About Us
Our Mission
OPEN is an international platform for progress:
we do independent, rigorous and accessible cross-country research and analysis on pressing policy, business and social issues, with a focus on diversity and other openness issues.
Our mission is to break down barriers:
- between countries and within them;
- that privilege some and deny opportunities to others;
- that entrench established ways of doing things at the expense of new, different and better ones.
OPEN believes in being open to the world, open to everyone in society, and open to the future and all its possibilities for progress.
Our Team
Our Advisory Board
Professor Erik Berglof is the inaugural Director of the Institute of Global Affairs (IGA) and its newly launched Global Policy Lab at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He has published widely in top journals on economic and political transition, corporate governance, financial development and EU reform. He is a member of the Secretariat for the G20 Eminent Persons Group tasked with reviewing global financial governance. He is also a member of the World Economic Forum Global Futures Council on the Financial and Monetary Systems, as well as a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution and at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in New York. Prior to joining the LSE, Professor Berglof was the Chief Economist and Special Adviser to the President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). Previously, he was Director of the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) and Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. He was Assistant Professor at Universite Libre de Bruxelles and has held visiting positions at Harvard, Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has also served as Special Adviser to the Prime Minister of Sweden.
Bill Emmott is currently a visiting fellow at All Souls College, working on a new book about Japan. Following a 26-year career at The Economist, during which he was editor-in-chief in 1993-2006, he has concentrated on writing and on advisory roles. His latest book is “The Fate of the West: the Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea” (Profile, 2017), following “Good Italy, Bad Italy” (2012) and “Rivals” (2008, about relations between China, Japan and India).
He was also co-author (with director Annalisa Piras) and presenter of a documentary film about Italy’s long decline, “Girlfriend in a Coma” (2013), and executive producer of Piras’s next film, “The Great European Disaster Movie” (2015). Piras and Emmott established The Wake Up Foundation to disseminate films and other material about the troubles of western societies for educational purposes.
He is a visiting professor at Shujitsu University in Okayama, Japan, a member of Tokyo University’s Global Advisory Board, a trustee of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an adviser to Swiss Re and to Critical Resource, and a director of InFacts, an anti-Brexit website. He is a regular contributor to La Stampa in Italy, Nikkei Business and the Mainichi Shimbun in Japan, and Project Syndicate.
Kate Hampton is CEO of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. She became CEO in March 2016, having run CIFF’s Climate Change team since 2009.
She is also a member of the FP2020 Reference Group, a multi-stakeholder partnership aimed at enabling 120 million more women and girls to use contraception by 2020, and she sits on the board of the European Climate Foundation, a philanthropic initiative to help Europe foster the development of a low carbon society and play a leadership role internationally.
Kate’s career spans roles in government, finance, consulting, a think tank and NGOs. Before joining CIFF she was Head of Policy at Climate Change Capital, a boutique investment firm with $1.5 billion under management, advising asset managers and multinational companies on clean energy opportunities. She has also advised policy-makers in a number of roles, including as Senior Policy Advisor for the United Kingdom’s G8 and EU presidencies in 2005, and as a Sherpa to the EU High-Level Group on Competitiveness, Energy and Environment in 2007. In 2008, Kate was named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.
She holds a BSc. from the London School of Economics and a Masters in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. She speaks French and Spanish fluently.
The Honourable Ratna Omidvar is an internationally recognised voice on migration, diversity and inclusion. She came to Canada from Iran in 1981 and her own experiences of displacement, integration and citizen engagement have been the foundation of her work.
Ms. Omidvar is a Director at the Samara Centre for Democracy, a Director at the Century Initiative, a Councillor on the World Refugee and Migration Council and Chair Emerita for the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council.
Previously at Ryerson University, Ms. Omidvar was a Distinguished Visiting Professor and founded the Global Diversity Exchange, a think-and-do tank on diversity, migration and inclusion.
Ms. Omidvar was appointed to the Order of Ontario in 2005 and became a Member of the Order of Canada in 2011, with both honours recognising her advocacy work on behalf of immigrants and devotion to reducing inequality in Canada. In 2014, she received the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in recognition of her contribution to the advancement of German-Canadian relations.
Ms. Omidvar is also co-author of Flight and Freedom: Stories of Escape to Canada (2015).
Dr Dhananjayan (Danny) Sriskandarajah is Secretary General and CEO of CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society organisations and activist. His previous roles have included Director of the Royal Commonwealth Society, Interim Director of the Commonwealth Foundation, and Deputy Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research.
Danny has worked on various aspects of migration policy, including the economic impacts of immigration, the migration-development nexus and British emigration. He is a Trustee of Comic Relief and International Alert, was a member of the United Nations Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Humanitarian Finance, and is a co-founder of the Ockenden Prizes and the Migration Museum Project.
Danny holds a degree from the University of Sydney, and an MPhil and DPhil from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. In 2012, he was chosen as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.