Advisory Board
Cyrus Ardalan
Non-Executive Director and Chairman Citigroup Global Markets Ltd. Former Vice Chairman and Head of Public Policy of Barclays Capital, while previously appointed as Head of Investment Banking, Russia, the Middle East and Africa Global Head of Fixed Income Marketing at Paribas.
Cyrus Ardalan is currently Chairman of LXI REIT PLC, a FTSE 250 closed-end real estate investment company, Board member of CEPI, a Trustee of the Charities Aid Foundation Chairing its financial services subsidiary CFSL and Chairman of Blend Network a lending platform.
Prior to his retirement, Mr Ardalan spent 15 years at Barclays Bank as a Vice Chairman, at Paribas where he held a number of senior management roles and at the World Bank where he was a Division Chief in the treasury.
He has also been Chairman of OakNorth Bank a UK challenger bank, Chairman of Citigroup’s international investment banking subsidiary, Citigroup Global Markets Limited, Chairman of the International Financing Facility for Immunization a multilateral development agency, Chairman of the International Capital Markets Association (ICMA), a board member for the Dubai International Financial Centre and a Senior Adviser to the Rock Creek Group and Alvarez and Marsal. He is also the co-founder of the Humanitarian Finance Forum (HFF).
Mr Ardalan has a bachelor’s degree from University College London and a postgraduate degree from Oxford University in economics.
Willem Buiter
Willem Buiter is an independent economic consultant and speaker. He is currently a Visiting Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations. He was Global Chief Economist at Citigroup from 2010 to 2018 and a Special Economic Advisor at Citigroup from 2018 to 2019. Previously, he was Chief Economist and Special Counsellor to the President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and an original member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. He was the Juan T. Trippe Professor of International Economics at Yale University and has also held professorships at the London School of Economics and Cambridge University. He is the author of 78 refereed articles in professional journals and seven books.
Deirdre McCloskey
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, to the Board. We are honored and grateful for the fact that Deirdre has accepted our offer to become part of our Board. Deirdre is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, adjunct in classics and philosophy, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard in the 1960s as an economist, she has written twenty-four books and some four hundred academic and popular articles on economic history, rhetoric, philosophy, statistical theory, economic theory, feminism, queer studies, liberalism, ethics, and law.
,She taught 1968–80 at the University of Chicago in the Economics Department during its glory days, but now describes herself as a “literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, ex-marxoid, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian classical liberal.” She is well known for her 2019 Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All , and her massive economic, historical, and literary trilogy The Bourgeois Era (2006, 2010, 2016), as well as for The Rhetoric of Economics (1985) among others.
Francis Fukuyama
Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, was published in Sept. 2018. His latest book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, was published in May 2022.
Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.
Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), and the Pardee Rand Graduate School. He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and at the Center for Global Development. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Governors of the Pardee Rand Graduate School and the Volcker Alliance, and a member of the American Political Science Association and the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Fukuyama is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.
Carl Muñana
Impact Investor, Former CEO, Inter-American Investment Corporation (IIC)
Mr. Muñana has dedicated most of his professional life to international investment banking, social impact investing and development finance. Most recently he served as the General Manager and CEO of the Inter-American Investment Corporation, the multilateral private sector investment banking affiliate of the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, DC.
In his early career Carl rose to Managing Director at J.P. Morgan & Co. where his responsibilities included being Head of Investment Banking for Mexico, Global Head of the Commitments Office and Senior Risk Officer for Latin America. He capped his 17 years at Morgan by designing an innovative social investment strategy for the firm.
His second career focused on the challenges and innovations in the fields of social and development finance. This included acting as an investor, strategy consultant, and board member to companies, foundations and academia primarily in Europe, the United States and Latin America.
He has helped establish and served on several international corporate and not-for-profit boards, including Voxiva Inc., the Microvest Funds and the Spanish affiliate of Ashoka. As a co-founder of the Beeck Center he was deeply involved in the design of its objectives and strategy.
Carl earned his Bachelor’s degree at the University of Notre Dame and his MBA at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Between degrees he served in the United States Peace Corps as a volunteer in Sierra Leone, West Africa.
Sir Christopher Pissarides
Sir Christopher Antoniou Pissarides FBA is a British-Cypriot economist. He is the School Professor of Economics & Political Science and Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, and Professor of European Studies at the University of Cyprus. Nobel Prize Laureate in 2010 on his work in Labor Economics.
He is the School Professor of Economics & Political Science and Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. His research interests focus on several topics of macroeconomics, notably labor, economic growth, and economic policy. In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, jointly with Peter A. Diamond and Dale Mortensen, for his contributions to the theory of search frictions and macroeconomics.
Emmanuel Tsesmelis
Professor Emmanuel Tsesmelis Senior Physicist, Directorate Office, CERN Visiting Professor, Department of Physics, University of Oxford Emmanuel Tsesmelis is an experimental particle physicist with a career spanning scientific research, academic teaching, science communication, international relations and management at CERN and at several universities.
He is a Senior Physicist in CERN’s Directorate Office and a Visiting Professor in Particle and Accelerator Physics at the University of Oxford. He is an elected Fellow of the Australian Institute of Physics and a supernumerary member of Jesus College, Oxford. He is fluent in English, French, German and Greek. He undertook his studies in Athens, Melbourne and Dortmund. He completed his Ph.D. studies in experimental particle physics at the University of Dortmund, where he worked on the search for the charged Higgs boson at experiments at CERN. From 1993 to 1998, he worked on neutrino experiments at CERN searching for quantum mechanical oscillations of one flavour of neutrino to another. In 1998 he joined the CMS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), one of the two experiments that in 2012 announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, and for the period 2005-2008 he was Head of the LHC Experimental Areas. As a result of his research, he has co-authored a large number of scientific papers in refereed journals together with international collaborators. Emmanuel Tsesmelis heads the CERN Directorate Office, which plays a key advisory and support role for the Director-General and Senior Management, providing a source of policy and strategy counsel. As of 2004, he has also been providing strategic advice to CERN Directors-General on international relations of the Organization. In this capacity, he has been responsible for bringing into collaboration with CERN scientists from countries that are in the process of developing their particle physics communities. He also lectures in physics and organizes public engagement events in science, technology and innovation, most notably related to CERN’s Non-Member State Summer Student Programme and High School Teacher Programme and also in relation to the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition in London.
Susan Wachter
Susan Wachter is the Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate and Professor of Finance at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. From 1998 to 2001, she served as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the senior urban policy official and Principal Advisor to the Secretary. During her tenure at HUD, Wachter’s office was responsible for the New Markets Tax Credit, the major legislative initiative for urban revitalization, with the goal of attracting private capital into low-income communities. At The Wharton School, she was Chairperson of the Real Estate Department and Professor of Real Estate and Finance from July 1997 until her 1998 appointment to HUD. At Penn, she co-founded and currently is Co-Director of the Penn Institute for Urban Research. She also founded and currently serves as Director of Wharton’s Geographical Information Systems Lab. She was the editor of Real Estate Economics from 1997 to 1999 and currently serves on the editorial boards of several real estate journals. Wachter is the author of more than 200 scholarly publications and the recipient of several awards for teaching excellence at The Wharton School. Her forthcoming edited volume, Fair Housing, will be published by Penn Press. Previous volumes include Shared Prosperity in America’s Communities and Neighborhoodsand Life Chances. Wachter has served on multiple for-profit and not-for-profit boards and currently serves on the Affordable Housing Advisory Committee of Fannie Mae and the Office of Financial Research Advisory Committee of the U.S. Treasury. She frequently comments on national media and testifies to Congress on U.S. housing policy.
Michalis Sarris
Michael Sarris economist and politician with a doctorate in economics at Wayne State University.
Retired from World Bank as Department Director and served as Cyprus Finance Minister under. His wide range of expertise includes developmental policy issues, structural adjustments and the cultivation of economic policy dialogue.
Peter Zemsky
Professor Zemsky directs/teaches Strategy in the Age of Digital Disruption, Business Strategy and Financial Performance and the Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) Programme.
As Dean of Innovation from 2013 to 2023, he led the development of a wide range of EdTech innovation including immersive VR cases and the INSEAD Learning Hub app, as well as the development of large scale customized online courses for leading companies including Accenture, Microsoft and Schneider Electric. These courses have been recognized with gold medals by the Chief Learning Officer’s Learning in Practice Awards for “Excellence in Blended Technology” and “Excellence in Academic Partnerships”, by Brandon Hall for “Best Results of a Learning Program” and “Best Unique or Innovative L&D Program” and by EFMD for “Excellence in Professional Development”.
He oversaw the school’s physical entry into North America through the design and execution of its distinctive San Francisco Hub for Business Innovation. He was also oversaw the school’s activities on its Middle East Campus in Abu Dhabi.
During his over 13 years in INSEAD leadership, he has led all major departments of the school including the flagship MBA program, executive education, fundraising, faculty & research and IT, as well as serving as Acting Dean. He oversaw the Advancement department during its successful €300 million Business as a Force for Good capital campaign. He was the first Dean of Degree Programmes and created the integrated department structure.
Professor Zemsky is a pioneer in the value-based approach to strategy analysis that characterizes firm performance in terms of value creation and value capture. His research develops rigorous mathematical treatments of fundamental strategy phenomena such as the timing of innovation strategies, the choice of competitive positions, and the nature of disruptive technologies. His doctoral students have been recognized three times for having the best dissertation in strategy by the Academy of Management and have been hired by leading business schools including HEC, NYU and Wharton.
Professor Zemsky is a frequent speaker and moderator on technology and innovation strategy. He is a Board Member at the public company Clairvest (TSX: CVG), a top performing mid-market private equity management firm.
He was recognized as the outstanding graduating economics major at the University of Pennsylvania and then pursued his doctoral studies at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was supported by a prestigious National Science Foundation fellowship.
