Scholars

Abubakar Kagermanov has six years of experience in the nonprofit sector and two years of work in university. Abubakar graduated from Grozny State Oil Technical University in Russia. During his second year of studies, he realized his goal of working to solve social problems in the local community. He couldn’t leave the university, as his parents were paying tuition fees and they had their own expectations. But it didn’t stop him from volunteering at local NGOs and creating his own social projects focused around conflict management, peacebuilding, communication, and human rights. After graduating from university, he started to work as an Assistant Director of the local NGO “Youth the Future.” In 2017 Abubakar received a scholarship for his Master of Arts on Theory and Technology of Social Work at Chechen State University.To this day, he is continuing his research on the topic: Socialization of Children with Disabilities in the Chechen Republic. He also created a project on socialization of children with disabilities and is still engaged in the project as a volunteer. For the last five years, the project helped more than 220 children and involved more than 150 volunteers. Since 2013, Abubakar participated in different long term programs and has won grants to support his local activities and projects. For the last two years, he has worked at the Chechen State University. Thanks to this job, he was able to attract young people’s attention to certain social problems, create new workshops, and facilitate sessions for the students to improve their soft skills and find creative solutions for complex social issues.

Alena Kondiurina has more than seven years of professional experience in the field of business and financial analysis. Alena holds a Master’s degree in World Economy and a Bachelor’s degree in Financial Management from the Higher School of Economics. Currently, she works as a manager at the international consulting and audit company KPMG AO and focuses on financial analysis of various businesses. She has volunteered with multiple NGOs around the world such as microfinance companies in India and community organizations in Kenya, Uganda, and Cambodia. The core focus of Alena’s volunteer work is women empowerment and helping them improve their financial literacy and entrepreneurship skills. She organized financial literacy courses in several communities in Kenya and worked alongside NGOs in entrepreneurship projects for women in India, Uganda, and Greece. In 2020, she completed a fundraising strategy development project for Russian NGOs. Through her volunteer work and primary job she acquired skills such as management and coordination skills and financial acumen which are all essential for any organization. Through her participation in the Virtual Leadership Institute, Alena wants to develop a plan to bring forward financial literacy initiatives in rural and urban areas in Russia.

Alexandra Bakiewicz has years of experience in communications and engagement, and she has earned her degree in Business Administration from the State University of New York, Polytechnic Institute. In 2018, Alexandra founded the digital communications firm AM Bakiewicz Consulting. Having been employed at a variety of companies and international non-profits across the United States, Alexandra has worked tirelessly to amplify her clients’ voices in the digital world. While working at international non-profits, she has developed digital media strategies to further her clients’ missions on an international level. Alexandra strives to uplift the voices of emerging social sector leaders worldwide. It is her personal passion and mission to make sure their stories are continuously told.

Alice Aluoch is a Senior Associate for Grassroots Expansion at RESULTS. She is responsible for starting new RESULTS advocacy chapters and developing partnerships with like-minded organizations interested in learning about global health issues including child survival, child nutrition, diseases of poverty, and learning advocacy skills. She also leads RESULTS efforts to reach more diverse underrepresented communities in the RESULTS movement, with a particular focus on African Diaspora with direct experience related to RESULTS global campaigns. She has over seven years of experience in health advocacy, social justice, and economic empowerment on women and girls, as well as significant experience in grassroots organizing, advocating with members of congress, and community engagement. Alice has firsthand experience in living and working in developing countries. Previously, she worked as a network engineer in Kenya leading technology firms and — after personally experiencing the inequality and vulnerability that young women living in poverty in Kenya face — Alice founded Mfariji Africa, an initiative focused on ensuring girls and young women to complete their education. In 2014, she served as a Global Youth Ambassador for A World at School, a global movement of young leaders working to get every child in school. In 2015, she was awarded the Social Entrepreneur Award of the year by Start Up Africa for her commitment to empowering young girls. She is also a recipient of a three-year fellowship from the Vital Voices which offers training and mentorship to women who are pioneering change for women and girls in communities and countries across the globe. She joined RESULTS in 2014 and started the RESULTS Delaware chapter where she was a group leader for 3 years before transitioning to full time staff.

Anastasiia Beltiukova has four years of experience in the non-profit sector and earned a Master of Law degree at Voronežskij Gosudarstvennyj Universitet. With diverse experience in program and event management, strategic marketing communication, and fundraising, Anastasiia works as a Program Manager directing a team of 20 people across Europe and Asia Pacific. She leads economical and cultural projects in partnership with UN Women, OHCHR, EU international missions, Misereor Foundation, Chanel Foundation, Mercedes, Sephora, DBS, and Virgin, among others. Anastasiia’s coordinator role in such a dynamic field, as humanitarian initiatives in the Asia-Pacific region, involves providing support to four project managers and coordinates an average of 10 concurrent public events dealing with humanitarian topics each month. She planned and monitored project schedules, budgets, selection process, partnership, content planning, data analytics, resources, and communication, as well as drafting external materials and reports. She specialized in maintaining detailed project documentation, which ensures all project stakeholders were informed of scope, milestones, and deliverables. Thanks to her intercultural experience, Anastasiia has the communication skills needed to work with the teams involved in order to help them develop plans to complete projects on time and build relationships with internal stakeholders. Anastasiia is particularly interested in human rights, especially gender equality and human rights education and advocacy, community development, and fundraising.

Areen Dweekat is a Palestinian lawyer. She started her job as a public interest lawyer in 2015 at the National Institution for Human Rights in Palestine. In 2019, she received the Open Society Foundation Scholarship to earn her Master’s degree in law from Syracuse University in New York and she graduated in 2020. During her job, she focuses on marginalized groups’ rights, including women, persons with disabilities, refugees, and persons in prisons and detention centers.

Chris Julias has three years of experience in the non-profit sector and earned a Master of Engineering degree in Electronic and Computerized Systems from the University of Antananarivo as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Anglophone Studies. Currently, working as a data science content engineer at SmartPredict, she has been entrusted the mission of creating the landing page content and webinars for SmartPredict Version 1.0 – the eponymous automated AI platform. Apart from that, she contributed to the launching of SmartPredict Beta that reached fifty permanent users. As the role is by nature multidisciplinary, she frequents different stakeholders on a daily basis which enables strong communication skills as one of her main assets. This strength has been inherited from her previous experience as a business analyst and machine learning engineer at the Strategy and Innovation Pole of the eTech Research Lab, during which she developed the architecture of an ontological chatbot with a team of DSML engineers. Chris has always been entrusted with leadership roles in which she has demonstrated a unique systemic empathic approach with transversal management and succeeded to federate her team to achieve their business goals. Being in charge of designing tech-commercial video tutorials as well as blogs about data science, she is proficient with Balsamiq, Adobe Audition, Active Presenter and PicsArt. Her interests include Artificial Intelligence in all its aspects and how it could benefit human beings. One value dear to her heart is also the promotion of girls’ inclusion in the field of technology conveyed through her integration of Ikala STEM.

Ei Ei Aung has nearly eight years of progressive experience as a public health specialist and international health researcher. With a scholarship funded by the Japanese government, Dr. Aung earned her PhD in health promotion with a dentistry background from Tokyo Medical and Dental University in Japan. Dr. Aung has academic and professional experience in analytical strategies for research on the burdens of diseases and clinical trials research. She worked as a Policy Researcher at the International Health Policy Program Foundation under the Thailand Ministry of Public Health and wrote a successful grant proposal for the ASEAN-CHINA Cooperative Fund. She demonstrates a solid track record of peer-reviewed publications and also contributed to capacity building training on the national burden of diseases in research methodology. She was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship for young foreign researchers in Tokyo and successfully received a research grant from the Futokukai Foundation in Japan.