Our team

Philippe Legrain is the founder of OPEN. He is an independent thinker, communicator and political entrepreneur who is a passionate believer in openness.

Three big things define his wide-ranging career: trying to understand how the world works; communicating this to a wider audience; and trying to make the world a better place. Through his work, writing and media appearances, he has been at the heart of many big debates of the past 15 years – globalisation, international migration, the financial crisis, the euro and Brexit – from a variety of vantage points:

studying economics and international political economy at the London School of Economics and returning there as visiting fellow at the European Institute (2007-10) and now as a senior visiting fellow since 2014;
as a journalist (at The Economist), editor and commentator for a wide range of international media outlets and currently a columnist for Project Syndicate, Foreign Policy and CapX;
as a senior policy and media adviser (to World Trade Organisation Director-General Mike Moore) and as independent economic adviser to European Commission President José Manuel Barroso and head of the team that provided him with fresh thinking and strategic policy advice (2011-14);
as a political campaigner; and
as an independent writer, consultant and public speaker.

Philippe is the author of four critically acclaimed books:

Open World: The Truth about Globalisation (2002), which defended free trade but warned of the dangers of unfettered finance, was described as “wonderfully lucid and intelligent” by Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times;
Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them (2007), was shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year award;
Aftershock: Reshaping the World Economy After the Crisis (2010) attracted the attention of President Barroso and persuaded him to hire Philippe;
European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics are in a Mess – and How to Put Them Right (2014), was described as “essential reading” by the Financial Times and was among its Best Books of 2014.

Philippe was born and lives in London, has a French father and an Estonian mother, and is a British citizen, as well as a citizen of the world. He is a long-suffering Arsenal fan and loves house music and House of Cards.

Hosuk Lee-Makiyama is the co-founder of OPEN. He is a prominent analyst and original thinker on international trade, digitalisation, Asia’s global role and the future of Europe, as well as a director of the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE), a top think-tank in Brussels.

He has a knack for spotting trends before they become fashionable. For instance, he has been working on digitalisation and trade since 2008, long before the current controversies over data privacy and much else, and was named “one of the 20 most influential people for an open internet” by readers of the Guardian in 2012 for his work on internet censorship. His first report on dumping and Chinese overcapacity came out five years before the current debate over China’s market economy status made the news. He has successfully advocated the opening of several “impossible” trade negotiations for the EU, including the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the US and free-trade agreements with Japan and Australia/New Zealand.

Hosuk often appears in European, Chinese and US news media and is regularly asked to advise governments and international organisations. He previous worked for the Swedish government where he dealt with trade, intellectual property and UN matters.

Back in the pre-internet analogue age, he paid his way through school by designing adverts for global brands. Having migrated to Sweden from Tokyo in his youth, Hosuk is reconciled to being called a foreigner wherever he goes.

Martyn Fitzgerald is a senior researcher at OPEN. Previously a researcher at OPEN, he has a wide variety of research experience, including for books on political philosophy and globalisation, as well as at a leading advertising agency.

Martyn has a first-class degree in politics, philosophy & history from Birkbeck College, London and has written on social and political issues for a wide range of international publications. He is of mixed British and Indian heritage.

Iana Dreyer is a senior fellow at OPEN. A journalist, commentator, political economist and media entrepreneur, she specialises in all matters related to international trade. She also has a keen interest in broader European affairs and globalisation. She is particularly passionate about defending free movement in Europe and open migration policies.

Iana is the founder and editor of Borderlex.eu, Europe’s top trade-policy news and commentary web platform. Previously, she was a think-tank analyst focused on trade. She lives in London and has also made her mark in Brussels and Paris.

Iana is a proud citizen of the world and has a French, German and Latin American background, with an added twist of inveterate anglophilia.

Marta Bengoa is a senior fellow at OPEN. An economist with wide-ranging research interests that span migration, trade and foreign investment in China, Latin America and the Pacific, she is the Director of the Graduate Program in Economics at the Colin Powell School and an Associate Professor of International Economics at City University of New York (CCNY).

Marta also serves as an External Research Fellow at the Institute of International Economics in the University Jaume I and University of Valencia in Spain. She has been visiting scholar and visiting professor at the Department of Economics at Columbia University, the Free Market Institute Foundation in Cape Town, the University of Costa Rica, the University Federico Santa María (Chile) and Universidad of Azuay (Ecuador). She has also collaborated with the World Bank and UN on projects about economic growth in Latin America and has conducted fieldwork for the AECI (Spanish International Cooperation Agency).

Marta has published widely on the interaction between openness and growth, productivity and development. She is currently studying the interconnection between internal migration and health outcomes in China, which is conditioned on the use of the Hukou registration system. Other projects focus on quantifying the multilateral resistances to trade for intra-state flows in the US, the impact of bilateral investment agreements on Latin American foreign direct investment (FDI), and the trade diversion effects of non-tariff measures for Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) countries.

Marta is Spanish and lives in New York. She tutors, pro bono, immigrants who lack the resources to go to school in maths and economics. She is a mentor to many women on a diverse array of issues. She is also a yogi and art lover who supports young local artists.

Guy de Jonquières is a senior fellow at OPEN. His current interests and research focus on international economic policy and Asia’s political economy, about which he writes and speaks regularly.

Guy had a long and illustrious career at the Financial Times, notably as world trade editor, principal leader writer and Asia commentator. He is now also a senior fellow at the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) and an associate at LSE IDEAS, the London School of Economics’ foreign-policy think tank.

Guy is British and lives in London.

Garvan Walshe is a senior fellow at OPEN. A thought leader and entrepreneur, he is the founder of Brexit Analytics, which focuses on applying technology to help small and medium-sized businesses understand Brexit.

A columnist for Conservative Home, he also serves on the advisory boards of London think-tanks Modern Europe and the Migration Matters Trust.

Garvan played a senior role in the Conservatives’ campaign for Britain to Remain in the EU. Before that, he was an academic at the European University Institute in Florence. He has also been a policy adviser on national and international security to the UK Conservative Party. He holds a PhD from the University of Manchester.

An Anglophile Irishman and passionate supporter of immigration, Garvan grew up in Argentina and Spain. He once managed to manipulate the Daily Mail into running a pro-immigration front page.

Jack Graham is a fellow at OPEN. A journalist and commentator, he specialises in the political economy of migration and early childhood development.

Jack is currently lead writer on early childhood policies at Apolitical.co, a global network for public servants to accelerate the best ideas in global governance. He has previously worked on policy and communications in the UK Parliament, and as a video journalist at Contented Digital Media.

As a commentator, Jack’s work appears regularly on CapX, Politics.co.uk, and talkRADIO. He mainly comments on British and US politics, with a particular focus on migration issues.

Sam Lowe is a senior fellow at OPEN and a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform. He is also co-founder of UK Trade Forum, whose mission is to improve the policy debate about Brexit and trade. A well-respected trade expert and environmentalist, he regularly briefs politicians, civil servants and journalists on issues ranging from cumulative rules of origin to the EU’s sanitary and phytosanitary border requirements. He recently gave oral evidence to the UK Parliament’s International Trade Select Committee on the subject of a potential future UK-US trade agreement. Sam frequently makes media appearances. Most recently he has been quoted in the Financial Times, The Times, Buzzfeed and others. He has also appeared on BBC Newsnight, Sky News, BBC News 24, Channel 4 News and BBC Farming Today. Sam previously worked on community land rights in Uganda and Greenlandic gemstone policy. His efforts while leading a prominent environmental charity’s campaign advocating for a Remain vote in the UK’s EU referendum was acknowledged by its then Prime Minister, David Cameron.

Rebekah Smith is a fellow at OPEN. As a migration policy consultant, she specialises in building institutions in sending, receiving and transit countries to facilitate increased migration flows.

She has worked with international organisations and more than 20 client countries on the development of migration policies and institutions. She has supported governments on migration at every stage from technical consultations to designing programmes actively placing workers in jobs abroad. Her current work focuses on migration between South Asia and the Middle East.

Rebekah is also a frequent commentator on global migration dialogues and processes, including a proposal with Lant Pritchett at the Center for Global Development for an international forum for negotiating migration agreements.