Chair, ReACT Advisory Council
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Hala Fadel co-founded Leap Ventures in 2014 and has been a Managing Partner with the firm since then. Hala is also the founder and chair of the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Pan-Arab region, an organization that has promoted entrepreneurship and organized, among other things, the MIT Arab startup competition since 2006. Hala also sits on the global board of the MIT Enterprise Forum and chairs the Arab edition of the MIT Technology Review magazine. She is also an angel investor in startup companies in the Middle East and Europe, and has launched a co-working space in Beirut called Coworking +961. She co-founded and chairs Ruwwad Lebanon, a non-profit organization working on community development in disfranchised areas through education and grassroots organizing. Hala graduated from HEC in France in 1997 with a Masters in Financial Economics and attended the Berkeley Haas School of Business, she holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Erdin Beshimov is a Lecturer at MIT and a Founder of MIT Bootcamps. At MIT, Erdin was also the founding Director of the MITx MicroMasters Program, which pioneered the model of “inverted admissions,” and the Incubation Group in the Office of Digital Learning. He co-created MIT’s first massive open online courses on entrepreneurship, which have enrolled hundreds of thousands of learners from every country in the world. Erdin’s family came to the United States from Kyrgyzstan as refugees. He believes refugees have the power to change the world.
Lorraine Charles is a social entrepreneur and a researcher. Her expertise is education, and workforce development for refugees, with a focus on digital livelihoods, in the Middle East with over 10 years of experience. She also conducts research on the future of work and the impact of digitalisation on employment. She is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Na’amal, which links displaced people and underrepresented communities with remote digital work opportunities.
She is a Research Associate for the Center for Business Research, University of Cambridge. She is also a member of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) Advisory Board, Technical Advisory Committee for ReBuild, their East Africa livelihood programme.
Marina Hatsopoulos was Founding CEO of Z Corporation, an early market leader in 3D printing out of MIT. The Company was the winner of the “New England Technology Fast 50” for 2001, a ranking of the 50 fastest-growing technology companies in the region, and was listed in the Inc 500 ranking of the nation’s 500 fastest-growing private companies by Inc Magazine.
She is currently Chair of the Board of Levitronix Technologies, the worldwide leader in magnetically-levitated bearingless motor technology and Founding Advisor of Inkbit, a MIT startup. She is on the MIT Corporation Visiting Committee for the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and she is President of Hellenic Innovation Network. She is on the Advisory Board of the Nantucket Conference, MIT Enterprise Forum Greece, Eurobank’s EGG accelerator, Mindspace entrepreneurial program, and Cyprus Seeds research commercialization program.
Soo Kim is a Partner, Portfolio Manager and Global Head of Performing Credit Research at Anchorage Capital Group. Prior to joining Anchorage, she worked at Goldman Sachs most recently as a Vice President and an industry head in the Americas Special Situations group. Ms. Kim received an M.B.A. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated with honors, and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Management Science from MIT, where she was a Tau Beta Pi scholar.
