Support for Innovation

Bruce is the Executive Director of Inveneo and Founder of Green WiFi. He leads Inveneo with extensive experience in the energy and telecom industries, 17 years in Silicon Valley as a telecom industry expert, a background in engineering and experience implementing solar powered ICT4D projects to help further Inveneo’s mission. He recently provided technical guidance and hands-on training and implementation assistance bringing Internet access to hard to reach schools in Haiti and Micronesia. His areas of expertise include: wireless networking, eco-data centers, DC power, and solar power. Bruce has published numerous white papers and articles on green data center operations and solar power in ICT4D. His educational background includes a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Technological University and advanced studies in International Business from the University of Wisconsin. He is also a guest lecturer on solar powered ICT4D at ICTP and the University of Guam.

Barbara Krause is a Senior Corporate Finance Attorney, Social Venture Attorney, and Entrepreneur based in the Bay Area. She has an international legal career spanning more than 10 years representing private and public companies in all industries and at all stages of development, investors in early and later stage ventures, and leading banks and commercial lending institutions. In addition to her legal career, Krause has served as a lecturer at Santa Clara University since 2010.

Wesley Grubbs is an artist, data visualizer and provocateur based in Berkeley, CA. In 2007 he founded Pitch Interactive, a studio whose focus is weaving code with design with statistics to find versatile solutions to communicate complex data for clients such as Google, Wired, GE, Esquire, Scientific American, Popular Science and the McKnight Foundation. He received his BA and Masters at the University of Arkansas.

APRIL 4, 2014 (FRI). 12:30pm- 1:30pm
Moderator: Nathaniel Manning, open data, business development, and technology for global good; Director of Business Development at Ushahidi, Former Chief Data Coordinator at USAID & connecting the globe with BRCK.
Theme: Ushahidi, building a tech ecosystem in Nairobi that reaches the world

Learn more about Nathaniel Manning

Nathaniel’s work orbits around the theme of developing technology that makes the world a better place.
Nathaniel is the Director of Business and Strategy at Ushahidi. Nat also helps run business development for the BRCK, a redesign of connectivity for the developing world.

He was previously a Presidential Innovation Fellow, and then the first Chief Data Coordinator at USAID. The role involved working to develop tools and strategies for liberating data to fuel entrepreneurship and innovation for international development.

Nathaniel has also previously co-founded Fellow Robots, a robotics company, and The Instnace, a personal data exchange. Previously, Manning was a financial associate for the Clean Energy team at the Clinton Climate Initiative, living in Bangkok and Melbourne and working throughout Asia-Pacific.

Nathaniel holds a BA and MA from Brown University.

Dr. Nathan Wolfe, the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Human Biology at Stanford University, has spent his life studying deadly viruses to detect worldwide disease pandemics before they kill millions. Wolfe is Founder and CEO of Metabiota, a for-profit company specializing in microbiological research, products and services. He is also Founder and Executive Chairman of Global Viral, a non-profit promoting understanding, exploration and stewardship of the microbial world.

TIME magazine included him in the “2011 Time 100” as one of the one hundred most influential people in the world; Rolling Stone named him one of the “100 Agents of Change” in 2009; and Popular Science recognized him as one of their “Brilliant 10” in 2006. He has been honored with a Fulbright fellowship and the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. He is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer. Times Books published Dr. Wolfe’s first book, THE VIRAL STORM: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age on October 11, 2011. Dr. Wolfe has over 80 scientific publications and his work has been published in or covered by Nature, Science, The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, The New Yorker and Forbes among others. He has received support totaling over $30m in grants and contracts from Google.org, the Skoll Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the US Department of Defense and others.

Jonathan Berman is an author, speaker, and consultant. He current serves as a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Vale Center and a senior advisor to Dalberg, a strategic advisory firm focused on frontier markets. He has advised numerous global Fortune 500 companies on entry and operations in emerging and frontier markets, focusing on the political and economic dynamics that drive shareholder value. His clients include global leaders in oil, gas, mining, agribusiness, infrastructure, healthcare, and consumer goods, as well as governments and investors active in these sectors.

Sheila E. Desai arrived in India in September 2012 to serve as the Deputy Director for the Office of Food Security within the USAID/India Mission. She has since transitioned to serve as USAID India’s Senior Science and Technology Advisor sitting within the Mission’s Center for Innovation and Partnerships. She regularly coordinates with USAID Washington DC initiatives to increase cooperation between U.S. Universities and visiting U.S. scholars/scientists with Indian organizations. Prior to this position, she was seconded from USAID to the International Security Assistance Forces where she served as the Senior Economist for the Stability Development Unit in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Before joining USAID, Dr. Desai worked as a Management Consultant and Transfer Pricing Economist for Price Waterhouse Coopers and Accenture. Her international experience includes serving as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Paraguay and leading household survey development in rural Mexico. She speaks Spanish and French and holds a B.A. in Economics from Yale University and an M.S. and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics. Originally from Minnesota, she recently relocated to India and Florida.

David currently works to create social investing funds to support sustainable social enterprises, including The Eye Fund with Deutsche Bank for $15M and now the Solar Fund with Bamboo Finance.  More recently he co-founded Sound World Solutions, a social enterprise to make affordable hearing devices with a novel fitting made of off-the-self Bluetooth components.

David Green has worked with many organizations to make medical technology and health care services sustainable, affordable and accessible to all. David is a MacArthur Fellow, Ashoka Fellow and is recognized by Schwab Foundation as a leading social entrepreneur. David directed the establishment of Aurolab and has developed high-volume, quality eye care programs that are affordable to the poor and self-sustaining from user fees, including Aravind Eye Hospital in India. He has played a role in developing major eye care programs in China, India, Nepal, Egypt, Tanzania, Bangladesh and Guatemala. Within this paradigm of ‘empathetic capitalism’, he now works to create social investing funds to support sustainable social enterprises (The Eye Fund with Deutsche Bank for $15M and now the Solar Fund with Bamboo Finance). In addition to co-founding Sound World Solutions, he started Brien Holden Vision Diagnostics, to design unique and affordable ways to detect eye disease, diabetes and neurological disorders. He works with Pacific Vision Foundation to establish an eye institute serving all in N. California.

David is also Vice President at Ashoka, where he leads an effort to reduce health care costs in the US.  He graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor in General Studies (1978) and a Masters degree in Public Health (1982).  He is on the faculty of Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute.  He is the recipient of the 2009 “Spirit of Helen Keller” award for humanitarian efforts in blindness prevention; is the recipient of the 2009 University of Michigan Humanitarian Service Award; and was selected by University of Michigan Engineering students as a leading social entrepreneur alumnus. He is on the boards of the University of Michigan School of Business Social Venture Fund; the Stanford Biomedical Fellowship for India; and is on the advisory board of the Seva Foundation.