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.

Lila Tretikov

Deputy Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft, USA

Lila Tretikov is Chief Executive Officer of Terrawatt (TWI), a global organization that aligns corporate, financial, NGOs and political interests to alter the trajectory of Earth's ecology. TWI brings next-generation clean energy to humankind through innovative models rooted in shared economic value, enabled by technologies such as artificial intelligence and financial engineering.

Named one of the 21 Most Powerful Women in Bay Area Technology by San Francisco Chronicle, one of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women by Forbes and invited by the World Economic Forum to join the Young Global Leaders in 2016. She has co-authored numerous articles, patents and inventions across areas of policy, management and technology.

Previously, Ms. Tretikov was Chief Executive of the Wikimedia Foundation, an organization supporting Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia available in 300+ languages and the fifth most popular internet media site. She transformed the organization to prepare for upcoming changes in the age of ubiquitous Internet and machine learning. She also led Wikipedia’s rapidly expanded regional presence to nearly 100 global organizations, doubled revenues and launched the Wikipedia Endowment to support modernization and expansion of knowledge access in perpetuity.

Ms. Tretikov is Board Director and CEO Advisor at numerous companies such as Rackspace, Onfido, PrivacyShell Corp., OpenEd (acquired by ACT), Zamurai (acquired by Join.me), Crunchbase and Bonsai. She advises leaders on identifying and navigating through major market and consumer behavioral shifts propelled by technical innovations.

Ms. Tretikov launched her first company, Grok, while attending college at UC Berkeley creating intelligent data mapping of the Human Genome Project. She founded and scaled several pre-IPO companies, as well as accelerated 10-100% YOY growth of strategic projects within multi-billion USD corporations. Her cross-discipline background has allowed her to play a seminal role in helping businesses and their leaders synthesize and operationalize successful, lasting strategies and paths of execution.

Born in Moscow, Ms. Tretikov started college at the age of thirteen and emigrated to the United States independently as a teenager. She has more than two decades of experience as a transformational leader in Silicon Valley companies where she honed her passion for harnessing human-focused technologies for global impact. She currently resides in Paris, France.

John R. Tyson

Chief Financial Officer, Tyson Foods, USA

John R. Tyson is a fourth-generation member of the Tyson family and executive at one of the largest food companies in the world. As Chief Sustainability Officer at Tyson Foods, he has the ability to influence the global food supply chain, promoting more sustainable production practices that empower people, conserve natural resources and drive innovation for smart, responsible agriculture. Prior, he worked in investment banking for J.P. Morgan and as a private equity and venture capital investor. He is also a lecturer at the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, he serves on the Board of Directors of Winrock International and is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Tyson has a BA in Economics from Harvard University and an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Vasudha Vats

Vice-President, Pfizer, USA

Vasudha Vats has grown several multi-billion dollar businesses in pharma and currently manages one of the highest selling small molecule medicines in the world. Her mission is to not only help patients by delivering high-quality medical therapies, but also to improve care delivery across the entire patient experience. As a leader in healthcare, she has forged and led partnerships across the industry to deliver better outcomes for patients, including patient advocacy groups like the American Diabetes Association, technology (Fitbit), pharmacy (CVS and Walgreens), and government (National Institutes of Health). She is an advocate of supporting emerging thinkers to fuel future societal improvement, actively mentoring emerging biotechnology firms with the New York City Entrepreneurship Lab and having helped to co-found the Chandini Foundation, a charity designed to provide underprivileged youths in developing nations with mentoring support to become ethical, impactful and entrepreneurially minded leaders.

Ayesha Vera-Yu

Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Advancement for Rural Kids (ARK), USA

CEO and Co-Founder of Advancement for Rural Kids (ARK) which co-invests with rural communities in the developing world on securing food, health, kids' schooling and their self-sustaining future.

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic that triggered acute hunger among farmers and fisherfolk who feed the world, Ayesha steered ARK to pivot its award-winning and the world’s only self-sustaining, 5-cent school lunch to a food security program that benefited everyone in the community.

ARK's Feed Back is a community-based vegetable exchange that is solving hunger in just 5 weeks. It creates a path for families to source food from their backyards, exchange excess produce with their neighbors, and sell to their own community, nearby villages and towns. It enables communities to work together, be food secure and resilient. It launches new entrepreneurs and new local, regenerative and equitable food systems. In the past 2 years, 35 communities across 6 provinces partnered on Feed Back. Together, we have secured 8,607 families captured 105% of at-risk families transformed over 76,000* lives.

Prior to ARK, Ayesha was Director at BNP Paribas where for 11 years she was involved in leverage finance, acquisition finance and loan syndications. She also restructured a farm in the Philippines making it the first one in the province to be organic, and to offer fair employment, revenue share, healthcare and continuing education to farmers/employees. Expertise - management, industry and business credit analysis, restructuring, natural farming, sustainable systems, social ventures.

Mark Vlasic

Executive Producer, Blood and Treasure, CBS Television Studios, USA

Mark V. Vlasic is a Senior Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, and leads the international practice at Madison Law & Strategy Group. A former pro bono advisor to the Director-General of UNESCO on “blood antiquities” issues, he is now an Executive Producer with CBS Studios, as his international work helped inspire the character “Danny” on the action-adventure social impact series BLOOD & TREASURE on CBS, Paramount, and AmazonPrime.

As public sector specialist at the World Bank Group, Mark served as the first head of operations of the StAR Secretariat, a joint United Nations-World Bank presidential initiative to help developing countries recover stolen assets from past dictators.

Before joining the Bank, he served as a White House Fellow/special assistant to the Secretary of Defense and advisor to the President’s Special Envoy to Sudan, and was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service by Secretary Robert Gates.

Prior to his government service, Mark practiced law at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, and served on the Slobodan Milosevic and Srebrenica genocide prosecution trial teams at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. He has taught the Iraqi judges that tried Saddam Hussein, served on the U.S. Delegation to the Pan Am 103 “Lockerbie” terrorist bombing trial in the Netherlands, advised the Director-General of UNESCO, provided commentary to BBC, CNN, FOX, CBS and NPR, and is published widely.

Mark studied business, theology and government at Georgetown University while on an Army ROTC scholarship, and received his Juris Doctorate, cum laude, from Georgetown Law Center. He holds Certificates in International Law from The Hague Academy of International Law, conducted post-doctorate research at Universiteit Leiden as a NAF-Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands, and completed the World Economic Forum's executive leadership programs at Oxford and Harvard.

As a U.S. Army officer, he has been attached to Capitol Hill and the Defense Attaché Office at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague, and was awarded the Army Commendation Medal.

Knighted by both the Vatican and Ethiopian Crown, and commissioned a Kentucky Colonel, Mark is a Fellow with the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations, a member of the Bars of California, the District of Columbia, and the Supreme Court of the United States, and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, a Senior Peace Fellow by the Public International Law & Policy Group, and an ITAC advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Mark is founding co-chair of the YGL SDG Advisory Council and has advised numerous boards, including the White House Fellow Foundation, Artemis Climate Partners, the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, and the LAPD Leadership Advisory Board.

Nicole Vogrin

Former Chief Corporate Affairs & Communications Officer, Western Union, USA

Nicole Vogrin became Western Union’s first Chief Corporate Affairs and Communications Officer in 2019, when she was tasked with spearheading the company’s global corporate brand, public affairs, and communications strategy with a focus on elevating and protecting the company’s reputation. In this role, Nicole shapes Western Union’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitment while strategically aligning it to the company’s global advocacy. She is based at the company’s global headquarters in Denver, Colorado.

Nicole joined Western Union in 2009. Through her tenure, she has held roles in Europe and the United States. Most recently, she served as Head of Corporate Relations and Chief of Staff to Western Union’s CEO, playing a key role in accelerating the company’s transformation agenda. In August 2019, when Nicole was promoted to her current role, she and her team started to bring together disparate comms functions, combining them with environmental, social, and governance and dedicated corporate brand teams, as well as the Western Union Foundation.

She is also a director of the board of the Western Union International Bank, Austria. In 2020, Nicole was recognized as one of PRWeek’s ‘40 Under 40,’ an annual list spotlighting U.S. PR professionals leading the future of communications and marketing; and was named one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders.

Prior to joining Western Union, Nicole held finance, accounting, and marketing positions in the health care and electronics industries in Europe. She was born in Vienna, Austria and holds a Master’s in Business Administration and Economics from the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria.

Hitesh Wadhwa

Enterprise Technology & Business Leader, Google Cloud, USA

Hitesh is a seasoned Enterprise Technology, Sales & Business leader at Google Cloud. In his role, he leads growth and adoption of Google Cloud with large enterprises in Central US. His work revolves around bringing Technology in the forefront, especially Cloud, AI/ML, Quantum Computing, etc for large Enterprises, and communities around.

Before Google, Hitesh worked at Amazon Web Services (AWS) as 'Principal, Enterprise Sales' for one of the fastest growing territories in the region to scale AWS adoption with large and medium enterprises.

Prior to AWS, he worked as a Vice President at Tech Mahindra, the IT arm of the Mahindra group, where he rans various strategic accounts and initiatives in the Telco, Media & Entertainment (CME) vertical and grew Tech Mahindra's revenues by $100Mn+ through organic & in-organic growth. He was part of Tech Mahindra's Global Leadership Cadre and Shadow Board program, and ran various impact programs panning across digital transformation, diversity, culture and sustainability.

In his 17+ years of work experience, he has led teams, scaled businesses, ran strategic initiatives and managed various Fortune 500 customer accounts such AT&T, Facebook, Verizon, Oracle, UnitedHealth Group, WarnerMedia, Rakuten and iHeartMedia etc.

Hitesh believes Technology can solve world's biggest problems if used in the right way. At Tech Mahindra, he served a leadership position as part of the CME vertical, a $2.5B+ business annually. He was chosen for the company's "Shadow Board" (https://bit.ly/2WdSLrs) program twice, which is a highly selective and rigorous program (only 6 people out of 130K+ employees make it every year to shadow the board of directors). As part of that, Hitesh was instrumental in a) defining company's vision for 2024; b) running initiatives to help TechM be an organization with purpose, and a company that practices inclusiveness in all aspects of diversity; c) building a strategic roadmap on how to strive during Covid-19; d) globally representing Mahindra as a brand for millennials; e) building an effective talent supply chain management and optimizing resource utilization.

David Alexander Walcott

Founder and Managing Partner, Novamed, USA

David is a Medical Doctor (MD., Ph.D. MSc.) and Entrepreneur with over 10 years experience as a Founder, Operator and Consultant to several businesses in the Caribbean & Latin America. Professionally, he is committed to attracting world-class healthcare resources into emerging markets through Novamed, a healthcare & real estate investment firm that actions best-practices and global insights through its portfolio companies. His firm invests in and develops hospitals, clinics, health technologies & commercial real estate. He is currently building a google campus’-type Smart business district in the first such commercial change-of-use project in the Caribbean, as well as a smart hospital on the legs on the first such acquisition in the English-speaking Caribbean. His work in healthcare has been recognized by Forbes, World Economic Forum, the United Nations and the IMF and his firm led the largest private donation of PPE into the Caribbean and has completed extensive public & private sector projects in emerging market healthcare. He is also Founding Partner of The Visionaries’ Summit & My Destination Experience, knowledge & opportunity exchange platforms designed to attract investment into the Caribbean convening a community controlling US$140 billion in equity that has seeded over US$300 million in investments in the region. A Rhodes Scholar, his academic profile includes Oxford, INSEAD & Harvard and he is the previous Co-Chair of the Global Shapers’ Covid-19 Steering Committee, and Young Global Leader & a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council.

Tiffany Xingyu Wang

Chief Trust and Marketing Officer, OpenWeb, USA

Tiffany Xingyu Wang is an award-winning founder, operator and investor who focuses on building an ethical web3. She leads the way in defining and elevating the industry of digital safety. Identifying the urgent need for industry collaboration on safety initiatives as the social web evolves into the metaverse, Tiffany co-founded Oasis Consortium, a non-profit organization that launched the first comprehensive User Safety Standards for web3.0. She is also currently the Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer of Spectrum Labs, a contextual AI platform created to build a safer internet. Spectrum Labs protects billions of users from harassment, toxicity, and abuse in online communities. As a keynote speaker and expert at the intersection of AI and Trust & Safety, she has been featured and published in TIME, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, Protocol, Digiday, VentureBeat and more. She also sits on the Digital Safety Coalition committee at the World Economic Forum, hosts the Brand Safety Exchange podcast, a destination for digital user safety thought leaders, and created the first-of-its-kind course on Trust and Safety partnering with Linkedin Learning. Tiffany is also an advisor and investor in blockchain and quantum computing companies. She is also a venture partner at Tribe, a Singapore government-backed blockchain accelerator. She holds two USPTO patents in machine learning applications on marketing. Her previous roles span tech and global investing.

Nolan Watson

President and Chief Executive Officer, Sandstorm Gold Ltd, Canada

President and CEO, Sandstorm Gold, a NYSE American-listed company with a market capitalization of $1.1 billion. Founder and President, Nations Cry, a registered charity building and operating schools in Sierra Leone, Africa. By the age of 26, was the youngest CFO of any NYSE-listed company in the world. Recognized as one of the "Top-40-Under-40", Canada and "CEO of the Year". In addition, Nolan is the youngest "Fellow" of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of British Columbia and he has been recognized as one of the "Most Motivated" Chartered Financial Analysts in the World by CFA Magazine. Nolan is a regular contributor on various radio programs, television programs, and government conferences on topics ranging from mining, to environmental sustainability and he has been seen on CNBC, Fox Business News, BBC, BNN and CNBC Europe among others.

Leana Wen

Professor of Health Policy and Management, George Washington University, USA

Dr. Leana Wen is an emergency physician, professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, and an op-ed columnist for the The Washington Post, where she anchors a weekly newsletter "The Checkup with Dr. Wen". A nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, she is also an on-air commentator for CNN as a medical analyst and author of When Doctors Don’t Listen: How to Avoid Misdiagnoses and Unnecessary Tests (St. Martin’s Press, 2013) and Lifelines: A Doctor’s Journey in the Fight for Public Health (Henry Holt, 2021).

Previously, she served as health commissioner for the city of Baltimore, where she led the nation’s oldest continuously operating health department to combat the opioid epidemic and improve maternal and child health. She has also worked as director of patient-centered care research in the department of emergency medicine at George Washington University; president of Planned Parenthood; global health fellow at the World Health Organization; consultant to the China Medical Board; and distinguished fellow at the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity.

Currently, Dr. Wen serves on the board of directors of Glaukos Corporation (NYSE: GKOS) and UroGen (NASDAQ: URGN) and as the chair of the advisory board of the Behavioral Health Group. She is also a member of the board of directors of the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Baltimore Community Foundation, and on the advisory boards of B-Generous, MANUAL, and Shatterproof. Her previous board experience includes being board chair of Behavioral Health System Baltimore for four years and serving on boards and advisory of boards to more than ten nonprofit and venture-backed health innovation companies.

Dr. Wen obtained her medical degree from Washington University School of Medicine and studied health policy at the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She completed her residency training at Brigham & Women's Hospital & Massachusetts General Hospital, where she was a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School.

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Dr. Wen has received recognition as one of Governing's Public Officials of the Year, Modern Healthcare's Top 50 Physician-Executives, World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders, and TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential People.

Dr. Wen lives with her husband and their two young children in Baltimore.

Adam Werbach

Global Lead, Sustainable Shopping, Amazon, USA

Adam Werbach is a sustainability leader working at the intersection of technology, business and politics. He is currently focused on developing the sustainable shopping customer experience and product assortment as the Global Lead for Customer and Employee Impact at Amazon.com. After a YGL journey, he founded Trove (formerly Yerdle), the re-commerce company that manages resale for Patagonia, Nordstrom's, Eileen Fisher, Arc'Teryx, and REI. He previously founded Act Now, which was acquired by Saatchi & Saatchi and the Publicis Groupe, after he helped Walmart launch its sustainability efforts. At age 23, Werbach was elected President of the Sierra Club, the oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization in the US, after helping pass the legislation to create Death Valley and Joshua Tree National Parks in California. He spent almost ten years producing an indie-rock documentary film entitled "This is Noise Pop," which was named one of the top five music documentaries of the year by Rolling Stone Magazine, even though it was only shown once. Werbach lives between San Francisco and Bolinas, California with his wife Lyn and their three kids, Mila, Pearl and Simon.