biodiversity and Climate Change conventions in the Bahamas (1994), and Berlin (1995), respectively. He was also an active participant in the preparations and the deliberations of the Johannesburg Earth Summit in 2002.

Michael holds a B.S. degree from Colorado State, and an M.S. from Yale University, and has done post-graduate work at the University of California in Berkeley. He is a member of South North Initiatives where he has served as President and is currently a member of the Board of Directors. He serves on the Board of Directors of AMEGA, and is a founding member of Sustainable Development Advisors (SDA), a firm providing consulting services in public/private partnerships, climate change, renewable energy and transportation. He has been involved with The Sustainability Laboratory since its early inception.

Manuela Roosevelt

Manuela Roosevelt has been a book publisher since the late 80s, running companies in Switzerland, the UK and now in the States. Throughout her publishing career, she has overseen the publication of over 300 illustrated non-fiction titles in the subjects of science, history, spirituality, biography, current affairs, art history, and gift titles. She has also authored eight books, which have been published in several languages. In 2013, Manuela co-founded Springwood Media, a producer of leading-edge interactive digital academic learning environments for undergraduate and graduate courses. Manuela is the Chair of the Board for the Eleanor Roosevelt Partnership at Val-Kill, spearheading landscape preservation programs as well as Eleanor Roosevelt’s legacy outreach. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, and on the Advisory Board of Sanghata Global, an Ashoka-awarded program for social impact investment in areas of need. Born in Bern and brought up in Lugano, Switzerland, Manuela obtained her B. A. in Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. She has dual Swiss and Spanish citizenship, and speaks English, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, and French fluently. She has lived in six countries, and has traveled extensively, including crossing the Sahara desert on camel with a Touareg tribe and studying the Dogon culture of Southern Mali. She currently resides in Hyde Park, New York, with her husband and two daughters.

Peter Dean

Peter Dean holds a BFA in Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Boston University Program in Artisanry. He has been a furniture designer/craftsman for 28 years, designing and building one-of-a-kind and limited edition pieces for the residential and corporate markets. His work is held in numerous private and museum collections. Mr. Dean has completed numerous residential architectural projects as well as several product design commissions. Prior to attending RISD, Peter was an environmental science major in college. After attending RISD, Peter did two years of graduate study in Psychology and Theology at the University of Notre Dame. For the last sixteen years, Peter has worked as a Senior Critic/Teacher in the Department of Furniture Design at the Rhode Island School of Design where he has taught the Sophomore Studio Curriculum, the Senior Degree Project/Thesis, and Sustainability: Green Materials and Green Behavior, exploring the designer’s responsibility to this important issue. Immersed in the Strategic Planning process for RISD over the past three years and working with a few colleagues, Peter has developed a curriculum on sustainability for the whole school. This is in the form of a concentration entitled, ‘Nature/Culture/Sustainability’ and was inaugurated in the fall of 2012. Peter has designed and will teach the core course for this concentration. Peter has also developed an R. Buckminster Fuller Biennial Design Science Symposium in collaboration with the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab at RISD and The Synergetics Collaborative. Mr. Dean is also a board Member of The Marion Institute. This is a charitable organization devoted to making positive and lasting change in the world. Peter has been instrumental in developing the Sustainability Education Initiative as well as the Las Gaviotas Carbon Offset Initiative, which the UN has declared to be the model for third world rural development. So far, the team at Las Gaviotas has planted 20,000 acres of fully canopied poly-culture rainforest with another 10,000 acres to go. Peter has also worked with Las Gaviotas to market the technological innovations developed at Las Gaviotas to other third world rural areas that are contemplating development in a sustainable manner.