Prof Carel IJsselmuiden is South African and holds medical and public health qualifications from Universities in the Netherlands, South Africa and the United States. His professional life started as a rural doctor in the northern part of South Africa, just below the border with Zimbabwe, in what was then know as the ‘Gazankulu homeland’. His public health research and work led him to focus on improving child health through immunisation and nutrition, and by focusing on income generation through communal gardens and cooperatives. The basis for this work was both the hospital and an NGO : ‘the Elim Care Group Project’ of which he was director from 1983 – 1987. In the Elim Care Group Project, which focused on rural women’s health and income generation, he was privileged to work then, and remains friends now, with Selina Maphorogo who became the first ‘Shoprite-Checkers Woman of the Year’ in 1996’.

From these alternative beginnings in health care, Carel specialised in public health at the University of the Witwatersrand and The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. He worked as Deputy Medical Officer of Health for the city of Johannesburg before joining academia as a senior lecturer at the Medical University of Southern Africa (MEDUNSA). In 1995, he was appointed as head of the Department of Community Health at the University of Pretoria, and became founding director of the University of Pretoria’s School of Health Systems and Public Health in 1999. Carel has published widely in the field of public health, epidemiology, research and the ethics of international health research.

In 2004, he joined the Council on Health Research for Development in Geneva, Switzerland, as director. Since 1993, COHRED has supported low and middle income countries to optimise the use research and innovation to create health, equity and socio-economic development. He strongly believes that science & innovation are key to national development everywhere . He also believes that women are key to national development and to science & innovation – as well as the other way around! He joined the WAAW Board because he believes that WAAW can make a major difference.

Adjo Amekudzi is an Associate Professor at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. She earned a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Stanford University (1994), an M.S. in Civil Engineering (Transportation) from Florida International University (1996), an M.S. in Civil Infrastructure Systems (1997), and a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering (1999) from Carnegie Mellon University. Professor Amekudzi joined the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 1999.

Professor Amekudzi studies systems problems related to the integrated built and natural environment with the objective of improving investment decision making for built systems. Her research currently focuses on three areas: (I) environmentally-conscious planning, (II) evaluation of infrastructure sustainability, and (III) infrastructure asset management. These areas are important for improving planning and decision-making for infrastructure facilities and systems in order to advance the economic and social development of communities, while preserving environmental conditions to enable such development to continue. Professor Amekudzi has published over 30 papers on these subjects, served on several boards and panels contributing expert knowledge on these subjects, and received notable awards and honors recognizing her contributions in these concentration areas. Professor Amekudzi is actively involved in course development in these areas. /p>

Professor Amekudzi chairs the ASCE Infrastructure Systems Committee and is on the editorial board of the ASCE Infrastructure Systems Journal. She is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Transportation Research Board, the American Society for Engineering Education and the American Public Works Association. Professor Amekudzi also serves as the faculty advisor for the Georgia Tech's chapters of the Engineering Students without Borders (ESWB) and the Women's Transportation Seminar (WTS).

Coming soon.

Abi Adeoti is CFO for SCI Pavement Services, LP, a wholly owned portfolio company of Relativity Capital, LLC. He has Twenty years of proven experience in finance and strategic management at major IT companies and he’s currently the Chief Financial Officer of SCI Pavement Services, LP (“SCI”), a wholly owned portfolio company of Relativity Capital, LLC. He is responsible for SCI’s global finance, information technology, mergers and acquisition, and procurement organizations.

Prior to joining SCI in January 2010, Adeoti was Senior Finance Manager at Intuit’s Employee Management Solutions, where he had global financial duties and acted as COO for the $400+ million business within Intuit’s $1.5 billion Small Business Division. Before joining Intuit in October 2005, Adeoti worked with Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, WA as Senior Finance and Business Strategy Manager for the company’s multimillion dollar Worldwide Business Solutions. He led the finance and strategy team at Microsoft Small Business Solutions that developed and marketed Microsoft’s Point-of-Sales, Online Services, Small Business Accounting, and Merchant Services Solutions. In this role, he managed the end-to-end finance and business strategy for this business, including Strategic Alliances, Mergers and Acquisition deals. He joined Microsoft in August 2003, after working with Hewlett-Packard (HP) Company for 13+ years in various management positions, including; Strategic Global Alliance, Financial Controller, Business Development, and he has extensive FP&A experience leading end-to-end P&L activities directly and at a group level across worldwide and region business units. He has managed in small start-up and large environments with a direct financial responsibility of more than $3 billion P&L, and 11,000 people. He was a founding member of HP’s Wireless and Internet Services division and he led the outsourcing initiative of the division’s software development works to India.

His extensive global executive experience includes serving on the Board of Directors for WAAW Foundation and was the founder of Waltan Corporation, a global outsourcing consulting firm. He holds an MBA in finance and strategy from Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA, earned a BS in Accounting from California State University, East Bay.

Andreas Heinecke, Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of Dialogue Social Enterprise (DSE), a Hamburg based social enterprise with team members working from Italy, India, France and Bulgaria. The objectives of DSE are to create jobs for disabled people and to change the mindset towards otherness. This happens through exhibitions such as “Dialogue in the Dark” or “Dialogue in Silence” and Business Workshops.

Andreas grew up in Baden-Baden, Germany, graduated in German literature and history in 1982 (phD in 1989) and started his working career as a journalist at Südwestfunk (a German broadcasting company).Here, he received the task to train a colleague, who became blind by an accident. Andreas was fascinated by the world of the blind and shocked about the discrimination, with which they are still confronted today.

In 1988, Andreas became Vice-director of the "Stiftung Blindenanstalt" (Foundation for the Blind). Here he had a framework to roll out his ideas to establish a dialogue between blind and sighted, which was not motivated by pity, insecurity and prejudice. The idea was simple: blind and sighted people should meet in darkness, taking the chance to switch roles and to overcome limits. In 1996, Andreas established his first own company in order to spread the idea of “Dialogue in the Dark” (www.dialogue-in-the-dark.com) internationally. 2000, he opened his first permanent exhibition in Hamburg.

Since the founding in 1988, “Dialogue in the Dark” exhibitions are distributed worldwide through a social franchise-system. Thus more than 6.000 jobs for disabled and disadvantaged people in 30 countries were created and has led over 6 million visitors through total darkness into the world of the blind, seeding a better understanding, empathy and tolerance.

In 2009, Andreas established Dialogue Social Enterprise GmbH as a “roof” for all his international social business projects. Andreas won various awards and became the first "Ashoka-Fellow" in Western Europe in 2005. Two years later he was nominated “Out- standing Global Social Entrepreneur” by the Schwab Foundation. In 2008, Andreas was nominated as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Social Entrepreneurship.