Staff

Karl P. Sauvant, Ph.D. – Executive Director

Lisa E. Sachs, Esq. – Assistant Director

Barry Herman, Ph.D. – Research Director

 

Karl P. Sauvant, Ph.D. is the Founder and Executive Director of the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment; Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School; Co-Director, Millennium Cities Initiative; Honorary Fellow, European International Business Academy; Chatham House Foundation Fellow; Senior Advisor, Investment Advisory Committee, China International Investment Council (formerly the China Federation of Investment Promotion Agencies); and Member, International Advisory Council, International Center for Corporate Accountability, Baruch College, CUNY. He is also Guest Professor at Nankai University, China.

Until July 2005, Dr. Sauvant was Director of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's (UNCTAD) Division on Investment, Technology and Enterprise Development (DITE), the focal point in the UN system for matters related to foreign direct investment (FDI) and technology, as well as a major interface with the private sector. While at the UN, he created, in 1991, the prestigious annual World Investment Report, of which he was the lead author until 2004. In 1992, Dr. Sauvant founded the journal Transnational Corporations, serving as its editor until 2005. He provided intellectual leadership and guidance to a series of 25 monographs on key issues related to international investment agreements, which were published in 2004/05 in three volumes, and he edited, together with Dr. John H. Dunning, a 20-volume Library on Transnational Corporations (published by Routledge).

Dr. Sauvant joined the United Nations in 1973 and, as of 1975, has focused his work on matters related to FDI. Since 1988, he was responsible for the Organization's policy analysis work on FDI. In 2001, he became Director of DITE. His responsibilities included managing the Division; promoting international consensus-building in the areas of FDI, technology and enterprise development; providing intellectual leadership for policy-oriented research; and conceptualizing and supervising technical assistance activities in this field.

Apart from his work for the United Nations, Dr. Sauvant has published extensively on issues related to economic development, FDI and services. His name is associated with a great number of United Nations publications on FDI over the three decades of service in the UN.

Dr. Sauvant received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. He is a national of Germany, married to Silvana F. da Silva, a national of Brazil.

Lisa Sachs is the Assistant Director of the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment. She received a J.D. and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University in May 2008, and her B.A. from Harvard University in 2004. Her academic research has focused on foreign investment, corporate responsibility, human rights, and economic development.

Barry Herman, Ph.D. joined the Vale Columbia Center in September 2009 as Research Director. Before joining the VCC, he had been Visiting Senior Fellow at the Graduate Program in International Affairs of The New School in New York since January 2006. He is also a founding member of the Board of Directors of Global Integrity, a research NGO based in Washington that works with independent scholars and investigative reporters in developed and developing countries in assessing laws, institutions and practices to improve governance and limit corruption.

In a professional career of some 35 years, his long-term interest in foreign direct investment has been in the context of promoting sustained and sustainable economic and financial development that is effectively and equitably governed. While he published on FDI under his own name in the 1970s, his most recent books have been on developing country debt. One is Overcoming Developing Country Debt Crises, to be published by Oxford University Press in December 2009, co-edited with José Antonio Ocampo and Shari Spiegel, where he is also a contributing author.  The book is the culmination of the work of a task force of financial and legal experts that he co-directed on Debt Restructuring and Sovereign Bankruptcy at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. His previous book, jointly edited with Christian Barry and Lydia Tomitova, is Dealing Fairly with Developing Country Debt (Blackwell Publishing, Boston), a collection of papers by philosophers, theologians, lawyers and economists who participated in the “debt and ethics” project at The New School and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs that he co-directed with Christian Barry.

He completed almost 30 years in the United Nations Secretariat in 2005, the last two years of which were as Senior Advisor in the Financing for Development Office in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). He was part of the core Secretariat team that worked with a number of governments starting in 1997 to help prepare the Monterrey Summit on Financing for Development in 2002. Earlier, he led the staff team that produced the UN’s annual World Economic and Social Survey. Before joining the UN Secretariat in 1976, he taught development and international economics.

He holds a PhD from the University of Michigan and an MBA from the University of Chicago. He is married with two grown children and two grandchildren.

 

Senior Research Fellows

Mark Kantor was a partner in the Corporate and Project Finance Groups of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy until he retired from the firm. He currently serves as an arbitrator and mediator, and teaches courses in International Business Transactions and in International Arbitration as an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Mr. Kantor is a qualified arbitrator and a member of numerous arbitration panels.  He is a Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and is listed in Who's Who Commercial Arbitration, Chambers USA (International Arbitration), and The Best Lawyers in America (International Arbitration; Washington, D.C.).

Mr. Kantor is the incoming Editor in Chief of Transnational Dispute Management, an on-line global portal focusing on transnational disputes.  He is also a member of the ADR Advisory Board of the International Law Institute, the Editorial Board of Global Arbitration Review, the Board of Editors of the Journal of World Energy Law and Business and the Board of Editors of The Banking Law Journal.  He is Vice-Chair of the DC Bar International Dispute Resolution Committee, having served as Chair from 2004 until 2007. He serves as the Chair of the Washington, D.C. chapter of The Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.   Among other publications, Mr. Kantor is the author of Valuation for Arbitration: Compensation Standards, Valuation Methods and Expert Evidence (Kluwer Law International 2008), named Best Book of 2008 in the OGEMID Awards.  Additional publications and background can be found at http://clik.to/kantor.

Ucheora Onwuamaegbu is senior counsel at the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), where he heads a team administering numerous arbitral proceedings.  He sits on the Editorial Board for the ICSID Review – Foreign Investment Law Journal and coordinates various institutional initiatives at the Centre. Before joining ICSID in 2001, Mr. Onwuamaegbu was senior legal officer at the United Nations Compensation Commission, Geneva. A graduate of the University of Nigeria, Mr. Onwuamaegbu is a barrister of the Supreme Court of Nigeria and a solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales. He has served on different International Committees of the American Bar Association’s International Law Section, and of the International Bar Association.  He is an Associate Member of the Institute of World Business Law at the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and has written and spoken extensively on different aspects of investor-state dispute resolution.

 

Research Fellows

Zehra Gulay Kavame graduated from Columbia Law School with a Master of Laws degree in May 2008. She is a Business Administration graduate of Istanbul University and a Law graduate of Bahcesehir University. At Columbia, her focus was on corporations, corporate finance, financial statement analysis, and foreign investment as well as gender issues.

Jonathan Strauss graduated from Emory Law School with a Juris Doctor degree in May 2008.  He earned his Business Administration degree in International Business and Finance from the Honors Program at the University of Georgia and received a Certificate in Leadership from the University of Georgia's Institute for Leadership Advancement.  Prior to joining the Vale Columbia Center, he was an associate at a law firm in New York where he worked in securitization of various products and restructuring of large corporations.

 

Research Associates

Rik A. Andrews holds a Bachelor's degree in International Studies from Pepperdine University, with a concentration in International/Intercultural Communication & Negotiation. His academic areas of interest are foreign investment, globalization, and sustainable economic development in landlocked developing countries and small island developing states.

Elizabeth Briones (JD from Catholic University of Peru, LLM from Columbia University, LLM in Banking and Finance from University College London, postgraduate studies on International Relations for Business at  Boston University Brussels, former trainee for the European Commission) is a former civil servant for the Peruvian government with experience in public bids and concessions in the fishery industry, drafting regulations and laws for the local government and the executive, as well investigating and imposing sanctions. Experienced in U.S. local government and European Commission with understanding of financial aid applications and community regulations in the European Union.

Ilze Dubava received her law degree from the University of Latvia in 2007. In 2006 and 2007, she worked as a legal adviser in Public International Law in the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Latvia. She received a Masters in Legal Research from European University Institute, Florence, in 2008. Currently she is a Ph.D. candidate at the European University Institute, writing her Ph.D. thesis on “The Legal Limits of a State’s Right to Regulate Foreign Investment for Environment Protection Reasons: Legal Problems of Indirect Expropriation and Sustainable Investment.”

Elizabeth Horwitz is a Research Associate at the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment.  A graduate of Barnard College, she is currently an M.A. candidate in International Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies with a concentration in International Policy.  Her research focuses on social and environmental consequences of extractive activities, poverty and economic development.

Wouter Schmit Jongbloed received his Law degree from the University of Leiden with specializations in Civil Law and Philosophy of Law. Thereafter he studied at the Institute for Law and Finance at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His research topic is “Liberalizing Investment: Foreign Direct Investment as a Proxy to the Financial Crisis,” with a special focus on the BRIC-countries.

Oleksiy Kononov received his Specialist degree in Law from Donetsk National University, Ukraine, in 2003. He received his LL.M. degree in International Business Law from Central European University, Hungary, in 2007. From 2000 to 2006, Oleksiy practiced law in Ukraine as an in-house lawyer, independent legal counsel, and in a law firm. His legal practice included corporate law, contracts, foreign trade, and labor law issues. He is currently a SJD student in Central European University.  His research topic is “Foreign Direct Investment Regulation: German Model and Bulgarian Reforms Approach as Patterns for Ukraine.”

Ingrid B. Santos holds a Master’s degree and a Bachelor’s degree in Law from Federal University of Paraiba, Brazil.  Her academic research has focused on economic development, corporate social responsibility, and intellectual property.

 

Related Bodies and Faculty

The Center is a joint undertaking of the Columbia Law School and The Earth Institute at Columbia University. The Center is also linked to the Center on Global Legal Problems. It is a bridge between the legal focus of Columbia Law School and the sustainable development focus of The Earth Institute.

Dr. Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director, The Earth Institute at Columbia University; Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, Columbia University; Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

Dean David M. Schizer, Dean of Columbia Law School; Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law