ABOUT KOPERNIK

Kopernik (Copernicus’ Polish name) is known for changing the way people viewed the world around them. In our own way we hope to change the way people approach development and the way in which some of the greatest challenges facing the world today are addressed.

 

Staff

 

Co-Founder

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Toshi has extensive experience in international development gained during his career with the United Nations.  He has spent the past nine years living in East Timor, Indonesia and Sierra Leone working with the United Nations and dealt with governance reform, peace building processes and post-disaster reconstruction including the tsunami in Aceh and the Yogyakarta earthquake.  While in Indonesia he piloted a Base of the Pyramid approach by engaging Japanese companies in pro-poor business development. Prior to joining the UN Toshihiro was a management consultant for McKinsey and Company in Tokyo. He holds an L.L.B from Kyoto University, Japan and Masters of Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.

 

Co-Founder

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Ewa began working in development ten years ago when she arrived in East Timor as an Australian volunteer to work for a local NGO.  She subsequently established a local women’s empowerment organization - Centro Feto, which remains an important local organization until today.  Since then Ewa has lived in Indonesia, Sierra Leone and Thailand and worked for NGOs, the United Nations and the World Bank.  Throughout her career, Ewa has focused on protecting the rights of vulnerable and disadvantaged groups.  Ewa has extensive experience in the design and implementation of projects which seek to improve access to justice and empower poor and disadvantaged communities. Ewa’s undergraduate study focused on Asian studies, and her graduate specialization was in politics and public policy.Ewa grew up in Poland and Australia.

 

Irene has 10 years experience in the area of interactive media, working as part-time/freelance web developer in the USA and Indonesia. She began working in development when she joined UNDP Indonesia to develop interactive solutions for improving knowledge management. She had since combined her talents to improve development project practices through better monitoring and information management.

Irene has a bachelor's degree in architecture, and an MFA in Computer Graphics & Interactive Media from Pratt Institute, New York. She also has a diploma in project management from UC Berkeley Extensions.

 

Shan Riku is a current student at Harvard Kennedy School with concentration on International Development. Previously she worked for McKinsey&Company for three years, during which time she worked for various multi-national companies on marketing and strategy issues. Her involvement with international development began in the summer of 2008 while she worked as a Public-Private-Partnership consultant at UNDP in Indonesia. Shan aspires to become BOP (Bottom of the Pyramid) business specialist with a focus on technology. She holds a B.S. in Chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

Scott White is a Masters student at Stanford University studying Management Science & Engineering, specializing in strategy for high-tech companies entering new markets. Previously, Scott worked with various NGOs and community organizations in Central America to promote the rights of indigenous peoples and implement energy projects in off-grid indigenous communities. As a career Scott aims to develop companies that incorporate novel business models to use the web for social change.

 

 

Board of Directors

 

Guy Janssen is a highly experienced governance expert, with two decades of experience built up through hands-on research and policy consulting. His governance work has spanned a wide range of governance issues for public and corporate entities in the world’s poorest countries.

He has worked extensively for bilateral donors and international institutions such as the World Bank, UN agencies, NGOs, think-tanks and academia.

Guy has a particular interest, and expertise in developing scientific methods for the evaluation of aid programs and actively seeks to make the impact of development measurable. He has developed an assessment to measure organizational personality of non-profit organizations - this analytical tool uses values, power and interests of all stakeholders to create a personality of the non-profit organization that encompasses and transcends external identities.

Guy is supporting several SMEs as a board member or through provision of governance advice.

Abigail Schwartz is the Deputy Director of the Burma Project/Southeast Asia Initiative at the Open Society Institute. She has lived and worked in both Thailand and Cambodia. Prior to joining OSI, she worked for the Asia Foundation's Washington, DC office. She has an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center.

 

Koki Yoshino worked for ten years with the Ministry of Environment in Japan and more recently has been a management consultant with Roland Berger Strategy Consultants. He is a law graduate of Kyoto University and received his MBA from Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in 2002. Koki is an executive member of Project-K, a non-profit organization working towards the reform of the Japanese bureaucracy. He has recently published a book “Kasumigaseki Ishin” “Reforming the Japanese Bureaucracy”.

 

 

Advisory Board

 

Scott Guggenheim is the senior social policy adviser for the AusAID-Indonesia Partnership Program and former lead social scientist for East Asia and Pacific at the World Bank. His main focus during the past twenty-five years has been the use of social policy and analysis to help development agencies improve the quality of their operations. Scott was instrumental in the shift to better integration of social development in the World Bank structure and the architect of many large-scale community development programs. Of note, these include the Kecamatan Development Program, a $1.3 billion community development program covering 34,000 villages across Indonesia; the National Emergency Solidarity and Employment project in Afghanistan, which was the first community development and emergency public works program after the bombing; and the Empowerment of Female-Headed Household (PEKKA) program which supports advocacy and micro-finance for poor widows in conflict areas across Indonesia. Scott has a Ph.d. in Social Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Jakarta, Indonesia and doesn't sleep much.

 

Richard Manning is a governance and community development expert and has worked in Indonesia for more than 22 years.   He served as district administrator of 3 districts in Timor Leste with responsibility for the overall management of local government and security services. Richard has extensive knowledge of Indonesian government structures, processes and access to a vast network of government officials at national, provincial and district levels.  He has extensive practical understanding of governance issues (e.g. management of local government, elections, management of security forces, etc) at all levels from communities to national government resulting from work with international NGOs and multilateral agencies.

 

Edward Rees is Senior Adviser at Peace Dividend Trust (PDT) where he assists in the development of new Marketplace Projects for PDT, in addition to developing new operational effectiveness initiatives for peace operations. He was formerly the Country Director in Timor-Leste for PDT.

Prior to this, he worked with the Peacekeeping Best Practises Section (PBPS) of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) at the UN Headquarters in New York. Edward acted as Political Officer to the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy in Timor-Leste in 2006 and later participated in the Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Commission of Inquiry for Timor-Leste.

Additionally, Edward acted as consultant to the International Crisis Group, the Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, King’s College London, Amnesty International and the US State Department. A dual British/Canadian citizen, he studied at McGill University and King’s College, University of London.

 

Sanjay is the President and General Counsel of Roebling Partners in New York where he works with emerging growth companies (“start-ups”) on matters of valuation, strategy, regulation and marketing. He has over 12 years of experience working with global public organizations and private firms as both a consultant and operator. He previously worked with the UN Development Programme where he built an innovative program partnering with businesses and local stakeholders to create new “Base of the Pyramid” business models in fifteen countries across Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. Prior to UNDP, he was a senior manager with McKinsey & Company's New York office where he was a leader in the New Business Building practice. Sanjay graduated from the University of Oxford in 1997 with a Masters in Law. He also studied law at the University of New South Wales (Australia) and McGill University (Canada) as well as Finance and Economics at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. He is the co-founder of McKinsey Alumni in Development (MAD), a global network of over 1,600 McKinsey alumni engaged with international development issues and also served on the Advisory Board for Business and Ethics at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He was admitted to the New York Bar in 2001.

 

Nigel is Technical Evangelist and Product Manager with the Microsoft Public Safety Initiative (aka Microsoft Vine.net). Prior to joining the Vine team Nigel led Microsoft's research on humanitarian collaboration, working in Afghanistan and elsewhere on innovative collaboration technologies to make communities more resilient and development more effective.

In addition to his work with Kopernik, Nigel is an advisor to the ICT4Peace foundation (http://ict4peace.org), and the Institute for State Effectiveness (http://effectivestates.org).

Before joining Microsoft Nigel worked for the United Nations, most recently as a global Pandemic contingency planner for the UN System and before that with the UN Joint Logistics Center where he was deployed to Iraq, the 2004 Tsunami in Indonesia, the Sudan and a number of other crises. At UNJLC Nigel managed the mapping and information management teams and led logistics coordination in the field for major emergencies.

Nigel has a PhD in Complex Adaptive Systems from the Australian National University, has worked as a researcher and lobbyist, founded technology startups, received a number of patents, and has jumped off way too many cliffs over the years.

 

Osamu is a partner of McKinsey & Company based in Tokyo and Shanghai.
He is one of the leaders of McKinsey's Asia Pacific consumer practice and has worked with private companies as well as public institutions in Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Philippines on wide range of topics such as corporate strategy, frontline transformation, and corporate transformation. He was also involved in UNDP's Growing Sustainable Business project as an advisor in Indonesia. Prior to McKinsey, Osamu worked at Japanese Ministry of Finance for international financial policy making at the time of Asian currency crisis.
He holds a B.A. in economics at University of Tokyo and a MBA at University of Rochester.

 

Linda Gottlieb is a film and television producer, writer, adjunct professor, and consultant to non-profits.

Among her films is Dirty Dancing, starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey; television movies including Citizen Cohn for HBO, Soldier’s Girl for Showtime, Face of a Stranger, Summer of My German Soldier, The Gentleman Bandit, The Electric Grandmother, and the mini-series Chiefs. For three years she was executive producer of ABC’s daytime drama One Life to Live.

Ms. Gottlieb was the co-founder of Learning Corporation of America, an educational film company funded by Columbia Pictures, and launched the company’s television arm, Highgate Pictures.

As an author, Linda Gottlieb co-wrote the book, When Smart People Fail, published by Simon and Schuster. She has been a contributor to Life, Premiere, The Reader’s Digest, Mademoiselle and other publications.

Currently she teaches a graduate master class in screenwriting at the Tisch School at NYU and has also taught screenwriting at Yale School of Drama.

She is on the advisory board of Auburn Seminary, is active in the Women and Foreign Policy group at the Council on Foreign Relations, and consults for many non-profits on their marketing strategies, particularly as to how they can help women in the developing world.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wellesley College, Ms. Gottlieb was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the Russian Institute of Columbia University, where she received an M.A. Recipient of the 1992 Muse Award from New York Women in Film and Television, Ms. Gottlieb is married, has two grown sons, and lives in New York City.