Re-kindling the fire: European Young Leaders (EYL40) Valletta Seminar

A former advertising executive, Jon Alexander co-founded UK-based innovation consultancy the New Citizenship Project (NCP) as a vehicle to bring the skills of the creative industries to bear on inspiring people to claim their agency in society as citizens instead of just selling stuff to people as consumers. Part think tank, part consultancy and still in its early years, NCP has worked with organisations ranging from The Guardian to Coop Group, and potentially soon with the European Central Bank. 

Helena Dalli is Minister for European Affairs and Equality in Malta. First elected to Parliament in 1996, her experience in the Maltese Parliament has been one of the longest held by a woman in Maltese politics and the only woman to be elected from two districts in the interest of the Labour Party. During the 2013-2017 legislature she was minister for Social Dialogue, Consumer Affairs and Civil Liberties.  Under her direction the Government introduced several laws and policies to strengthen the equality and human rights framework placing Malta among the first in Europe in this field. In 2016 Minister Dalli won the European Diversity Award for her work in human rights and equality.

Giselle Frederick has an established career working in Financial Technology Swiss and British Investment Banks. She is the Founder and CEO of Zingr, a FinTech startup providing solutions to the unbanked. Built on Blockchain technology, it reduces the cost of accepting and making payments through an app that makes online and peer-to-peer payments seamless, fast and secure. She is a passionate advocate for the growth and development of the Tech ecosystem in the Caribbean and a renowned blockchain advocate. Frederick is also the Chair of the Millennial Women Initiative at Women in Banking and Finance, a stream that tackles issues around attraction and retention of female millennial women in the finance sector.

Juha Kaakinen has worked in public administration of the City of Helsinki, as a researcher, consultant and CEO of Social Development Ltd, a company devoted to developing social and health services for cities and municipalities and as a Program Leader of a National Program to End Long-term Homelessness. He is now Chief Executive of Y-Foundation, the biggest Finnish NGO providing housing for homeless people and social housing with a housing stock of 16700 flats. He is internationally known as an advocate of Housing First policy.

Abdalla is a serial entrepreneur and award-winning Fintech expert. He specialises in the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the design of complex financial systems. Throughout his career, he founded a number of start-ups and companies specialising in deep learning, professional match-making and Fintech. Furthermore, Abdalla is an Alumni of Microsoft Ventures UK and worked on projects which were featured at the World Economic Forum 2017 in Davos. He is also an academic at the University of Malta where he lectures and researches topics related to computational intelligence, financial engineering and financial data science. In addition to these roles, Abdalla advises governments on matters related to strategic development and the utilisation of technology, Fintech, and Blockchain/DLT technologies.

Flavia Kleiner founded the Swiss political movement Operation Libero, which gained national importance in Switzerland in 2016 when it successfully campaigned against the so-called ‘enforcement initiative’ by the Swiss People’s Party. Her work focuses on the future of democracy, the rule of law, the current rise of right-wing populism and civil society engagement. Flavia is a council member of the European Council on Foreign Affairs (ECFR), one of POLITICO’s ‘28 people who will shape Europe in 2018’ and among Forbes ‘30 under 30’ in the section ‘Law & Policy’.

Julia Kloiber is a researcher and designer who works at the intersection of technology and society. In 2016 she founded the Prototype Fund, Germany’s first open source funding program that supports technology projects for the public good. As part of the Open Knowledge Foundation, she has been running multiple initiatives that foster the reuse of open data and promote transparency. She is a Senior Fellow at Mozilla where she focuses on building public awareness to demand ethical internet technologies. Based in Berlin, she is currently researching emerging technologies and exploring future narratives. 

Lili Milani’s main areas of research have been epigenetics and pharmacogenetics – studying the genetics of inter-individual variation in drug response. She is now a research professor and head of the personalised medicine initiative at the Estonian Genome Center, University of Tartu. She is actively participating in preparing and implementing the national strategy for personalised medicine in Estonia in close collaboration with the Ministry of Social Affairs and Institute for Health Development. She is also a SciLifeLab fellow at the Department of Medical Sciences, Uppsala University.

Barbara Prainsack is a Professor at the University of Vienna and at King’s College London. Her work explores the social, regulatory and ethical dimensions of biomedicine and bioscience. Current projects focus on personalised and “precision” medicine, on citizen participation in science and medicine, and the role of solidarity in medicine and healthcare. Prainsack is also a member of the Austrian National Bioethics Committee, and of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) advising the European Commission.

Orna Rosenfeld is a senior housing expert teaching at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) since 2013. An architect by training, she designed and assisted in the delivery of over 6,000 affordable homes before dedicating herself to counselling and researching the advancement of affordable and social housing policies. Among other publications, she is the author of the flagship study “Social Housing in the UNECE Region: Models, Trends and Challenges”.