The SDG Digital Transformation and Sustainability Solutions Lab

Margot Gerritsen is a Professor [Emerita] at Stanford University in Computational Mathematics and Energy Science and Engineering, and the founder and current Executive Director of Women in Data Science Worldwide. Margot’s expertise is in designing computational tools for a wide range of applications, including energy resources, ocean modeling, sustainability, and data science.

Born and bred in the Netherlands, Margot left the country in 1990 in search of sunnier and hillier places and after some time in Colorado she completed her PhD in Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics at Stanford in 1996 with a focus on Computational Fluid Dynamics.

Her first academic position was in New Zealand at the University of Auckland. In 2001, Margot returned to Stanford as faculty member in Energy Science and Engineering. From 2010-2018, Margot was the director of ICME, the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford, and from 2015 – 2020, the Senior Associate Dean for Educational Initiatives in the School of Earth Sciences. Margot is a Fellow of the international Society of Industrial & Applied Mathematics and holds honorary doctorates from Uppsala University in Sweden and the University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

Margot now lives in Bend, Oregon, with her husband Paul and dog Millie. In her spare time, she loves hiking and kayaking, riding bikes and motorcycles with Paul, reading mysteries, gardening, and visiting her son Callum who lives and works in Seattle.

Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English. He studied for his undergraduate degree at the University of Ghana and took his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, after which he held a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford before returning to Cambridge to become Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature in the Faculty of English. He was also Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Fellow of Pembroke College while at Cambridge. Prior to Stanford he was Professor of African and Postcolonial Literature at New York University and Professor of English and inaugural Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. In 2016 he was appointed University Professor at the University of Toronto, the highest distinction that the university can bestow.

Professor Quayson has served as President of the African Studies Association and is an elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, the British Academy, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Vaughan Pratt is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University. He obtained a double honours degree in pure mathematics and physics from the University of Sydney, and his Ph.D. from Stanford University under Donald Knuth. He taught at MIT from 1972 to 1980 and subsequently at Stanford University until his retirement in 2000.  After a decade of work on pocket workstations and autonomous vehicles, in 2010 his interests turned to geophysics with a focus on global environmental change.  He has made a number of presentations in this area at the annual fall meetings of the American Geophysical Union.  His current research addresses the limited funds available for slowing the rate of rise of atmospheric CO2, arguing that $80 per ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere as contemplated by America’s Inflation Reduction Act is too expensive to have any appreciable impact.  His present research is focused on methods focused cost-effectively removing  CO2 from the atmosphere.

Ashish Goel is a Professor of Management Science and Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science at Stanford University, and a member of Stanford’s Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford in 1999, and was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California from 1999 to 2002. His research interests lie in the design, analysis, and applications of algorithms; current application areas of interest include social networks, participatory democracy, Internet commerce, and large scale data processing. Professor Goel is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan faculty fellowship (2004-06), a Terman faculty fellowship from Stanford, an NSF Career Award (2002-07), and a Rajeev Motwani mentorship award (2010). He was a co-author on the paper that won the best paper award at WWW 2009, an Edelman Laureate in 2014, a co-winner of the SigEcom Test of Time Award in 2018, and a recipient of the 2023 Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Kanpur. Professor Goel was a research fellow and technical advisor at Twitter, Inc. from July 2009 to Aug 2014.  He has also served as a technical advisor to Coinbase Inc, Infosys Inc, and to the Chief Economic Advisor of India.

Vasilis Syrgkanis is an Assistant Professor in Management Science and Engineering and (by courtesy) in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, in the School of Engineering at Stanford University and a member of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. His research interests lie in the areas of machine learning, causal inference, econometrics, online and reinforcement learning, game theory, mechanism design and algorithm design. Until August 2022, he was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, New England, where he was a member of the EconCS and StatsML groups. During his time at Microsoft, he co-led the project on Automated Learning and Intelligence for Causation and Economics (ALICE) and was a co-founder of EconML, an open-source python package for causal machine learning. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University. His research has received best paper awards at several top tier machine learning and AI conferences (EC, NeurIPS, COLT) and he is the recipient of a 2022 Amazon Research Award and of the 2023 Bodossaki Distinguished Young Scientist award. He has published more than 70 scientific papers and co-authored the book “Applied Causal Inference Powered by ML and AI.”

Kwaku Addo Sakyi-Addo is strategic communications advisor, Government of Ghana; former Chair, National Communications Authority, & former BBC & Reuters country correspondent. He chairs the board of the Minerals Development Fund, a statutory body responsible for supporting social projects in mining communities, and serves on the Advisory Board to the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources in Ghana. Kwaku is Chair of the Advisory Council of the International Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon, and a director of Databank Foundation, the charity arm of Databank Financial Services, Ghana’s pioneer assets management firm. He served as Chief Executive of the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications from 2011 until early 2017 when he was appointed Chairman of the National Communications Authority, the telecom industry regulator.

Tralance Addy is a co-founder and CEO of Yaro Capital, a newly formed venture capital firm focusing on scalable potential-high-impact enterprises in Sub-Saharan Africa.  He was previously the first executive director of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (Stanford|SEED). He also is the founder and former President of Plebys International, LLC, a California-based investment and venture management company.  He simultaneously served as CEO of WaterHealth International Inc. (WHI), a Plebys venture whose transformation he led, from a technology offering into a path-breaking company providing access to affordable clean water to more than 5 million people in urban and underserved rural communities in Africa and Asia. He has been recognized for his innovation and philanthropic work and, in 2007, Inc Magazine named him “Do Good Capitalist of the Year.”

Paola is a seasoned strategy, innovation and transformation officer with more than 20 years in the CPG and consulting industries, now focused on value creation, mutual sustainable solutions and the frontiers and resilience of human systems. For the last 4 years, she was the Chief Innovation Officer for Mars, Inc and is well recognized for her fluent ability to bring the outside in, articulating the next generation of needs and tactical solutions, which can be seen throughout her career at Mars, having spent it developing and implementing strategic plans, M&A integration, insights and intelligence analysis, global governance methodology, next generation capabilities, and managing external partnerships, including the United Nations (Food and Agriculture Organization, World Food Programme and World Health Organization), World Bank and African Union. Her current focus is in helping broad acceleration and scale up of Sustainable Development Goals solutions across multiple sectors and stakeholders.

CEO & Founder of Producers Trust, which is building a leading network of agricultural producers and working to build market linkage software to connect value chains more directly and efficiently. The data is being organized to bring greater transparency and visibility to consumers in an effort to connect shared values. As CEO, Keith plays a leadership role in setting the vision, creating the strategic plans, and working to execute all facets of the Producers Market ecosystem including the market linkage platform, StoryBird product, and media entity.