The SDG Digital Transformation and Sustainability Solutions Lab

Claudia is cofounder of Stanford Alumni in Sustainability and Initiative Founding Co-Chair of the SDG Digital Transformation and Sustainability Solutions Lab. Claudia has built a career in the luxury retail industry in product marketing and brand management roles at Tiffany & Co. and Estée Lauder as well as at early and mid-stage fashion and jewelry startups. Her work has always intersected sustainability and retail and she continues to be involved in the world of eco-fashion. Claudia holds degrees in International Relations and Psychology from Stanford University.

Mr. Cogut founded Pegasus, a private equity fund, in 1995 and serves as its Chairman and CEO. Through Mr. Cogut’s leadership, Pegasus has focused on sectors influenced by global resource scarcity and the need to combat climate change, as well as on the growth in demands globally for human health and wellness, leading to Pegasus becoming the first U.S. private equity fund manager to be accredited by the Green Climate Fund. In 1990 Mr. Cogut co-founded and was one of the original partners at Apollo Advisors L.P., a position he held for six years preceding the creation of Pegasus. In addition, Mr. Cogut has been an active philanthropist in the fields of improving education, building civil society and championing environmental and health issues. Mr. Cogut currently serves as Chairman of the finance advisory board of the Global Alliance for a Sustainable Planet, a non-profit focused on leveraging private finance for public good in order to achieve sustainable development goals.

Radhika Shah is Cofounder and Co-Chair of the SDG Digital Transformation & Sustainability Solutions Lab which is bringing together brilliant minds to leverage tech and data science innovation to advance the SDGs. Radhika is a tech-impact investor and deep believer in digital innovation & policy’s role in accelerating the SDGs. She is Co-President of Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs and along with fellow Stanford alum is catalyzing a new Stanford community anchored Alliance on Artificial Intelligence for the SDGs. Radhika is a staunch believer in role of policy and community to accelerate social change, is on the board of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), U.C. Berkeley and Impact Experience and is Founding Co-Chair of the United Nations Joint SDG Fund Breakthrough Alliance which leverages tech, media and markets to advance sustainable futures and create opportunities for all.

Influenced by Gandhian philosophy, Radhika cares deeply about sustainability, human dignity, and women’s socio-economic empowerment. She is and has been an advisor to Illumen Capital, the former SDG Philanthropy Platform, ATREE USA which helps communities protect and restore ecosystems they live in, and Benetech & MakerGhat in the education transformation space. Radhika has been a member of the Center for Global Development study group on AI, Technology Comparative Advantage & Development Prospects and participated in co-designing a Stanford study, co-authored peer-reviewed-papers, and had articles published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the UN, Thomson Reuters, and other national/regional media. She holds a Masters in Computer Science from Stanford University and an MBA from U.C. Berkeley.

The first-ever White House National Climate Advisor and a former U.S. EPA Administrator, Gina McCarthy is one of the nation’s most respected voices on climate change, the environment, and public health. As head of the Climate Policy Office under President Biden, McCarthy’s leadership led to the most aggressive action on climate in U.S. history, creating new jobs and unprecedented clean energy innovation and investments across the country. Her commitment to bold action across the Biden administration, supported by the climate and clean energy provisions in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, restored U.S. climate leadership on a global stage and put a new U.S. national target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50-52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 within reach.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Soledad Artiz Prillaman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and the faculty director of the Inclusive Democracy and Development Lab. She received a Ph.D. in Government at Harvard University and a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Texas A&M University. Her research lies at the intersections of comparative political economy, development, and gender, with a focus in South Asia. She is the author of an award-winning book, The Patriarchal Political Order, and has published numerous academic articles on issues of women’s empowerment and political economy in India.

Supreet Kaur is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at UC Berkeley. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Economy and Government (Department of Economics) from Harvard University, an M.P.A. in International Development (MPA/ID) from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a B.S. in Operations Research from Columbia University. Supreet’s research lies at the intersection of development, behavioral, and labor economics. Her work seeks to further our understanding of the role of labor markets in the persistence of poverty—with a focus on unemployment, wage structure, and the psychology of poverty.

Supreet is a faculty affiliate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action, where she serves as a Scientific Director for the Psychology and Economics of Poverty Initiative and on the Faculty Advisory Committee. She is a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2019-2024), Sloan Research Fellowship (2018-2020), the CESifo Distinguished Affiliate Award in Behavioural Economics (2015) and the David A. Wells Prize by the Harvard Economics Department (2012).

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.”

Sanjay Purohit is CEO and Chief Curator of Centre for Exponential Change. He has 35+ years of diverse experience spanning corporate and development sectors. Since 2016, he has been co-creating Societal Thinking, an approach to resolve complex societal challenges with speed, at scale, sustainably. He has engaged with 500+ Change Leaders across 20+ countries with Societal Thinking in domains such as climate action, education, gender equity, healthcare and livelihoods. The core ideas of Societal Thinking are encapsulated in his Think Books. He is mentor and co-founder of apurva.ai, a platform to amplify the collective wisdom of communities with AI. He serves on the Board of Advisors of Don Norman Design Award that champions humanity centred design, the UN DPI Safeguards Initiative, and Fundamentum, a scale investment fund.

Sam Hamilton is a global data and AI executive who brings over three decades of experience architecting the large-scale, high-trust platforms that underpin the digital economy. Having held leadership roles at Visa, PayPal, and Yahoo, Sam has built a career on scaling secure, real-time systems serving millions of users globally.

Most recently, as Senior Vice President and Head of Data and AI at Visa, Sam led the modernization of the company’s analytics, AI, and Generative AI stacks. His focus extended beyond technology to include the crucial integration of governance and ethical principles, ensuring that all AI was operationalized responsibly and fairly at a global scale. Earlier roles as VP of Data at PayPal and VP Engineering/CTO across multiple companies built his foundation in high-scale, real-time systems.

Sam has been recognized on the Observer AI Power Index, Constellation Research AI 150, Haute Living AI 100, and holds multiple patents in digital and mobile real-time intelligence, analytics, AI and GenAI. He now advises boards, investors, and mission-driven organizations on responsible AI, sustainable digital ecosystems, and data-driven growth, helping leaders translate cutting-edge AI into trusted capabilities that serve both business and society.

Heather Grady is a Vice President in the San Francisco team of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. She leads on funder collaboratives and oversees a portfolio of more than 40 sponsored projects in environment, climate change and cross-cutting issues including migration, public interest media, and democracy. Heather also advises philanthropists and foundations on issues from grantee selection to governance of funder collaboratives. She co-founded and leads the Shifting Systems initiative that encourages funders to place longer-term, more adaptive funding with grantee partners to support them to foster systemic impact. Her perspectives and practice have been influenced by two decades living and working in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She previously worked with the Rockefeller Foundation, Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative, and Oxfam Great Britain. Heather has co-authored two books and numerous reports, articles and chapters focusing primarily on topics in philanthropy and assessment. She has a Bachelor of Arts from Smith College and a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University. She serves on the boards of several organizations including the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, Doc Society, the Wildlife Justice Commission, Dropbox Foundation, and WINGS.

Muneerah is the Chief Executive Officer of the Aga Khan Foundation USA.
Muneerah previously served as the Chief of Advancement and Partnerships at the Children’s Health Council, a leading organization in comprehensive and integrated services for learning differences and mental health. Prior to that, she was the Vice President of Philanthropy at Khan Academy, one of the world’s leading online education providers; the Director of Advancement at The Nueva School; and the Executive Director of Palo Alto Partners in Education. Before the nonprofit sector, Muneerah had a successful career as a management consultant, ultimately serving as a senior principal of The Parthenon Group.
Muneerah holds a BA in Math and Electrical Engineering from Smith College, a MSc in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Patricia brings more than 15 years experience in the public and private sectors supporting sustainable development and investments in Emerging Markets & Developing Economies. In her current role at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Patricia advises on strategic partnerships and designing and executing blended finance solutions to mobilize private capital for climate resilience and sustainable infrastructure. Patricia has authored/co-authored several publications, articles and books on climate change, smart cities, and sustainable finance. She holds a Master’s in Public Policy from the University of York and a degree in AI from the University of Oxford Saïd Business School. In addition to serving on the Advisory Board of the SDG Digital Transformation Lab, Patricia is a Board Member of Kelp Ark, the leading global institution dedicated to preserving ocean biodiversity through seed-banking and genetic conservation.

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.

Bradley is the co-founder of SDG Impact Japan, a sustainable investment fund. Bradley is a leader in sustainable finance and the SDGs, and has established a global reputation for scaling digital transformation and SDG-linked innovation, including solutions to climate change and food security.  He led sustainable investment strategy for the United Nations and served as the inaugural director of UN’s Global Centre on Tech, Innovation and Sustainability where he scaled national digital responses to the COVID pandemic. He also drove the creation of the world’s largest network of innovation labs (over 100 countries), and led the creation of the UN’s catalytic SDG Fund. Bradley serves on the boards of several companies and organizations, and is a frequent public speaker. He graduated with honors from Stanford University, where he also earned a master’s degree in philosophy.

Jason Gagnon is a senior development economist and policy leader with over 15 years of experience at the intersection of migration, development, and labour markets. He currently serves as Head of the Migration and Skills Unit at the OECD Development Centre and is a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s King Center on Global Development. His work focuses on the development impact of human mobility, with expertise spanning integration, return migration, remittances, diaspora engagement, and skills mobility. He has led flagship reports, managed international dialogues, and advised governments and UN partners on evidence-based strategies linking migration to sustainable development. A dual Canadian and French national, he holds a PhD in economics from the Paris School of Economics and has held an academic role at Sciences Po.