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Our Team
Executive Director
Emad Tinawi is Engage-AI’s founder. He has more than 30 years of experience in social and economic development, including as a senior partner in the government consulting practice of Price Waterhouse Cooper (PWC) in Dubai; as director of thought leadership for PWC’s Middle East Public Sector Institute; and as managing partner for the Middle East and North Africa at the Monitor Group. Mr. Tinawi has worked closely with senior government leaders on economic growth and social fairness and has led economic development projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other governmental institutions. He was a senior advisor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the Middle East and a member of the World Bank's Advisory Panel on the Middle East and North Africa.
Director of Data Innovation
David A. Carle is a technology leader with more than 25 years’ experience in financial and technical innovation. He has created growth and competitive advantage solutions for financial services companies (AIG, Goldman Sachs, Bridgewater, SunGard and Broadridge), as well as hedge funds and startups, using globalization, scalable technology, and comprehensive planning approaches. Mr. Carle crafts practical responses to problems in enterprise technology, operations, compliance, and risk management for firms in domains ranging from capital markets and derivatives to foreign exchange, precious and base metals, and energy products. He is also an expert data strategist, turning structured and unstructured information into actionable results—for example, to drive risk management and monetization
Director of Legal Programs
James W. Newton is a specialist in economic development and the rule of law. Mr. Newton has more than 20 years of experience working on large international development projects. In the field of commercial law, his areas of expertise include alternative dispute resolution, access to credit and finance, bankruptcy, civil procedure, competition policy, contracts, corporations and corporate governance, court administration, customs, financial crimes, immigration, international trade, and real property. For Engage-AI, Mr. Newton is exploring how AI relates to such issues as data usage and privacy; equality of use and access, including AI and the data commons; legal and regulatory trends and needs, including possible model laws; and procedural and substantive due process in legal systems.
Senior Development Economist
Art Westneat is a political economist with a 40-year career working on African economic issues, particularly in agriculture and the private sector. Dr. Westneat has a strong background in field research, economic analysis, capacity development, communications, and project management and evaluation; he has more than a decade of long- and short-term work experience in multiple countries in sub-Saharan Africa. His Ph.D. is a jointly conferred degree in public policy and political science. Dr. Westneat also holds degrees in economics and agricultural economics. He has extensive training in statistics and econometrics and was an award-winning statistics instructor at Indiana University.
Senior Advisor on Data Sciences
Ryan T. White is a mathematician, researcher, and consultant with expertise in machine learning (ML) and probability theory, along with private-sector experience in algorithm development and data science. Dr. White is an assistant professor of mathematics at the Florida Institute of Technology, where he leads an active research program centered on stochastic analysis and related algorithms. Dr. White also heads private-sector contracts in ML and participates in numerous scientific and engineering research projects. He is authoring two textbooks, and teaches ML, neural networks, probability, and statistics at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Communications Advisor
Cynthia Almansi is a communications strategist focusing on social good and the arts. She became involved with the international development sector during her time in Washington DC, where she worked on projects mainly in Latin America and Africa for clients such as USAID, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. She holds an MA in Arts, Culture and Society from Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands) and while in Europe gained experience as a cultural organizer and docent. Ms. Almansi is currently a PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology at Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Argentina) researching sociability among artists in the city of Buenos Aires.
Contributing Editor
Maia has been a human rights lawyer and consultant for more than 26 years, and has worked on legal and human rights issues in Southeast Asia, particularly in the Philippines and Cambodia. Her main areas of expertise are in economic, social and cultural rights, including land rights, rights of indigenous peoples and environmental issues. She also has experience in the fields of rule of law and access to justice as well as other civil and political rights. She has taught and designed educational materials on law and human rights for formal and informal educational courses. In the past 10 years she has been editing articles, reports, and both fiction and non-fiction books. She does copy editing, developmental editing and proofreading, and aims to assist authors in finding their voices and express themselves and their ideas in a clear, consistent and engaging manner.
Barbara Brittingham is President Emerita of the New England Commission of Higher Education. She was the founding dean of the College of Education at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates, as well as a dean and full professor at the University of Rhode Island. Currently, she serves on the board of Quality and Qualifications Ireland and on the Quality Council in Iceland. Sponsored by the Fulbright Commission, the U.S. State Department, the World Bank, and local governments and universities, Dr. Brittingham has worked with ministries and universities in more than 25 countries. She served as a non-federal negotiator for the U.S. Department of Education, working on program integrity issues. Dr. Brittingham has testified before committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives on distance education, competency-based education, and educational accreditation.
Wade Channell is an independent consultant who retired in May 2021 as the senior economic growth advisor for the Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). A specialist in business-enabling environments, Mr. Channell worked for many years on issues that limit growth and private sector development, first as a commercial lawyer and later as a development professional. In 2013, he turned his focus to the disparate constraints faced by women, eventually leading USAID’s efforts to create a more comprehensive approach to advancing women’s economic empowerment and equality. In this role, he actively promoted women’s financial inclusion, with an emphasis on secured lending. He also advanced a value chain approach to combating human trafficking enterprises, focusing on the nexus of law, business, and gender. In addition, Mr. Channell served as an adjunct professor at the George Washington University, teaching in both the policy school and the business school.
Dan Grimm leads the New Product Development (NPD) team at AT&T, a community of developers, designers, product leaders, and architects building software-centric products, services, and platforms on AT&T’s leading-edge 5G and fiber connectivity. Prior to joining AT&T in January 2022, Dan grew new products and to global scale at Amazon and RealNetworks and co-founded internet startups. Before that he advised corporate and national leaders on growth and innovation in 15+ countries as an Associate Partner at Monitor Deloitte. Dan serves as a Trustee of the CodeBrave Foundation (UK), which supports tech education for children from disadvantaged backgrounds in Lebanon, and is an advisor to Engage AI, a nonprofit supporting the use of AI/ML to advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals. He earned a BA from Yale.
Born in Taipei and a Swiss citizen, Dr. Yiu holds a doctorate in Educational Psychology from Indiana University. A former associate professor at Chinese Culture University, Chinese Taipei, she was a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University in organizational psychology. She is fluent in English and Mandarin.
Dr. Yiu has more than 20 years of experience as an advisor to governments and international organizations on organizational development and reform of public administration. She recently directed a two-year, bilateral Swiss-Slovene project to reform the public administration of Slovenia and a three-year Sino-Swiss bilateral program to modernize management training of senior civil service officials in China. She has also been a consultant to the United Nations Development Program and other specialized UN agencies, as well as to private-sector organizations.
Jim Sintros is Chairman of the Board of Nexus FrontierTech, a multinational business specializing in the effective application of AI to business processes and regulation, and is President of the Stilwell Institute Foundation. He is also on the board of KMT-Hansa Corporation, which develops, markets and licenses intellectual property and intellectual design technology, and the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, an independent, nonpartisan research organization specializing in national security, foreign policy, and defense planning. He is a director of the Hult International Business School and was previously a senior advisor at Monitor Consulting Group.
Technology Partner
Founded in Jordan in 1996, Primus focuses on designing and applying appropriate solutions and processes in information and communication technology as an effective means to increase its clients’ competitiveness and efficiency. By understanding business needs and the requirements of specific industries, Primus has successfully transformed the operations of leading entities, both private and public. From groundwork consulting and planning to integration and management of technology solutions, Primus has both the understanding and the experience to respond to unique challenges and opportunities.
Technology Partner
Nexus FrontierTech is an AI research and software company, which provides AI solutions to clients across industries, sectors, and regions globally. Founded in 2015, Nexus was created with the vision of democratizing AI to bridge the gap between developers and business professionals and raise awareness of the benefits of AI in solving everyday business problems. Nexus FrontierTech’s AI-powered platforms can accurately read, extract, and validate all types of real-world data, helping businesses move quickly and efficiently through the data value chain so that they can serve their customers better. With more than 100 researchers, practitioners, and business leaders across London, Tokyo, Singapore, and Hanoi, Nexus has partnered with global enterprises to co-create intelligent systems operating in real-world conditions.
