Quick Response Team

Iro Altraide graduated with a Master’s degree from Yale’s Environment School. She has over 10 years of experience in sustainable development projects and program management. Her career has orbited around sustainability – in advocacy, rural community development, natural resource production, investments, philanthropy and stakeholder participation. She has worked for Shell, free-lanced with various national and international NGOs, UNDP, World Bank, EU; consulted for several Niger Delta States, Federal Government of Nigeria; and also in regional partnerships across West & Central Africa. Her main interests are in poverty eradication programs for developing countries and contributing to behavioral reforms that help the public, private and civil society sectors to achieve sustainable development.
Tom Andreassen is a Fellow of the Global Justice Program at Yale University

Yasin Janjua teaches times series econometric methods to graduate and undergraduate students in Ryerson and York University, respectively and microeconomic case studies for management at University of Toronto. Prior to this, he headed a public policy think tank the Centre for Poverty Reduction and Social Policy Development (CPRSPD) in Islamabad, of UNDP and the Government of Pakistan. As an entrepreneur, he established a policy research firm Centre for Research on Economic and Social Transformation (CREST) in Pakistan, which advised governments and international development agencies. He was also the member of the core team which has prepared Pakistan’s New Economic Growth Strategy at Planning Commission. In past, he has worked as a Development Economist with Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the World Bank, European Union and German Technical Cooperation (GIZ).
Gichung Lee has completed her Master’s program at Seoul National University with an International Cooperation major. Her graduation thesis focused on assessing Hong Kong’s press freedom since 1997 as she saw it as one of the key indicators of Hong Kong’s reality. During her last semester, she also worked as a Research Assistant at the Institute for China Studies at school. She has also got MPhil in Development and has been involved in many projects. Her extracurricular activities include: an internship at the Yale-China Center; participating as a discussant in the Youth MDG Forum; assisting at the Ewha English camp; contributing to an UNESCO work camp in Spain; volunteering at Holt Children’s Services and Korea Food for the Hungry International.
Tinya Lin is currently a medical student at Western University in Canada and completed her M.Sc in international health policy at the London School of Economics & Political Science. She has previously worked at Medtronic European Headquarters as a health policy/ reimbursement intern, and at the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Heath in the Ethical, Social, and Cultural program and St. Michael’s Hospital (Toronto) contributing to identifying strategies for community engagement. Research background include the use of qualitative (interview-based) methodologies, and conducting systematic reviews. She has also spent time in Jamkhed, India with the Comprehensive Rural Health Project in 2009, working towards the grassroots empowerment for sustainable health development.
Anna Malavisi, currently is a PhD candidate in  the doctoral program in philosophy at Michigan State University, specialization in ethics and development. Her areas of interest are ethics, feminist philosophy/epistemology  and social and political thought. She has a Master of Health and International Development and has worked for many years in Bolivia in the NGO sector in areas of development practice and management.
Alessandra Pinna received her PhD in Political Science from the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane (Florence) in 2011. Her fields of interest are regime transitions, democracy promotion and democratic governance. Between 2007 and 2012, she was a Teaching and Research Assistant in Political Science and Democracy and Democratization at Roma Tre University. She participated in several research programs, both in Italy and abroad (Yale University and University of Belgrade). Her more recent publications are “US Democracy Promotion in Serbia and Croatia,” “Democratizzazione in Serbia,” “Democratizzazione in Croazia” (forthcoming), “United States Democratic Anchoring” (2010) and “La Ciencia Política según sus Maestros” (2008).
David Rodríguez-Arias, PhD. is a Juan de la Cierva research Fellow at the Philosophy Institute of the Spanish National Research Council (CCHS-CSIC), and belongs to the Group or Excelence G-41 on Applied Ethics of the University of Salamanca. In December 2008 he simultaneously obtained a PhD in Moral Philosophy at the Philosophy Department of the University of Salamanca, and a PhD in Medical Ethics at the School of Medicine of the Université Paris-Descartes. He has been a visiting fellow at Case Western Reserve University, the University of Toronto Joint Center for Bioethics and the Hastings Center, NY. His research is devoted to the ethical and international aspects of organ transplantation, biomedical research and global bioethics.
Karen Hoi Ting So graduated from McMaster University in 2008 with a Bachelors in Health Sciences (Honours) Specializing in Global Health. For her undergraduate thesis she travelled to Ghana where she researched about the factors that help predict whether healthcare workers will comply to practice guidelines in regards with the distribution of anti-malarial medications. She also completed an independent project in Ghana about the barriers to HIV testing in youths in Wa, Upper West Region in Ghana with a focus on the psychosocial, provider-related and structural barriers. This past summer she spent interning at the World Health Organization’s European Region Office in Copenhagen, Denmark where she helped analyze changes in the number and quality of EURO’s health systems guidelines/guidance or decisions taken by the Regional Committee, before and after the establishment of the Guidelines Review Committee in 2007 as well as helping with the follow-up on the work done by the Consultative Expert Working Group on Research and Development: Financing and Coordination. She is currently studying Medicine at the University of Hong Kong.
Mitja Stefancic was born in 1980 in Trieste, Italy, where he completed a scientific secondary high school with a final grade of 100/100. In 2003 he graduated at the University of Essex with a thesis on the Slovene ethnic community in Italy, under the supervision of Professor Yasemin Soysal. During the MPhil at the University of Cambridge, he specialized in political economy and transition economics in Central and Eastern European countries.  He has successfully completed a number of courses and summer schools in Principles of Management, and has been later employed for some years in a cooperative bank based in Trieste, Italy. He is about to finish a PhD with a dissertation on the governance of cooperative banks in Italy. His main research interests are – apart from non-commercial banking – youth unemployment, issues in political economy, and the concept of “diversity” in economics. Mitja is fluent in English, Italian and Slovene. Moreover, he has a basic knowledge of French.
Kuldeep Thakre is currently pursuing Post Graduate Program in Global Business Operations from Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi University. He is Curator & Licensee of TEDxSRCC conference in 2013. He is the President of Harvard US India Initiative (HUII) SRCC Chapter & Outreach Chair in HUII Board. He is associated with Task Force for Peace Child International and UNESCO’s Youth Summary of the 2012 Education for All General Monitoring Report. He is the Board Member of Academic Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) “Global Student Advisory Board” and provides input to ASAP Board members for poverty alleviation projects in India. He was member of Editorial Board of the SRCC GBO National Colloquium & organizer of the Annual Management Fest “En Masse 2012”.
Erica Tucker is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Cal Poly Pomona, a large and diverse public engineering university in Southern California. Her specialties are global justice, the history of political and social philosophy, and development theory and ethics. She also works in community radio, helping build community capacity through radio. She is currently finishing a book manuscript on refugee radio and democratization in the United States. From January 1, 2013 to December 2013, she will be in Finland as a fellow of the University of Helsinki Centre for Excellence.
Satay Yadav  has been working as Associate Professor in Economics(South Asian Studies ) with College Education, Government Of Rajasthan since last 1998. He has visited Duke University(USA), Jacobs University, Bremen(Germany),  INTED of Spain(Spain), Tribhuwan University ,Kathmandu(Nepal) in his prestigious academic career. He is deeply involved in research activities. He has  four books  in his credit and published  more than  30 paper/articles in international and national journals. He is  Board Member of Academic Stand Against Poverty (ASAP). Dr. Yadav is on the editorial board of international journal-’RJHSS’. He is also life member of Indian Economic Association. He has been President of the Researchers Association University of Rajasthan and organized two workshops/symposias. He is open to learn things in collaboration with international persons on different aspects of common interest.