In the format of a compelling story, a debate, or spoken word poetry MaddyTalks: Global Ideas with Impact will showcase some of the important work and issues in which Albright Institute Fellows have engaged since participating in the Institute. Secretary Albright will serve as a respondent to the Talks.

 

MaddyTalks videos will be available on the Albright Institute website.

Schedule of presenters to be announced.

Sooah Cho is a joint-degree MPP | MBA candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (HKS) and the Harvard Business School (HBS). She is passionate about international development and business models for social innovation. Most recently, she worked at the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation (IFC). At IFC, she consolidated research findings on global policies supporting inclusive businesses for the delegates of the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Turkey. She also led landscape research on South Korea’s ecosystem of support for innovative business models in emerging markets and conducted data analysis to provide customer insights for a company that sells micro-irrigation products to low-income farmers.

 

Prior to graduate school, she worked at FSG, a social impact consulting firm founded by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer. She has experience working with FSG’s corporate clients across multiple industries (e.g., financial services, forestry, and extractives). Her work with companies focused on developing and implementing shared value strategies, which are powerful approaches to drive private sector innovation and value creation while simultaneously addressing profound societal challenges. She also contributed to establishing the Shared Value Initiative, a global multi-stakeholder effort to drive adoption of shared value strategies among companies, civil society, and government organizations. Furthermore, she provided strategic guidance for leading NGOs and major foundations such as the Gates Foundation.

 

Sooah also worked at the U.N. Global Compact Korea Network, where she conducted research on international standards for Corporate Social Responsibility to develop a systematic method for identifying best practices. As an Albright Fellow, she worked with the Haiti Team at the Clinton Foundation, supporting President Clinton’s Haiti relief and reconstruction efforts. Sooah holds a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College, where she graduated with international honors in Economics.

Alexandra Day recently graduated from Wellesley College, where she studied physics and math and was a Fellow in the Albright Institute for Global Affairs. She recently interned at the White House Domestic Policy Council and is now working as a researcher at MIT.  During her time at Wellesley, Alexandra worked on the DAEdALUS neutrino experiment at MIT and is served as President of Wellesley’s Society of Physics Students for two years.  She has worked at MIT, the International Relations Office at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the University of Maryland Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics.  She has been featured in Symmetry, Natural History, and the SPS Observer, and she wrote the lead story for a pamphlet that accompanied an exhibit at the MIT Museum last summer.  She has received awards for her research from the University of Maryland, the Northeastern Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, the North American Particle Accelerator Conference, and the American Physical Society April Meeting.  She is committed to supporting women and minorities in STEM and aspires to a role in government that connects scientists and policymakers.

Zara Ibrahim graduated in 2012 with a Bachelor of Arts in Biological Sciences and Spanish. Since Wellesley, she has continued to explore her deep interest in the intersection of health care and systems thinking.

Currently, she is a Case Writer/Researcher at the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care. In this role, Zara supports the Center’s research team by interviewing and developing case studies on exemplar primary care and health systems across the world. These case studies combine a unique systems approach and fundamental management principles to support the Center’s curriculum and programs for front line primary care leaders, including medical students, physicians, other healthcare workers, and staff. 

Zara also generates scholarship for both academic education and mixed-media publication. Formerly, she served as the Research Assistant for the Center.

Prior to joining the Center, Zara was an Analyst at Infosys, a management consulting firm, in New York, working with life sciences clients to deliver measurable business value from IT investments. While in this role, she managed a top pharmaceutical company’s iPad/Tablet presentations for health care providers. She also collaborated with marketing departments and agencies and led trainings on developing brand content.

Christine Keung’s fascination with Northwestern China stemmed from her parents’ experience as sent-down youth during the Cultural Revolution and her father’s childhood in Ili, a Kazakh autonomous prefecture on the border of Xinjiang, Kazakhstan, and Russia. She has been conducting environmental research in this region since 2012, after receiving a National Science Foundation grant that brought her to rural Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Henan provinces.

 

Upon graduating, she embarked on the U.S. Department of State Fulbright Fellowship and moved to Xi’an, where she had the opportunity to engage with U.S. Ambassador to China Max Baucus, Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou, and the Country Heads of Save of the Children, Plan International, and the Paulson Institute. After witnessing the haphazard dumping of used medical supplies and agricultural chemical wastes, she saw firsthand how economic development and societal change was impacting China’s already precarious environmental position across the Yellow River Loess Plateau. She plans to set up an intervention study, designed to empower women’s groups to reduce water pollution by hazardous and solid wastes in the Wei watershed. Her project is currently a finalist for the Rolex Foundation’s Awards for Enterprise.

 

Christine graduated with a B.A. in Economics in 2014 and was accepted into Harvard Business School’s 2+2 MBA Program. The first in her family to attend college, she shared her perspective on first generation issues while serving on the College’s Board of Admissions and as an Academic Peer Tutor for the Wellesley Plus Program. Yale University's China Hands Magazine has featured Christine as one of the top 25 emerging leaders in US-China Relations under the age of 25, and she was selected to attend Stanford University’s Forum for American/Chinese Exchange conference. Christine currently works for Dropbox’s Legal, Policy, Trust and Security team in San Francisco.

Sarah Mahmood works at CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360. Passionate about politics, she relishes the opportunity to cover a unique and dynamic presidential election. Prior to CNN, Sarah founded a women’s political blog, Women Talk Politics, which featured women’s commentary on pressing political issues. Her previous work experience includes time with the Clinton Foundation, State Department, and Obama for America.

 

A proud 2014 alumna of Wellesley College, Sarah wrote her honors thesis on media coverage of political scandals. At Wellesley, she co-chaired the Asian Awareness Committee, and hosted events as Lecture Chair for Al-Muslimat. She worked at the Wellesley Centers for Women and as a Research Assistant in the Political Science Department. Grateful for the opportunities that Wellesley gave her, she has appeared on HuffPost Live to discuss the importance of women’s colleges.

 

A native New Yorker, Sarah fulfilled her life-long dream of swapping “cawfee” for tea when she studied abroad at Oxford University. She is back in New York, but the tea obsession hasn’t faded. When not rewatching episodes of 30 Rock, Sarah can be found writing essays or practicing photography. She also volunteers with journalist Soledad O’Brien’s Starfish Foundation, hosting panels that advise young women on how to succeed in college and the workplace. As an avid reader of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sarah believes that “girliness” is not at odds with ambition and success. Both Queen Elizabeths have shown that princesses are powerful, too.

 

As the daughter of Indian immigrants, Sarah believes in the American Dream, but is well-aware that this dream is not a reality for many Americans. She hopes to work towards expanding educational opportunities, particularly for women, both in the U.S. and across the world. As they say at the Wellesley Centers for Women, "A world that is good for women is good for everyone."

 

Rebecca Turkington is a program associate at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security where she manages events, programs, student engagement, and contributes to a number of research projects. She is a co-author of "Women Leading Peace: A Close Examination of Women’s Political Participation in Peace Processes in Northern Ireland, Guatemala, Kenya, and the Philippines" for which she traveled to Belfast and Nairobi on field research, as well as "The UAE Panel Series on Women, Peace and Security," and "Security, Basic Services, and Economic Opportunity in South Sudan: Perspectives of Women Post-Independence and Pre-Civil War." Rebecca joined the Institute in 2013 from the National Democratic Institute, where her work focused on women's political participation in transitional democracies. She previously interned at the Moroccan Ministry of Interior in Rabat on programs related to women and local governance, the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, and the Wellesley Centers for Women, where she helped implement the inaugural Women in Public Service Project Institute. Rebecca received a B.A. in International Relations and History from Wellesley College in 2012, where she was a 2011 Fellow at the Madeleine K. Albright Institute for Global Affairs and an Anchor Point Fellow. She is currently pursuing an M.A. in Security Studies at Georgetown University concentrating in terrorism and substate violence.

Mayrah Udvardi is fascinated with the way the built environment creates injustices in developing areas around the world. She grew up in Australia, Germany, and the United States, a background that invoked in her a global ethic that guides every issue she engages with. Mayrah’s passions for environmental activism and architecture merged at Wellesley, where she majored in Architecture and Environmental Studies. She graduated Wellesley with honors in 2014. Her thesis, “Bangalore: Urban Development and Environmental Injustice” paved the way for her research and activism, post-Wellesley.

 

For the past year and a half, she has explored how historically marginalized indigenous peoples struggle to sustain their homes, first through the Watson Fellowship and later for an Urban-Think Tank project called Empower Shack. She has used visual journaling — a reflective process that incorporates mapping, gestural sketching and architectural drawing — to record the stories of 18 communities in Borneo, Peru, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Siberia, and South Africa.

 

Now back in the United States, Mayrah plans to enter graduate school this coming fall. She is pursuing a career in architecture, designing for marginalized communities affected by natural and manmade disasters.

Aisling Grogan is a graduate of Wellesley class of 2012 and Albright class of 2012. Post-graduation, Aisling moved to London where she was introduced to the world of innovation and startups at Cleantech Group, a cleantech market research firm. After falling head-in for the challenges of building companies that have impact at scale, she decided to transition into a carsharing company, Local Motion, in Silicon Valley. In the true spirit of quickly moving startup life, Local Motion was soon after acquired by Zipcar so Aisling found her next adventure in education technology at Piazza, which is transforming university recruiting. When not at work, you can find Aisling active in the Bay Area through hiking, yoga and climbing.