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Using Cellphones to Change Societies Seminar

Thursday and Friday, September 4 & 5, 2014

Participant Bios

Adnan Asdar, Chief Executive Officer, Multinet Pakistan Private Limited
Mr. Adnan Asdar Ali serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Multinet Pakistan (Private) Limited and previously served as its Acting Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Ali is the Co-Founder of Multinet, a subsidiary of Telekom Malaysia Bhd. Mr. Ali has over 25 years of progressively diverse experience in the discipline of structural and forscenic engineering, construction management, project management, liaison with local and international consultants, quality control and testing procedures for a wide range of construction and other engineering material. He has conducted a series of seminars on Entrepreneurship and Marketing at the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi, as well as Project Management and Leadership seminars at NED University in Karachi. He also plays advisory roles in several nonprofit organizations which are primarily focused on Education and Health. He serves as an Executive Director of Multinet Pakistan (Private) Limited. He has been Director of The Searle Company Limited (Formerly Searle Pakistan Ltd) since May 12, 2011. He has been a Director of IBL HealthCare Ltd. since April 8, 2011. He is on the Executive Council Board Member of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, The Citizen’s Foundation and Indus Hospital. Mr. Ali holds BS in Civil Engineering from University of Wisconsin – Madison and an M.S in Civil Engineering from University of Minnesota, USA.

 

Satchit Balsari, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative; New York-Presbyterian Hospital
Dr. Balsari is an Emergency Physician at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical College. His interests are focused on the development of pre-hospital care, emergency medicine and community-focused disaster mitigation methods in low-income settings. Dr. Balsari trained and worked at the Program on Humanitarian Crises  at the Harvard School of Public Health from 2001 to 2004. As a graduate of Grant Medical College, and a resident of Mumbai, he has experience working with children in the aftermath of natural and humanitarian disasters in India, including the Bhuj earthquake of 2001. He served as a consultant to the American Red Cross public health team in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. Dr. Balsari founded two non-profit organizations in Mumbai, whose work is focused on health and educational initiatives among the urban poor. Dr. Balsari’s current projects include EMcounter, an online tool aimed at capturing the epidemiology of medical emergencies in rural and urban India, and project mumbaiVOICES, a web-based application that facilitates a citizen driven analysis of urban disaster response. He recently served as Jt. Organizing Secretary of the Mumbai Emergency Management Exercise (MEMEx), in which HHI was a key collaborator.

 

Caroline Buckee, Harvard School of Public Health
Dr. Caroline Buckee joined Harvard School of Public Health in the summer of 2010 as an Assistant Professor. Caroline was a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, and an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. Dr. Buckee’s work focuses on the population dynamics of genetically diverse pathogen species including the malaria parasite and the meningococcus. She uses a range of modeling techniques to understand the relationship between the evolution of these species and the epidemiological patterns of infection and disease among human populations.

 

Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, MIT Media Laboratory
Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye is an advanced PhD student at the MIT Media Lab. He engineers stochastic tools to harness the power of large-scale behavioral datasets, such as human movement data, financial transactions, and communication patterns in networks. He also showed how the unicity of human behavior individual’s privacy in Big Data. His research has been covered BBC News, CNN, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Le Monde, Die Spiegel, in reports of the World Economic Forum and United Nations, as well as in his talks at TEDxLLN and TEDxULg. Before coming to MIT, he was a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico where he used cell phone data to model the dynamics of urbanization in developing countries. Yves-Alexandre worked for the Boston Consulting Group and acted as an expert for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Nations. Over a period of 6 years, he obtained an M.Sc. from Louvain in Applied Mathematics, an M.Sc. (Centralien) from Ecole Centrale Paris, an M.Sc. from KULeuven in Mathematical Engineering as well as his B.Sc. in engineering at Louvain.

 

Kenth Engø-Monsen, Telenor Research, Oslo
Kenth Engø-Monsen is a senior researcher in Telenor R&I. He holds a PhD (2000) in computer science from the University of Bergen, Norway, and a master in industrial mathematics (1995) and a master in technology management (2001) from NTNU, Norway. Since joining Telenor R&D in 2000, his interests have been in network analysis and graph theory, searching, and mathematical finance and risk.

 

Arun Gore, President & CEO,  Gray Ghost Ventures
Arun comes to social venture capital after executive leadership roles in finance and operations in the telecommunications industry. Arun brings his general management experience to lead the management of the organization, investment team and Fund investment activities. Over the last seven years, he has been involved in developing the Impact Ventures portfolios under management and promoting financial and social value creation. Prior to his current role, Arun founded a management and operations consulting practice focused on international operations and support to the wireless industry. Previously, he was a member of the executive team with T-Mobile USA, serving as the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Cook Inlet T-Mobile. As CFO, he spearheaded mergers and acquisitions and the development of business strategies that included managing joint ventures for T-Mobile, establishing Indian operations for US-based firms and promoting start-ups. During his career, he has been responsible for managing market operations, budgeting, vendor financing and special projects, as well as streamlining operations and restructuring departments and business centers to improve financial and operational efficiency.

 

Tarek Ghani, UC Berkeley
Tarek Ghani is a Ph.D. Candidate in Business and Public Policy at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. His fields of specialization are development economics, political economy and organizational economics, and his research interests include how risk affects the development of firms, markets and technologies in emerging economies. His recent fieldwork includes research projects in Afghanistan, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Before Berkeley, Tarek managed a grant portfolio on conflict prevention issues at the private foundation Humanity United, and held prior consultancies with the World Bank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Center for Global Development. A recipient of the Truman Scholarship and the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, Tarek graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and Honors in International Security.

 

Ali Habib, Interactive Health Solutions, Pakistan
Ali leads the software development efforts at IRD in Karachi and Dubai. Ali’s work at IRD involves using open source platforms and technologies like RFID (radio frequency identification) and J2ME to facilitate data collection and data management. His current work includes enhancements to the MDR-TB module of OpenMRS, integration with openXdata, and laying the groundwork for supporting MDR-TB programs in the region to deploy OpenMRS. Ali and the IRD Informatics team continue to enhance the capabilities of RFID-based electronic vaccine registries for EPI programs and vaccine trials sites. Ali and the informatics team at IRD are engaged in development and deployment of mobile phone and web-based electronic health record systems in Pakistan, Nepal, Tajikistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, DRC, Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Peru.

 

Mohammad Azmal Huda, BKash, Bangladesh
Mohammad Azmal Huda is the Chief Technology Officer at bKash Limited, where he directs the company’s strategic direction, development and future growth. The ultimate objective of bKash is to ensure access to a broader range of financial services for the people of Bangladesh. It has a special focus to serve the low income masses of the country to achieve broader financial inclusion by providing services that are convenient, affordable and reliable.

 

Malavika Jayaram, Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society
Malavika works broadly in the areas of privacy, identity, free expression and internet policy in India. A practicing lawyer specializing in technology law, she has a particular interest in new media and the arts, and has advised start-ups, innovators, scientists, educational institutions and artists. A Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, she follows legislative and policy developments in the privacy and internet governance domains. For the last few years, she has been looking at he evolution of big data and e-governance projects in India – particularly the world’s largest biometric ID project – and their implications for identity, freedom, choice and informational self-determination. As a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, she will explore the business case for protecting privacy and free expression in India, in the context of big data projects and threats to internet freedom.

 

Tarun Khanna, Harvard South Asia Institute and Harvard Business School
Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School, where he has studied and worked with multinational and indigenous companies and investors in emerging markets worldwide. He was named Harvard University’s Director of the South Asia Institute in the fall of 2010. He joined the HBS faculty in 1993, after obtaining an engineering degree from Princeton University (1988) and a Ph.D. from Harvard (1993), and an interim stint on Wall Street.  During this time, he has served as the head of several courses on strategy, corporate governance, and international business targeted to MBA students and senior executives at Harvard. He currently teaches in Harvard’s College’s General Education core curriculum in a university wide elective course on entrepreneurship in South Asia. He is also the Faculty Chair for HBS activities in India.

 

Karim Khoja, Roshan, Afghanistan
Karim Khoja, Chief Executive Officer of Roshan, has over 25 years of experience in the telecommunications industry, including starting and managing extremely successful GSM companies in Pakistan, Poland, Croatia, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Under his leadership, Roshan has grown to be Afghanistan’s market leader, with six million customers. Mr. Khoja started his GSM career as CEO for Mobilink in Pakistan, and then launched Era GSM in Poland.  He then went on to form the company, HT Mobile, from Croatia Telecom.  Over the course of the last eight years, Mr. Khoja has dedicated his time to the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED) to bring competition and best practices to the telecommunication industry in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. He has focused not only on financial results, but also on how technology can be used to change lives.

 

Ashwin Khubchandani, Blue Pine Capital, Hong Kong

Ashwin has over 20 years investment experience in corporate lending, mergers and acquisition, private equity and strategy. Over his career has advised on/invested in excess of US$ 20 billion in Asia, Europe, the Americas and Australia. Ashwin was with American Express for 10 years. He held many senior leadership positions in banking, private equity and strategy ended his tenure as reporting into the CEO of Global Financial Services. After his tenure with American Express, He joined ABN AMRO as Director of Global Financial Institutions where he led M&A activities for global financial institutions and corporate clients and also was involved in the banks proprietary transactions. He reported directly to the Vice Chairman and ABN Amro Board. More recently, he was the CEO of Pitt Capital Partners Asia. Pitt Capital Partners is a merchant bank/investment house owned by Washington H Soul Pattinson (WHSP). WHSP is a 130 years old Australian Investment firm that controls a portfolio of public traded businesses worth in excess of US$20 Billion. Today, he is a joint venture partner/Executive Director with United Overseas Bank’s capital markets business – UOB Kay Hian – where he spearheads Asian social enterprise investment platform, corporate finance advisory and family office practice. He is has a MBA from Columbia University Graduate School of Business and MBA from London Business School.

 

Tanaya Kilara, Consultative Group to Assist the Poor; World Bank
Tanaya Kilara is a member of the Customer Centricity team at the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), leading work on translating consumer insights into better delivery and youth financial services. She has been with CGAP since 2010 and has worked on analyzing the business case for youth savings, developing a customer profiling tool called Kaleido, and foundational research and demonstration projects on customer centricity. Kilara brings rich operational experience from a previous position where she was part of the start-up team for an urban microfinance institution in India. In her four years there, she was instrumental in building the business plan, bringing in equity investors, designing financial products, and managing sales and operations. She has an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and a BA with Honors in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. Kilara speaks three Indian languages in addition to English, and is currently learning Spanish.

 

Eric King, Innovation Specialist, US Global Development Lab, USAID
The U.S. Global Development Lab is a new entity within USAID that brings together a diverse set of partners to discover, test, and scale breakthrough solutions to achieve what human progress has only now made possible — the end of extreme poverty by 2030. http://www.usaid.gov/GlobalDevLab

 

Gunn Ingemundsen, Financial Services, Telenor
Gunn heads Telenor’s Financial Services Risk Management, use telco data for credit insights by using advanced predictive scoring models and establish risk management framework to mitigate risk and prevent fraud. Mail goal: strive to build up a risk culture within Telenor with the right governance structure that will encourage corporation and best sharing across all business units within Telenor. Her accomplishments include Launched Devices financing product in Pakistan (based on telco data), Launched Airtime credit product in Thailand (based on telco data), Introduced new financial policies in Telenor Group, Started to build up a risk management team.

 

Marc Mitchell, Harvard School of Public Health
Dr. Marc Mitchell, Founder and President of D-International, and Lecturer on Global Health at Harvard University School of Public Health is a pediatrician and management specialist who has worked in over 40 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America on the design and delivery of health care services. His current work focuses on the use of electronic clinical protocols running on mobile phones to enhance the quality and continuity of care in low income countries. Through this work he has become a specialist in the use of mobile technology to improve health care delivery worldwide. His organization, D-tree International has offices in Tanzania, Malawi and India and is a leader in the use of clinical protocols to improve the quality of health care delivery. His research includes an NIH funded project testing the use of mobile phones to improve provider and client adherence to the widely used IMCI child health protocols, projects to develop and test clinical protocols that improve antenatal, post natal and neonatal care in clinics and the community and a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenge Grant that is developing new approaches to improve the immediate transfer of women in labor who deliver at home but exhibit danger signs during labor or delivery. His work on HIV/AIDS funded by CDC/PEPFAR focuses on the triage of patients on ART. Dr. Mitchell began his international career as a pediatrician at a hospital in rural Tanzania, was Assistant Secretary for Health in Papua New Guinea.

 

JP Onnela, Harvard School of Public Health
Dr. Onnela is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University. He is interested in a broad range of theoretical and applied problems in network science and network analysis. His current research focuses on statistical and mathematical analysis and modeling of social networks and their connection to human health, development of metrics and methods for network analysis, and network models. He also interested in online social systems, social media, and analyzing and modeling behavioral and social interaction data captured through mobile technology both at the individual and collective level.

 

Clayton Sims, VP of R&D and Mobile Engineering,  Dimagi; MIT’s User Interface Design Group
Clayton Sims is the VP of R&D and Mobile Engineering at Dimagi, an award-winning, socially conscious technology company that helps organizations deliver quality healthcare to urban and rural communities around the world. His focus is on empowering both local and global organizations to employ technology on their own terms, working with partners on the ground to develop tools like IVR driven voter information systems in Zimbabwe and multimedia-enabled Maternal and Child Health tools for community advocates in Afghanistan. Clayton leads technical development on CommCare, a customizable platform which allows non-technical groups to author their own mobile data collection and decision support applications. Recently, Clayton has worked with MIT Engineers and Harvard University Economists to create a toolkit for economists to create highly scalable internet based game simulations. He is currently pursuing a Masters Degree in Computer Science and Engineering at MIT’s User Interface Design group, developing software systems to enable end-users to generate electronic decision support protocols.

 

Joel Selanikio, Datadyne
Dr. Joel Selanikio is an award-winning physician, innovator and public speaker who leads DataDyne’s efforts to develop and promote new technologies and business models for health and international development, including multiple-award-winning Magpi mobile data collection and messaging software – the most widely scaled mobile technology ever created for international development, with more than 30,000 users in more than 170 countries. Dr. Selanikio is a practicing pediatrician, as well as a former Wall Street computer consultant, and former CDC epidemiologist.

 

Ara Tahmassian, Harvard University Chief Research Compliance Officer
Ara Tahmassian, Ph.D., is the University Chief Research Compliance Officer. In this role, Dr. Tahmassian is broadly responsible for the oversight of the review, development, and implementation of policies related to research compliance activities across the University. Additionally, Dr. Tahmassian works toward the overall effort to manage potential risks at the University by integrating and coordinating the significant compliance requirements across the University.

 

Kentaro Toyama, University of Michigan
Kentaro Toyama is a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT, and will soon join the faculty at the University of Michigan School of Information. For the last ten years at Microsoft Research India and the University of California, Berkeley, he has conducted research in a field called “information and communication technologies and development” to understand how the world’s poorest communities use and could benefit from electronic technology. Before that, Toyama did computer vision and multimedia research at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, and in Cambridge, UK; and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. Toyama graduated from Yale with a PhD in Computer Science and from Harvard with a bachelors degree in Physics. He is writing a book about technology and social causes.

 

Kerstin Trikalitis, Out There Media
As CEO and Co-Founder, Kerstin is responsible for the company’s global growth working closely with Fortune 500 global brands as well as with tier 1 mobile operators. She has over 15 years of international experience in the mobile industry and has held leading management positions since 2001. Prior to her appointment as CEO of Out There Media, she was the Managing Director of WIN SA, a subsidiary of LSE-listed mobile services provider WIN plc. Her previous position was Managing Director of Imako Interactive, which she successfully transformed from a loss-making web development firm into a profitable supplier of mobile services that was acquired by WIN plc in 2005. Kerstin started her career in Marketing at Unilever, a position which formed the foundation of her solid knowledge in the fields of Marketing and Communications. She holds a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from the Vienna University of Economics & Business Administration, and an MBA from ESADE in Barcelona. In 2014 she graduated from Harvard Business School after following the OPM program (Owners and Presidents Management) and completed the Stanford Graduate School of Business Endeavor Leadership program. She is a regular Keynote Speaker at international conferences and was appointed the Chairperson of the Board of the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) for the EMEA region in 2012. Kerstin was selected as “Endeavor High Impact Entrepreneur” in 2013 and among the Top 50 Female Executive in Mobile by Mobile Entertainment Forum in 2010. In 2014, Kerstin was nominated to serve Cannes Lion  jury at the category “Mobile”.  She is half Danish and half Greek and speaks six languages.

 

Erik Wetter, Flowminder.org
Co-founder and Chairman of Flowminder.org. Dr. Wetter has a position as Assistant Professor at Stockholm School of Economics where he for several years was teaching courses on Social Entrepreneurship and Social Impact Assessment. Erik has also been affiliated with SciencesPo Paris as well as the Swedish National Defence College where he was working on various topics relating to data collection methods and effects measurement in low-and middle income countries (LMIC).

 

Joseph Ziskin, Vice President, Corporate Strategy, IBM Industry Academy Member, IBM Corporation
Joe joined IBM in 1997 and has been an executive in IBM Global Services, IBM Sales & Distribution, and Corporate Strategy. He joined IBM Corporate Strategy at the end of 2006.   He works with IBM’s business and technical leadership to develop strategies for new business opportunities/business models and to improve operations. He works across IBM to drive strategy and execution in the areas of Cloud Computing Business Models, Networks, and Mobility/Wireless. He also spends time in China, India, and Africa working with leaders and executives on partnerships and digital disruption. Prior to his current role, he was Vice President for IBM’s Global Telecommunications Industry.  He continues to lead IBM’s efforts in telecom standards, business development, & growth initiatives. Prior to joining IBM, Joe spent over 10 years as a strategy consultant. He was also Vice President, Strategic Planning for The Bank of New England.  Joe is a member of the Executive Committee of the TM Forum, and chairs the Governance Committee.Joe is a Graduate of Cornell University (B.S.) and Boston University (M.B.A.) and is a Certified Public Accountant in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Joe and his wife Paula live in Westport, Connecticut.  Their two children; Max in NYC and Lena in Washington, D.C.

 

Harvard South Asia Institute Staff

Meena Hewett, Executive Director, Harvard South Asia Institute
Meena is the Executive Director of the Harvard South Asia Institute (SAI) and provides the administrative leadership to its day to day operations. She works with the faculty across all professional schools at Harvard University and the College, as well as at peer institutions to catalyze interdisciplinary partnerships on issues critical to South Asia with the goal to generate new knowledge on critical issues facing the region. She oversees the work of SAI offices at Harvard, Dhaka, Karachi, Lahore, Delhi and Mumbai, which works with think tanks, governments, NGOs, and South Asianists and connects them to faculty and students at Harvard.

 

Nora Maginn, Program Manager, Harvard South Asia Institute
As Program Manager at the South Asia Institute, Nora is responsible for SAI’s grant program for students and faculty, fellowship program, and events at Harvard and in the region, including seminars, conferences, webinars, and workshops. She holds a Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Human Development and Psychology. She is a 2014 Harvard University Administrative Fellow.

Seminar Scribe: Jeanette Lorme, Research Assistant, Harvard School of Public Health

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