Cambia Board

Professor Richard Jefferson, CEO of Cambia, is Chair of the Cambia Board.

Since establishing Cambia in 1991, Richard has continued to oversee the development of new science- and technology-enabled tools for the public good.

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Paul Gilding is an independent writer, advisor and advocate for action on climate change and sustainability. He has been an activist and social entrepreneur for 35 years, and is widely recognized as a global authority on sustainability and business. He has worked with CEOs and executives on many leading companies, including ANZ and IAG in Australia, and DuPont, Diageo, Anglo American, and Ford internationally.

Paul has served as CEO of a range of innovative NGOs and companies, including Greenpeace International, Ecos Corporation and Easy Being Green. He has also helped to establish and has served on the boards of a number of non-profit organizations, including Inspire Foundation, the Australian Business Community Network and Climate Coolers. His speaking engagements and work have taken him to over 30 countries, including the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, the USA and Mexico.

Paul is currently a member of the Core Faculty at Cambridge University's Program for Sustainability Leadership. His recently published book, The Great Disruption, has been making waves and achieving great reviews internationally (e.g. NY Times).

Dr. Pamela Hartigan is Executive Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Said Business School at the University of Oxford. She is also founding partner of Volans Ventures, an organization launched in 2008 and focused on building innovative scalable solutions to challenges affecting our future. Prior to starting Volans, Pamela spent eight years as the first Managing Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, a sister organization of the World Economic Forum where she was also on the Forum Managing Board. The Schwab Foundation is focused on advancing the practice of social entrepreneurship globally, building and supporting its community of practitioners whose efforts have achieved transformational social change.

Throughout her career, she has held varied leadership positions in multilateral health organizations and educational institutions as well as in entrepreneurial non-profits. She has been responsible for conceptualizing and creating new organizations, departments and programs across a variety institutional arrangements and multi-stakeholder platforms.  She is currently a Trustee for the following social enterprises:  Cambia (Australia), Endeavor (USA), INDEX (Denmark), GEXSI (Germany), Mobile Metrix (Brazil), and The Story Museum (UK).

A graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C., she also holds Masters degrees in Economics and Public Health and a PhD in Cognitive Psychology.

Dr. Russell J. Howard is an Australian-born scientist, CEO and entrepreneur. He was a pioneer in the fields of molecular parasitology, especially malaria, and in leading the commercialization of one of the most important methods used widely today. While Dr. Howard was President and Scientific Director at Affymax Research Institute, Willem 'Pim' Stemmer conceived and developed DNA Shuffling Technology. This revolutionary technology for improving the expressed phenotype of genes, pathways, plasmids, viruses and genomes gave birth to the creation and spinout of Maxygen Inc. where Dr Howard was CEO for 12 years. He took the company public and led its growth with 10’s of corporate partnerships, technology application programs that led ultimately to the development and commercialization worldwide of 10’s of Life Science products in diverse fields. In 2008 Dr. Howard left Maxygen to found Oakbio Inc. He is currently a founder and the CEO of Oakbio Inc. in Sunnyvale, California, USA, a company designing microbes for production of cost-competitive chemicals using industrial CO2 emissions as carbon source. Dr. Howard has published over 140 scientific publications in refereed journals and is an inventor on five issued patents.

Joichi Ito has recently been appointed as Director of MIT Media Lab, and is the Chairman and former CEO of Creative Commons. He is a co-founder and board member of Digital Garage JSD:4819. He is on the board of CCC TYO:4756 and Tucows AMEX:TCX. He is a Senior Visiting Researcher of Keio Research Institute at Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan. He is the Chairman of Six Apart Japan the weblog software company. He is on board of a number of non-profit organizations including The Mozilla Foundation, WITNESS and Global Voices. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.fm, Rupture, Kongregate and other Internet companies. He has served and continues to serve on various Japanese central as well as local government committees and boards, advising the government on IT, privacy and computer security related issues. He is currently researching "The Sharing Economy" as a Doctor of Business Administration candidate at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University in Japan. He maintains a weblog (http://joi.ito.com/) where he regularly shares his thoughts with the online community. He is the Guild Custodian of the World of Warcraft guild, We Know.

Ito was listed by Time Magazine as a member of the "Cyber-Elite" in 1997. Ito was listed as one of the 50 "Stars of Asia" by BusinessWeek and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications in 2000. He was selected by the World Economic Forum in 2001 as one of the "Global Leaders for Tomorrow", chosen by Newsweek as a member of the "Leaders of The Pack" in 2005, and listed by Vanity Fair as a member of "The Next Establishment" in 2007. Ito was also named by Businessweek as one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web in 2008.

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Professor The Honorable Michael Lavarch is Professor of Law and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Law at the Queensland University of Technology, a position he has held since 2004. A QUT graduate, Michael commenced his legal career as a Solicitor practicing in Brisbane. In 1987, aged 26, he was elected to the Australian Federal Parliament by the Queensland electorate of Fisher, where he served three terms. This culminated in his appointment as Attorney-General of Australia in 1993.

Following the 1996 Australian federal election, Michael returned to his legal career, as Special Counsel to Dunhill Madden Butler and Deacons, where he specialized in land access issues, particularly native title and cultural heritage clearances. From 2001 to 2004, he was the Secretary-General of the Law Council of Australia, the peak industry body for the Australian legal profession.

Michael holds a number of directorships on national companies and organizations, including Chair, Banking and Financial Services Ombudsman Limited (BFSO); Director, National Electricity Marketing Management Company Limited (NEMMCO); Director, Australian Stock Exchange Supervisory Review (ASXSR); and Director, Audit Quality Review Board (AQRB). He has also undertaken a number of significant community service and education roles in Australia.

Currently Professor of Law at New York Law School, Dr. Beth Noveck served in the White House as United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer (2009-2011) and leader of the White House Open Government Initiative . As a result of this initiative, today every department and agency has an Open Government Plan, and citizens have burgeoning opportunities to participate in their democracy.

Noveck founded the Democracy Design Workshop Do Tank.  Together with students at New York Law School and numerous partners, she designed and built the U.S. government’s first expert network . 

She developed the Cairns Project, graphical software to support group formation and collaboration; Democracy Island, an experimental space within a virtual world for research on citizen participation; and “IOPedia,” a platform for mashing up and visualizing public corporate accountability data and tracking the evolution of organizations.

She also founded the State of Play conference, the first (and still ongoing annual) conference on videogames, virtual worlds and society. With the support of the MacArthur Foundation in 2011-12, she is developing an agenda for interdisciplinary research on institutional innovation.

Dr. Michael Rabson is a partner in the Palo Alto office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where his practice focuses on counseling biotechnology companies, including those in the biopharmaceutical, diagnostics, clean technology, and agricultural biology industries.

Until recently Dr. Michael Rabson was Senior Vice President, Business Development & Legal Affairs, and General Counsel of Cytokinetics, a biotechnology company dedicated to the discovery, development, and commercialization of innovative therapeutics. Before that, Michael served as General Counsel and Senior Vice President at Maxygen.

Michael has handled the licensing of patents from Cambia Biosystems, and was instrumental in refining the drafts of the BiOS (Biological Open Source) license.

An expert in Intellectual Property, Michael has also been patent examiner at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), having a particular focus on patents in biotechnology and genetic engineering.

Michael received a BS in Biological Sciences from Cornell University. He holds a PhD in infectious disease epidemiology from Yale University, and a JD from Yale Law School. He was post-doctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health.

Antony Taubman is currently Director, Intellectual Property Division, World Trade Organization (WTO), with responsibility for intellectual property, competition and government procurement. He was previously the acting director and head of the Global Intellectual Property Issues Division of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a position he assumed in May 2002. After a diplomatic career, he left the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) in 2001 to join the newly-formed Australian Center for Intellectual Property in Agriculture, at the Australian National University in Canberra, teaching and researching on international IP law. He has also held a teaching appointment at the School of Law at the University of Melbourne. From 1998 to 2001, he was the director of the International Intellectual Property Section of DFAT. He has authored a training handbook on intellectual property and biotechnology, a comprehensive study on the implementation of the TRIPS Agreement, and a range of academic and general publications on international intellectual property law and policy. As a registered patent attorney, he has also worked in private practice in the law of patents, trade marks and designs. He has been awarded two academic prizes for postgraduate law from the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.