Community

The Forum of Young Global Leaders is a community of innovators from diverse backgrounds and experiences. Search current members and alumni by year awarded, sector or region.

Ameya Prabhu

President, Indian Chamber of Commerce (ICC), India

Ameya is an author, financial services entrepreneur & social worker. He is the founder and Managing Partner of UAP Advisors, whose flagship firm, NAFA Capital, focuses on asset management across asset classes & investment banking in the India and other emerging markets. UAP also invests in sustainable sectors such as agribusiness, healthcare, financial inclusion and renewable energy. He is the author of The Rock Babas and other stories, a fictional book of short stories that takes a philosophical outlook on the vagaries of human life. He is a regular columnist his writings have been published my reputed publications such as the HuffPost, The Quint, Business Today amongst others. Ameya serves as a trustee on the board of Manav Sadhan Vikas Sanstha (MSVS), a non-profit organization focused on skill training and skill development in rural & semi urban India with an emphasis on female empowerment. He also serves on the advisory board of The Climate Group and on the India board of MiracleFeet, a global non-profit organization focused on eliminating club foot. Ameya has a Bsc in Economics, Politics and International studies from the University of Warwick, England and a Masters in Financial Management from IE Business School in Madrid, Spain.

Shalini Puchalapalli

Managing Director and Country Manager, Google Cloud Storage, Google, India

Shalini is Managing Director and Country Head for Google Customer Solutions where she is building the digital ecosystem for India. Prior to her current role, she was the Category Director with Amazon India and CEO for Lehar Foods Business for PepsiCo, where she turned around the business through business model transformation. Shalini did her bachelors in engineering from IIT, Madras, Personnel management from XLRI and MBA from INSEAD.

Shalini is a leader with functional expertise in Sales, Finance, Supply chain and Human resources and deep experience of leading teams in different parts of the world across Eastern and Western Europe, Asia and South America.

Shalini is a keen champion of women’s rights. She has been working in the area of women’s empowerment and prevention of female feticide for the last 25 years. She is a mother of a 16 year old son and attempts to be cool by getting deeper into Avengers and Star wars.

Lewis Pugh

Founder, Lewis Pugh Foundation, South Africa

Lewis Pugh is an ocean advocate and an endurance swimmer. He is the only person to have completed a long distance swim in every ocean of the world. He has pioneered swims in the most challenging environments on earth, including the Antarctic, the North Pole and the Himalayas, and developed an understanding of the beauty and fragility of life and its many ecosystems.

Lewis is a leading figure in efforts to protect our oceans. He is currently working on creating a series of Marine Protected Areas around Antarctica. The negotiations require consensus among 25 countries, a number of which have long standing disputes with one another. The media have dubbed his efforts as "Speedo diplomacy".

Lewis is also one of the world’s foremost inspirational speakers, with TED describing him as "a master story teller”. In 2011 he was inducted into the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame. In 2013 he was appointed UN Patron of the Oceans. And this year he was named National Geographic's Adventurer of the Year.

Lewis read law at the universities of Cape Town and Cambridge.

Shweta Punj

Deputy Editor, India Today, India

Shweta Punj is a Senior Editor with India's largest and oldest political news magazine, India Today. She writes on political economy and is the author of India's first definitive book on failure, 'Why I Failed.'

She is also the co-founder of Whypoll, an organisation that has been instrumental in using technology and data to target women safety in Delhi.

Zhuang Qian

Founder & Chief Executive Officer, KnowYourself, People's Republic of China

Zhuang Qian is the founder & chief executive officer of KnowYourself. During the last 5 years, she devoted herself in promoting the awareness of mental health within the society. KnowYourself is a start-up with the mission to lead a lifestyle of mental wellness in China. It provides psycho-education and self-care tools (meditation, therapy-e-mail, cognitive behavioral theory based products, etc.) that are adaptive to the current China and Chinese culture for its users. She takes it as her responsibility to participate in the trending digital innovation for the mental health services.

Qiaomei Fu

Professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, People's Republic of China

Qiaomei Fu is the Head of the Ancient DNA Lab at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the leading science institution in China. Her work has reinvigorated research into the origin of humanity through ancient DNA extracting techniques and advanced, next-generation gene sequencing to decode ancient humans' genomes.

Miranda Qu Fang

Founder, Xiaohongshu, People's Republic of China

Miranda Qu Fang is Co-Founder and President of Xiaohongshu.
Founded in 2013, Xiaohongshu is China's leading lifestyle platform with over 260 million monthly active users, and is continuing to grow rapidly. With millions of users sharing their lives in an authentic way on Xiaohongshu, many of whom are at the forefront of trends, the platform has become a gathering place for the latest lifestyle trends in China and a destination that empowers users to make informed consumption decisions. Xiaohongshu has also developed into an important brand marketing platform and an emerging e-commerce platform, where over 170,000 brands have a presence.
Over the past decade, Qu has continued driving innovation at Xiaohongshu, playing a key role in building up a unique business model that enables the company to constantly adapt to market changes and maintain rapid growth. She has a keen understanding of Chinese consumers and valuable insights, allowing Xiaohongshu to become a leading gauge in China's business and consumption trends.

Arif P. Rachmat

Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, PT Triputra Agro Persada, Indonesia

Co-Founder & CEO of TAP Group, one of the largest oil palm companies in Indonesia. TAP has over 300,000 hectares of land bank, where more than 150,000 hectares has been planted. TAP employs over 24,000 people. Since 2011, he has been the Commissioner of PT. Kirana Megatara (KM), Indonesia’s largest crumb rubber processor and exporter. He is the majority shareholder of PT Triputra Persada Rahmat with a stake at BTPN Syariah Bank. The three companies fall under Triputra Group, with significant investment in publicly listed companies Adaro Group, the largest coal energy in Indonesia, and DSN group (palm oil and wood) and, is ranked no. 15 in Globe Asia’s 100 Largest Conglomerates in Indonesia August 2014. Upon graduation from Cornell University, he worked for General Electric Company in the U.S. for 7 years in various leadership roles including Six Sigma and Corporate Audit Staff. He is the Head of GK Indonesia foundation and a member of Young Global Leaders, an initiative of The World Economic Forum, as well as a member of Young Presidents Organization. He sits at the Rabobank Advisory Board Food Agri in Asia He also a member of Indonesia Business Association (APINDO), and Advisory Board of Indonesian Palm Oil Association "(GAPKI)". He also a member of Asia Business Council and ASEAN Business Club.

Kira Radinsky

Founder & Chief Technology Officer, Diagnostic Robotics, Israel

Dr. Kira Radinsky is the chairperson and CTO of Diagnostic Robotics, where the most advanced technologies in the field of artificial intelligence are harnessed to make healthcare better, cheaper, and more widely available.In the past, she co-founded SalesPredict, acquired by eBay in 2016, and served as eBay director of data science and IL chief scientist.One of the up-and-coming voices in the data science community, she is pioneering the field of medical data mining.Dr. Radinsky gained international recognition for her work at Microsoft Research, where she developed predictive algorithms that recognized the early warning signs of globally impactful events, including political riots and disease epidemics. In 2013, she was named to the MIT Technology Review’s 35 Young Innovators Under 35, in 2015 as Forbes 30 under 30 rising stars in enterprise technology, and in 2016 selected as "woman of the year" by Globes. She is a frequent presenter at global tech events, including TEDx, Wired, Strata Data Science, Techcrunch and academic conferences, and she publishes in the Harvard Business Review.Radinsky serves as a board member in: Israel Securities Authority, Maccabi Research Institute, and technology board of HSBC bank. Dr. Radinsky also serves as visiting professor at the Technion, Israel’s leading science and technology institute, where she focuses on the application of predictive data mining in medicine.

Faisel Rahman

Chief Executive Officer, Fair Finance, United Kingdom

Social entrepreneur Faisel Rahman founded Fair Finance in 2005 to tackle financial exclusion and high-cost lending in the UK. He has a background in campaigning on issues related to poverty in the UK and in international development with the Grameen Bank and the World Bank in Bangladesh. He created the UK’s first microcredit programme in 2000, which he grew into Fair Finance.

He remains an occasional Guardian columnist, writing about exclusion, and was awarded an Ashoka fellowship in 2007. In 2009 he was recognised as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, in 2014, made an OBE for Services to Community Finance, awarded Honorary Doctorate from the University of East London in 2016, and made an Honorary Fellowship for Social Enterprise in the UK.

Sanjiv Rai

Founder and Chief Solver, Genic AI Solutions P. Ltd., India

Graduate, University of Calcutta; studies, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Innovator and serial entrepreneur. Founder and former Chief Architect, CHANDRA project, NASA, aimed towards setting up a communication infrastructure on the moon for permanent human inhabitancy and human migration to Space. Founder: Hyperspace.ai : Inverted Ideas Lab; Genic.ai ; Billion Innovators; AceWP Innovation Labs; innovate2Learn; smartSAPS; BioTab; coolATM; ChazeMe; Rosenbridges smart cities. Active and leads initiatives at: IEEE Artificial Intelligence; Nanotechnology Council, GEOSS; ASQ-ECD; World Economic Forum. Author, several intellectual properties, including industry standards, copyrights, articles, books and patents. Recipient of several awards.

Devesh Raj

Chief Operating Officer, United Kingdom

Chief Operating Officer at Sky PLC; Previously CEO Sky Deutschland, Head of Strategy at Comcast-NBCU, Senior Partner and Head of TMT (NA) at BCG. PhD in Applied Physics and former HHMI Fellow, Yale.