Meet the team driving the shift towards a new economy

Mr. Ashish Shah has been working at ITC for 20 years in different capacities and currently serves as Director, Division of Country Programmes. He previously held the post of Acting Deputy Executive Director. He has also spent several years in the Office for Africa and the Office of the Executive Director, where he was head of strategic planning, monitoring and evaluation. Prior to joining ITC, he worked first at the International Labour Office in Geneva and then at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Mr. Shah has almost 30 years of international and United Nations experience in the field of trade promotion and development, during which time he has been providing strategic advice on trade-development issues and engaging in high-level policy dialogue with stakeholders in Africa, Asia and the Arab Region. He has extensive experience both in operations and strategic planning, project design and management, client-relationship management and negotiations. An Indian national, Mr. Shah holds a master’s degree in cooperative economics and a PhD in economics from Philipps University of Marburg, Germany. He is fluent in seven languages.

Global health and innovations leader at UNAIDS. Intrapreneur – co-founder of Health Innovation Exchange (HIEx) a unique platform connecting political leadership with innovators and investors for healthcare access which over last 2 years has facilitated over US200m in investments; Helped conceptualize and launch the Solar for Health initiative to bring solar solutions for health sector with the International Solar Alliance. Co-founder of Technical Support Facility (TSF) and built it to be the largest TA mechanism of the UN in HIV; Social innovator – established some of the earliest models for community based responses to the most vulnerable populations for HIV. Firm believer that health and development require partnership between communities, public and private sector.

Chris Gray is Senior Director, Global Institutions and Public Reporting, in Pfizer’s Corporate Responsibility group in New York. Chris manages the company’s strategic relationships with global health institutions, including UN agencies (e.g. World Health Organization), international NGOs, the Gates Foundation, and socially responsible investors. He is responsible for Pfizer’s non-financial reporting strategy, and producing the company’s integrated annual review (year-end financial report and corporate responsibility report). He also manages Pfizer’s engagement on the Access to Medicines Index, and other non-financial reporting initiatives. Chris began at Pfizer in 2008 in the International Policy department, specializing in emerging markets policy. He then joined the International Public Affairs team, focused on global tobacco control, cardiovascular, and women’s health. He re-established Pfizer’s Geneva presence as the IPA lead for global institutions before joining the Corporate Responsibility team. Prior to joining Pfizer in 2008, Chris served as Markets Director for the Ernst ＆ Young Global Pharmaceutical Center and as a consultant. He also worked for Ernst ＆ Young’s Global Health Sciences Center of Excellence. Previously, he was a Managing Editor at FDC Reports, a Reed-Elsevier health publications company, covering life sciences. He holds a Masters from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and is a graduate of Tufts University.

Katherine has supported leading social entrepreneurs and student start-up teams for over a decade and is a sought-after speaker and coach. She is a Director at the Collective Change Lab, a non-profit providing practical inspiration, insight, and guidance for attaining transformational collective change. Named a “Top 100 Women in Social Entrepreneurship” by the Euclid Network, Katherine is affiliated with many innovation and entrepreneurship networks, including as a founding member of the Geneva Innovation Movement, an Accelerate2030 Advisory Council Member, an Unreasonable Mentor, a board member of Social Impact Award, and an advisor to The Wellbeing Project. She teaches courses on social innovation and entrepreneurship at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies and Fordham University and is the author of over 17 publications, articles, and blogs published by International Institute of Economics, Stanford Social Innovation Review, MIT journal Innovations, Forum Agenda, and the Harvard Business School. Previously, she was the Executive Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, the sister organization of the World Economic Forum, which supports the largest community of late-stage social entrepreneurs in the world. Katherine received her B.A. from Dartmouth College and her Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University where she a Pforzheimer Scholar and Sheldon Knox Fellow.