Fellows, Researchers, and Assistants
Senior Fellows Fellows Post-Graduate Research Fellows Graduate Student Researchers Operations Assistants
Senior Fellows
Saleem H. Ali
Saleem H. Ali is an environmental planner whose research and practice focuses on ways of resolving ecological conflicts through technical and social mechanisms, as well as exploring novel ways of peace-building between corporations, governments and communities. He holds the Blue and Gold Distinguished Professorship in Energy and the Environment at the University of Delaware, USA (commencing September 2016). He has also held the Chair in Sustainable Resources Development at the University of Queensland’s Sustainable Minerals Institute in Brisbane, Australia (where he retains professorial affiliation). Previously he was Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Natural Resources where he was founding director of the Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security. His books include Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and a Sustainable Future, (Yale Univ. Press); Environmental Diplomacy (with Lawrence Susskind, Oxford Univ. Press), Mining, the Environment and Indigenous Development Conflicts (Univ. of Arizona Press) and Islam and Education: Conflict and Conformity in Pakistan’s Madrassas (Oxford Univ. Press). He has also authored over a hundred other peer-reviewed publications and been the editor of acclaimed anthologies including “Peace Parks: Conservation and Conflict Resolution” (MIT Press) and “Diplomacy on Ice: Energy and the Environment in the Arctic and Antarctic” (with R. Pincus, Yale Univ. Press). Corporate and government experience includes employment in General Electric’s Technical Leadership Program; a Baker Foundation Fellowship at Harvard Business School and a Research Internship at the UK House of Commons. He was chosen as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2011 and received an Emerging Explorer award from the National Geographic Society in 2010. He is a member of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas and serves on the board of governors of the non-profit environmental organization LEAD-Pakistan. He is also a series co-editor for the University of Chicago Press on Environmental Science, Law and Policy. He received his doctorate in Environmental Planning from MIT, a Master’s degree in Environmental Studies from Yale University and Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Tufts University (summa cum laude).
Luciana Aquino-Hagedorn
Luciana Aquino-Hagedorn is an international lawyer and angel investor with extensive experience in international investments. As a CCSI Senior Fellow she explores the theory and practice of impact and sustainable investments. Most recently she was a partner in Goodwin Procter’s Real Estate Industry Group and co-leader of the Impact and Responsible Investing Practice. She focused her practice as a lawyer on advising asset managers and institutional investors in direct investing, fund formation, joint ventures, incentive compensation and real asset investments, including sustainable timber and agriculture. Prior to Goodwin, she was Senior Vice President of Natural Resources at Harvard Management Company (HMC), where she was involved in HMC’s natural resources investment portfolio, overseeing U.S. outside counsel and foreign counsel in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Australasia, including investment structuring, M&A, corporate governance and real estate. Prior to joining HMC she was an associate in Goodwin’s Boston office, where she counseled clients on fund formation, transactional and regulatory matters. She also previously worked as a foreign associate for Linklaters in New York City and began her legal career at Le Pera & Lessa in Buenos Aires. She has a J.D. from Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, LL.M. from Columbia Law School, and J.D. from Boston University School of Law. She is admitted to the bar in Buenos Aires (inactive), New York and Massachusetts.
Albert Bressand
Albert Bressand is Professor, International Strategic Management in Energy at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands. During the Barroso Commissions to 2014 he was Special Adviser to Andris Piebalgs, the Commissioner for Development at the EU Commission in Brussels. From 2006 to 2012, he was a professor and the Executive Director of the Center for Energy, Marine Transportation and Public Policy at SIPA, Columbia University. From 2003 to 2006 he led the Global Business Environment department in Royal Dutch Shell’s global headquarters in London where he designed a new generation of Shell Global Scenarios around an enhanced, original methodology for risk and opportunity assessment. Previously, he co-founded and acted as managing director of Promethée, a nonprofit, Paris-based think tank specializing in the emerging global networked economy and its implications for corporate strategies, capital markets, and international economic relations. Earlier in his career, he served as Special Adviser to the Minister for Foreign Affairs of France, Deputy Director of the French Council on Foreign Relations (IFRI) and was member of the Policy Planning Staff in the Office of Robert McNamara at The World Bank. Currently, he is also a member of the faculty of the World Economic Forum, of the Oxford Energy Policy Club at St Antony’s College, Oxford, as well as of the Advisory Boards of the European Center for Energy and Resources Security (EUCERS) at King’s College London, of the Natural Resources Charter (Oxford), of Politique Internationale (Paris) and of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum in London. His recent publications include “Good COP, Bad COP: When the European Kant meets the World’s Machiavels” (Fondapol, in French), “The EU ETS as bellwether of a flawed European Internal Energy Market,“ Tendances Carbone (2013); “Markets and investment in global energy,“ Handbook of Global Energy Policy (2013); and Getting It Right: Lessons from the South in Managing New Hydrocarbon Economies (2011). He earned his advanced scientific degrees at École Polytechnique in Paris, École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and Paris-Sorbonne, and a Master in Public Administration and a PhD in Political Economy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Frank J. Garcia
Frank J. Garcia is Professor of Law and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar at the Boston College Law School. A Fulbright Scholar, he has lectured widely on globalization and international economic law in Europe, South America and the Asia/Pacific region, and has consulted on private litigation matters and for states and international organizations. He has held various leadership positions within the American Society of International Law, and currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of International Economic Law, where he is the principal Book Review Editor. He is the author of, among other volumes, Consent and Trade: Trading Freely in a Global Market (2019) and Global Justice and International Economic Law: Three Takes, both published by Cambridge University Press. An early advocate for joining normative political theory on the question of justice with the field of international trade law, his work in investment law has continued that move. Recent publications include “Reforming the International Investment Regime: Lessons from International Trade Law;” “Investment Law for the 21st Century” (with Sebastian Lopez E.); and a collaborative book on Rethinking International Investment Governance: Principles for the 21st Century” (2018). Most recently he has been a leader in law reform efforts to regulate third-party funding in ISDS through the UNCITRAL rules revision process and other modalities. His current research focuses on a multi-year project rethinking the nature of foreign investment law; a book chapter on the role of arbitration associations in regulating third-party funding; and (for the Max Planck Institute) a study of the contribution of international courts and tribunals towards global procedural and substantive justice.
James S. Henry
James S. Henry is a leading economist, attorney, consultant, and investigative journalist, who has written and spoken widely on tax havens and development finance issues. He has served as Director of Economic Research (chief economist), McKinsey & Co.; VP Strategy, IBM/Lotus Development Corporation; Business Development Manager, Chairman’s Office (Jack Welch), GE; and Senior Consultant, Monitor Company. He is founder of Sag Harbor Group, a technology strategy consulting firm, and has also founded several technology-based start-ups. In the not-for-profit sector, he has served as Chair of the Global Alliance for Tax Justice, senior advisor and global board member of Tax Justice Network, and founder and steering committee member of TJN-USA. He is also a founder and Managing Partner of the Northern Environmental Law Center. He has written numerous books, including The Blood Bankers (NY: Basic Books, 2005) and The Price of Offshore Revisited (July 2012, Tax Justice Network) and his articles have appeared in many leading newspapers, magazines, and professional journals, including Business Week, The Financial Times and The New York Times. He has testified several times before the US Senate on economic policy issues, is a frequent speaker at forums on international development, and has been interviewed on a wide variety of economic issues for leading international broadcast networks and radio stations. He is an honors graduate of Harvard College (Magna Cum Laude, Social Studies ’72; Detur Prize; Phi Beta Kappa, National Merit Scholar, Chairman, Institute of Politics, Student Advisory Committee); Harvard Law School (J.D., Honors, 1976); Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (M.S..ABD, Economics, 1978); Danforth Fellow; “Nader Raider;” and a member of the New York Bar since 1978.
Mouhamadou Kane
Mouhamadou Kane is an international lawyer, banker and development finance practitioner whose research and practice focuses on the intersections between law and development, public policy and development finance. His experience includes working for more than a decade at the Islamic Development Bank, were he participated in over thirty multi-million dollars developmental projects in about 25 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Middle-East and North Africa. He currently assists the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in establishing a permanent investment dispute settlement organ and leads the process towards the adoption of a dispute settlement protocol by the Council of Foreign Ministers. Previously, he worked as an Assistant Professor of law at the University of Cergy-Pontoise in Paris, as Research Scholar with the university’s Research Center on Public and Private International Law and as legal consultant for the Geneva-based International Trade Centre (ITC). He is a former visiting researcher at Saint-Louis University’s Center for International and Comparative Law in Missouri, a former Hubert Humphrey Leadership Fellow at Boston University (BU), and a former Research Fellow with BU Global Development Policy Center’s Global Economic Governance Initiative (GEGI). He is the Founding Executive Director of the African Center of International Law Practice (ACILP), a Senegal-based think-tank that helps African countries bridge the gap between international law and public policy. His most recent publications include authoring chapters in the 2017 and 2018 editions of the Yearbook on International Investment Law & Policy and collaborating in the book entitled: “Rethinking International Investment Governance: Principles for the 21st Century” (2018). He holds a Ph.D in law from Cergy-Pontoise University and an MPA from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Tom Mitro
Tom Mitro is Co-Director of the Graduate Certificate in Global Energy, Development and Sustainability at the University of Houston. He has 40 years of experience in management, consulting and teaching all aspects of petroleum financial, commercial and government related activities, working and living in six countries. His area of focus is the broader economic impact of petroleum development in Africa. For the last 10 years he has been an advisor and trainer to governments and national oil companies in Africa. He was a long term advisor to the Angolan national oil company on a range of commercial, fiscal, financing and governance issues for their natural gas and LNG projects. He also structured and conducted a series of training and development programs for senior Tanzanian government officials on fiscal, environmental, commercial and local content aspects of natural gas and LNG developments. Previously, he worked for 30 years for Gulf Oil and Chevron in several senior management positions living in Nigeria, Angola, Papua New Guinea, UK and Australia. He served as regional Chief Financial Officer for Southern Africa and for Europe with responsibility for managing: taxes and fiscal terms, economic evaluations, accounting and reporting, compliance matters, strategic planning, local business development, joint venture management, contracting and procurement and financing. He has led numerous commercial and government negotiations ranging from complex tax disputes, LNG agreements, major asset transactions, oil entitlement claims, financing arrangements and joint venture disputes to PSA interpretations and sale and purchase agreements. Since 2014 he has been assisting the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment as reviewer of policy documents, instructor on extractive courses and co-author of CCSI’s open fiscal model for natural gas combined upstream, pipeline and LNG developments. He is also co-founder of Indego Africa, an NGO that has been helping provide business management training and expanded market access for groups of women in Rwanda since 2007 and in Ghana since 2015. He holds a B.S. in Business Administration and M.A. in Economics degrees from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, USA.
Aniket Shah
Aniket Shah is a development strategist and investment manager working on development finance initiatives around the world. He is the Program Leader of the Financing for Sustainable Development Initiative at the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), where he works with national governments, global financial institutions and non-profit organizations to finance the sustainable development agenda. Before working with the SDSN, he worked as an investment professional and strategist at Investec Asset Management, an international investment management firm based in South Africa and the United Kingdom. At Investec, he advised large institutional investors — both public and private — on developing long-term portfolio investment strategies with a focus in emerging markets and Africa. He has also worked at The Earth Institute at Columbia University as a Program Manager and Special Assistant to the Director and at Goldman Sachs & Co. He has published books, reports and articles on sustainable development and financial markets. He is the lead author of the report Africa and the United States – A Defining Relationship of the 21st Century and co-edited Learning from the World: New Ideas to Redevelop America (Palgrave Macmillan). He is an honors graduate of Yale University, where he collaborated closely with former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo and former UN Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch Brown at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. He was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship and won various academic and leadership awards at Yale. He is currently pursuing his doctorate at Oxford University in Economic Geography, focusing on sustainable finance at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.
Fellows
Anna Bulman
Anna Bulman is an Australian lawyer whose work to date has focused on global food security and nutrition through the lens of international human rights, trade and investment law. After completing her Master of Laws at Columbia University, she briefly worked as a researcher in the Land and Agriculture team at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, after which she moved to South Africa and spent a year and a half heading a right to food project in the Constitutional Litigation Unit of the Legal Resources Centre. She then worked in international agricultural trade at the World Trade Organization before joining the team of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Professor Philip Alston, as a consultant and then advisor for two years. Prior to her Masters, she was an associate to the Honourable Justice Tom Gray of the Supreme Court of South Australia, and a paralegal at Blake Dawson (now Ashurst), where she became Co-Coordinator of Pro Bono for the Adelaide office. She is a former South Australian Co-Convenor of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights and has further previous experience in Aboriginal legal aid, representing young people in employment law matters, and teaching and mentoring students. Her academic writing focuses on the human rights to food and nutrition within international investment and human rights law, as well as international development more broadly. She is proficient in German and Spanish, and currently learning French. She holds a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and a Bachelor of Laws, Bachelor of Arts, and Diploma of Languages from the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Ludovica Chiussi
Ludovica Chiussi is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Adjunct Professor in Public International Law at the University of Bologna, School of Law. She has been lecturing in public international law, international human rights law, and business and human rights at the Universities of Oslo and Bologna. A fully qualified lawyer (Italy), she has worked as a legal assistant in cases before the International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea, and investor-state arbitral tribunals. She has also worked with the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs. Her current research focuses on the legal nature of corporate liability for human rights violations under public international law. In particular, she undertakes research on the role of international investment law in fostering corporate liability for human rights violations, as well as on the issue of complicity of social media companies in gross violations of human rights. She holds a PhD from the University of Oslo (where she was a Doctoral Research Fellow in International Law with the Norwegian Center for Human Rights), Degree in Law from the University of Bologna, and Master in International Relations and Human Rights from the Italian Society for International Organization.
Kabir Duggal
Antoine Heuty
Antoine Heuty is an experienced development practitioner with a long track-record designing and delivering policy reforms and working for social good with business, civil society and government in over twenty countries. He is the founder of Ulula- a mobile platform to measure and improve the impact of mining, oil, gas and other large corporations on local communities. Ulula uses SMS, interactive voice response to create a feedback loop between individuals and businesses for social good. The platform generates real-time big data that enables new insights for corporate decision making to minimize social risks and maximize shared value. He is the former Deputy Director of the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) – an independent organization promoting the effective, transparent and accountable management of oil, gas and mineral resources. He was Senior Economist with the Natural Resource Governance Institute and Public Finance Economist Bureau of Development Policy, United Nations Development Program (UNDP). He is the co-author of “Fiscal Space – Policy Options for Financing Human Development” and various articles on resource governance, public investment, fiscal policy and economic development. He has graduate degrees from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris, Oxford University and Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
Mirtha Kastrapeli
Mirtha Kastrapeli is the founder and CEO of Beyond Alpha, a specialized research and consulting firm that helps institutional investors adopt investment and business models that target social and environmental outcomes, in addition to traditional market outperformance. Most recently, she was the Global Head of State Street’s Center for Applied Research, an independent think tank designed to provide insights about the future of the investment industry. In this capacity, she co-authored multiple papers, including the 2019 study ‘The Big Shift; Finding a New Center of Gravity for the Investment Industry.’ She has over fifteen years of experience in the private and public sector, analyzing capital markets, and helping shape public policy. She spent seven years as a Global Macro Strategist at State Street Global Markets in Boston. In the public sector, she served as an advisor to the Secretary-General of the Ministry of Economics in Nicaragua. She also worked at the Economic and Commercial Office of the US Embassy in Managua, where she received a Meritorious Honor Award by the US Department of State. She earned a Bachelor’s degree from Ave Maria College in Nicaragua and a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the Brandeis International Business School.
Nicolas Maennling
Nicolas Maennling leads the Regional Cooperation Programme for the Sustainable Management of Mineral Resources in the Andean Region for GIZ. He is a development economist with experience in the public and private sectors. He has published, taught, and led advisory projects in various resource-rich countries on taxation systems, macroeconomic and revenue management, and risk analysis of large-scale investments. Before joining GIZ, he lived and worked in Mozambique and Timor-Leste advising the respective Governments on resource management prior to a five-year stint as Senior Economics and Policy Researcher at CCSI. He holds a MSc in Economics from the University of Warwick (UK).
Alexandra Meise
Alexandra (Xander) Meise has significant experience preventing and resolving international investment and human rights disputes, particularly those related to natural resources, economic development, and transitional justice in post-conflict regions. She has represented and advised foreign governments, international corporate clients, and sovereign officials before federal district courts, federal courts of appeals, UN bodies, international commercial arbitrations, investment treaty arbitrations, and the International Court of Justice, and has worked for prosecutors and judicial chambers in international criminal tribunals. She has also advised governments seeking to reform their international investment laws and policies. Active in pro bono activities, she has trained numerous government officials and practitioners on mechanisms, legal standards, and strategies in international arbitration; represented asylum seekers in immigration proceedings; and advised the Supreme Court of the Republic of Zambia as it developed a new clerkship program. In addition to her private practice and serving CCSI, she serves as an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, where she teaches International Human Rights Law.
Sophie Thomashausen
Sophie Thomashausen is a former Senior Legal Researcher at CCSI. Her focus is on optimizing legal and governance frameworks to promote sustainable development. In particular, she undertakes research and provides advice on issues related to mining law and policy, resource-related infrastructure, public-private partnerships, and large-scale land investments. Prior to joining CCSI, she was a Law Fellow at the Public International Law and Policy Group. She also spent seven years at Allen & Overy LLP in London and São Paulo where she advised on project finance, asset finance, and other banking transactions in the Middle East, Africa, Kazakhstan, and Brazil. From 2010- 2012, she also worked on a number of law capacity-building projects in Rwanda. She received an A.B. from Princeton University, USA, a B.A. and M.A. in law from Cambridge University, England, and an LL.M. from the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium. She is admitted to the Bar in New York State (2013) and England and Wales (2007). She is also currently a member of the Mining Law Committee of the International Bar Association.
Post-Graduate Research Fellows
Urvi Agarwal (Investment Law and Policy)
Kanika Gupta (Investment Law and Policy)
(Helen) Hyae Ryung Kim (Extractive Industries)
Daniel Parks (Land and Agriculture)
María Florencia Sarmiento (Investment Law and Policy)
Graduate Student Researchers
Cody Aceveda (Extractive Industries)
Jiarui (Sam) Chen (Extractive Industries)
Oluyemisi Falade (Investment Law and Policy)
Vrinda Handa (Investment Law and Policy)
Byungchul Jeon (Land and Agriculture)
Toumai Kafri (Extractive Industries; Land and Agriculture)
Naima Kane (Land and Agriculture)
Angel Li (Investment Law and Policy)
Isabella Lorduy (Investment Law and Policy)
Hillary Obinna Maduka (Land and Agriculture)
Scott Mills (Extractive Industries)
Diana Rincon (SDG-aligned Food Sector)
Aarushi Sahu (Land and Agriculture)
Bryan Sherrill (Extractive Industries)
Efosa Uwaifo (Land and Agriculture)
Operations Assistants
Seth Borden
Jordan Lesser-Roy
Gabriel McCormick
Asatta Mesa
Michael Morgan
Connor Olson
Maria Tamburro
Genevieve Wade