KEI’s board of directors includes the following persons:
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Chair
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr is a Professor of International Affairs at The New School, New York. A development economist her current work focuses on global policies for human development and human rights in diverse areas including poverty reduction, conflict prevention and agricultural technology. Prior to joining the New School, she was a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government where she worked on a project on agricultural biotechnology, and from 1995 to 2004, she was director of the UNDP Human Development Reports. Created by Mahbub ul Haq to advocate policy options that expand human choices and freedom, this annual publication that tracks global poverty and development has been an influential source on policy challenges for politicians, governments, NGOs, media, academia. The 10 reports Sakiko led covered a broad range of themes, from globalization to new technologies, democracy, human rights and cultural diversity. She has had a long career in international development, starting at the World Bank where she worked on agriculture in the Middle East, and moving on to UNDP where her assignments included managing programs in East and West Africa, and leading policy initiatives for aid effectiveness and capacity development. Her publications, in addition to the Human Development Reports, include The Gene Revolution: GM Crops and Unequal Development, Readings in Human Development (edited with Shivakumar), Rethinking Technical Cooperation – Reforms for capacity building in Africa (with Elliot Berg), Capacity for Development (edited with C. Lopes and K. Malik), and numerous papers and book chapters. She founded and is editor of the Journal of Human Development, and is on the Editorial Board of Feminist Economics. She is also on the board of several NGOs that advocate human rights and technology for development.
She is a member of the United Nations High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines.
Sakiko received her BA from Cambridge University (UK), MALD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (USA), and MA from the University of Sussex (UK).
Sakiko is a citizen of Japan and grew up in Tokyo, Washington D.C., London and Manila. She is married to Francis Parr, and lives in New York with their two children.
Tim Hubbard
Tim Hubbard is Professor of Bioinformatics and Head of Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics at King’s College London and is Director of Bioinformatics for King’s Health Partners/King’s College London. He also serves a Head of Bioinformatics at Genomics England, a company established by the UK government to help deliver the 100k Genome Project, which aims to sequence the genomes of 100,000 infectious microorganisms. He served as Head of Informatics at The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK from 2007-20013 and remains an honorary faculty at the Wellcome Trust. He was responsible for the informatics division of the institute, which is at the vanguard of providing analysis and access to genome and genetic data, particularly of humans. He was joint head of the Ensembl genome annotation project, which is the world’s leading database and access point for the human genome sequence. The Institute was responsible for determining a third of the human genome sequence and with the Wellcome Trust led the policy of immediate release of sequence data into the public domain.
Following the controversy surrounding the ownership and access to the human genome sequence, he has become a leading advocate of the benefits of open access and open data release for science and society as a whole. He was a member of the OECD working group on ‘Issues of Access to Publicly Funded Research Data’ and is a member of a number of advisory boards related to information access, including ukPMC (uk PubMedCentral) a repository for open access publications. He is actively involved in government, NGO and industry discussions regarding intellectual property, innovation and public health and in 2013 was seconded as a specialist advisor to NHS England. He received his BA from Cambridge University (UK), and PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London (UK).
Rohit Malpani
Rohit Malpani is Director of Policy and Analysis at Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF) Access Campaign. Prior to this, Mr. Malpani was Special Advisor, Policy and Campaigns Unit for Oxfam Hong Kong. Previously, he served as Senior Campaigns Advisor at Oxfam America – an international development and humanitarian agency where he managed Oxfam’s access to medicines campaign, provided advice to Oxfam on the intersection of intellectual property and development, and also served as a corporate campaigns advisors with Oxfam America’s Private Sector Department. Previously, he worked as a human rights advisor to the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization, and also with local civil society groups in Thailand and Argentina. Mr. Malpani started his legal career as an intellectual property attorney with the law firm of Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich and Rosati. He has a Doctorate of Jurisprudence from the New York University School of Law and a Bachelor of Arts from Rice University. He was born in Calgary, Canada and raised in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Eric Sawyer
Eric Sawyer currently works as Civil Society Partnership Advisor at UNAIDS, the primary policy and programmatic secretariat for the United Nations’ HIV programs. Sawyer is a long time AIDS activist who co-founded ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in New York in 1987.
He also helped found Housing Works, which houses homeless people with AIDS, and Health GAP (Health Global Access Program), which centers its advocacy around HIV drugs and the access to essential medicines. He studied at the State University of New York at Oneonta and earned a graduate degree from the University of Colorado-Boulder.