Team | Center of Complex Interventions

Joi Ito

Ondrej Holiencin — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 11:37:53 +0000

Joi Ito is an advisor to the CCI team and helps with several ongoing research projects.

He is currently a partner at the venture capital firm, Neoteny, a guest researcher at Keio University’s Cyber Civilization Research Center and founder and board member of Digital Garage in Tokyo.

He has had numerous roles in the past including Director of the MIT Media Lab, a Professor of Law from Practice at The Harvard Law School, Chair of PureTech Health, CEO of Creative Commons and board member of The New York Times Company, Sony Corporation, The MacArthur Foundation, The Knight Foundation, as well as The Mozilla Foundation, The Internet Corporation for Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Open Source Initiative.

He earned his Ph.D. from the School of Media and Governance at Keio University and is co-author with Jeff Howe of Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future (Grand Central Publishing, December 2016).

Ondrej Holiencin

Ondrej Holiencin — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 13:44:53 +0000

Ondrej is an experienced IT architect, agile practitioner, certified scrum master, and consultant with a background in computer science and political economy. He participated in many international multimillion-dollar projects in finance, insurance, and banking.

Ondrej works with the CCI operations team to set short-term and long-term goals for the organization and assists with project engagement and the grant application process.

Cristina Alonso

Ondrej Holiencin — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 06:27:18 +0000

Cristina Alonso is a Doctor of Public Health who has ample experience implementing systems change in complex political settings. Her doctoral dissertation, “The Impact and Social Response to COVID-19 in Chelsea, MA” won the national award for Outstanding Dissertation of 2021 by the DrPH coalition. She was co-founder of the Academic Public Health Corps which deployed over 1000 public health students and professionals to support local public health efforts during COVID. She then became a leader in coordinating Chelsea’s multi/disciplinary COVID response. Prior to working in COVID, Cristina worked for 18 years in Latin America improving the quality of care in maternal health. She founded several full-scope birth centers in Mexico and worked with the Mexican Ministry of Health to integrate midwifery into the health care system. Her book, “Open a midwifery center”, has been published in three languages and is considered the seminal textbook for opening birth centers in low-resource settings. Cristina continues to work in maternal health improvement consulting in Afghanistan and the USA.

Ariel Ekblaw

Ondrej Holiencin — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 12:42:20 +0000

Ariel Ekblaw brings an interdisciplinary approach to her work at CCI, bridging “extreme environments” between Earth and Space. She advises the climate change mitigation, adaptation, and geoengineering research areas for CCI. Outside CCI, she is the founder and Director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative and leads a space architecture research portfolio. Her work aims to create new technologies and explore systems-level impact to empower humans in resource-constrained environments.

Kriti Godey

Ondrej Holiencin — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 12:46:35 +0000

Kriti Godey manages technology at CCI. She spends the bulk of her time leading the Mathesar project, an open source product to help users of all skill levels work with data. Most recently, she was Director of Engineering at Creative Commons (CC), where she built open source tools to make CC licenses easier to work with. Prior to that, she focused on leading happy and productive distributed engineering teams at startups, and has enjoyed architecting and building both consumer-facing and enterprise software.

Colin Raney

Ondrej Holiencin — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 11:35:00 +0000

Colin Raney is the Chief Marketing Officer of PillPack and Director of Marketing at Amazon Pharmacy. Prior to PillPack, Colin served as the CMO of 3D-printing company Formlabs and as Managing Director at IDEO, the world-renowned design and innovation firm. He is an advisor to multiple startups, has written for The Harvard Business Review and Fast Company.

Samantha Bates

Ondrej Holiencin — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 13:00:45 +0000

Samantha Bates is the Executive Director of CCI where she sets the strategic vision for the organization, runs day-to-day operations, and works closely with the CCI research team on various research projects. Before CCI, Sam was the Director of Administration at YarnLabs Inc, a fiscal sponsor for non-profits. She also previously managed research at MIT and worked as a researcher at Harvard Law School and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Before entering the academic and non-profit space, Sam worked at Google. She has a master’s degree in Modern European History from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. in History from Grinnell College. When not running CCI, Sam can usually be found biking up New England’s finest gravel mountain roads.

Sean Colsen

Ondrej Holiencin — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 12:54:44 +0000

Sean is an engineer passionate about open source software, user experience, data, and interesting problems. He brings a background in tech, non-profits, CRMs, and community organizing to his work on our Mathesar project. In his free time he enjoys mountain biking, and carpentry.

Michelle Kydd Lee

Ondrej Holiencin — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 11:36:08 +0000

Michelle Kydd Lee is a Board Member and Chief Innovation Officer at Creative Artists Agency, where she provides strategic leadership that builds upon the agency’s renowned culture of collaboration and client service, and crafts state-of-the-art approaches to empower and develop employees. Kydd Lee has been a driving force for CAA’s diversity and inclusion initiatives, and is a founding member of TIME’S UP. In 1995, she founded the CAA Foundation to create positive social change. Kydd Lee, who directed the CAA Foundation until 2015, serves as a consultant to clients, executives, and corporations on their philanthropic and social impact initiatives.

Jose Arocha

Ondrej Holiencin — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 06:30:07 +0000

José Gustavo Arocha is a national security expert, specialized in analyzing civil-military relations, violent conflicts, complex systems, and counter-transnational organized crime. He is a retired Lieutenant Colonel from the Venezuelan Army, having fled his home country in 2015 after confronting the totalitarian regime. Living in the United States, Mr. Arocha has testified multiple times before the Organization of American States. He has briefed the Defense Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department about the ongoing crisis in Venezuela.

Mr. Arocha has published articles in The Hill, Harvard Kennedy School Latin America Policy Journal, and the American Foreign Policy Council.

He graduated with full honors in 1990 from Venezuela’s Military Academy, being the highest scoring officer in his promotion group when he ascended to captain in 1998. Following his forced resignation from the Venezuelan Army in 2009, Mr. Arocha founded a political consultancy, GeoFenix, that provided strategic advice and logistical services to high-profile Venezuelan dissidents and regime critics. In 2014, he was detained by Venezuelan regime security services under false treason charges. He was imprisoned for eight months without trial, kept in solitary confinement, and tortured in an underground prison known as “La Tumba.” Since escaping captivity in March 2015, he has resided in the United States.

Mr. Arocha received his Master’s in Public Administration from Harvard University in 2018. He is an Edward S. Mason Fellow and a postgraduate degree in Organizational Development at Universidad Catolica Andres Bello (UCAB) in Venezuela in 2003.