Dr. Eric Rasmussen arrived as President and Chief Executive Officer of InSTEDD in October 2007. Until selected as CEO of InSTEDD, Dr. Rasmussen was both Chairman of the Department of Medicine within Naval Hospital Bremerton near Seattle, Washington, and an advisor in humanitarian informatics for the US Office of the Secretary of Defense. He holds academic positions at several institutions and has been a Principal Investigator for both the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and for the National Science Foundation. He sits on several advisory boards, including the Crisis Management Resources Board for the National Academy of Sciences and the US Crisis Response Working Group. He has a number of publications and has been awarded several personal, unit, and theater military decorations, including a Presidential Legion of Merit.

Dr. Israelski currently directs InSTEDD’s Mekong Collaboration Program in Southeast Asia and has had extensive experience in Africa, particularly in the fight against AIDS. He is Clinical Professor of Medicine in Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and is a recognized physician leader in the field of Infectious Diseases.

He has over 20 years as a leading clinician administrator, educator and researcher, and has devoted his career to local and global public health. He has focused on community-based healthcare of indigent patients, quality service delivery to vulnerable populations, and innovative systems for the control and prevention of communicable diseases. He is on the Board of Trustees and Medical Director of AIDSETI (AIDS Empowerment and Treatment International) that promotes community-driven development programs enhancing health service delivery.

Eduardo Jezierski has spent his whole career designing, implementing and deploying software solutions on a global scale. He originally received an MsC in Informatics after initial work in nuclear engineering, and later worked in Argentina in the areas of GIS analysis, machine learning and modeling for anthropology challenges. His Master’s thesis was on robotics control, genetic algorithms and neural networks. He spent nine years in software development at Microsoft, first supporting largest enterprise customers, then later as Program Manager and Solutions Architect.  

He was one of the founders of a team dedicated to building software assets (tools, practices, frameworks, services, content and information architectures) to improve quality and productivity of Microsoft’s business customers. The usage of these assets and frameworks climbed at its inception from zero to more than a million developers worldwide and adoption in excess of 80% of the target market – including financial, healthcare, military and manufacturing customers.

 Mary Jane Marcus has fifteen years experience in international and domestic program management, community building and cross-cultural dynamics. She has a degree in International Affairs and African Studies from Georgetown University and a Masters in Social Work. She has significant field experience, including work with unaccompanied minors in a 200,000-person Rwandan refugee camp after the genocide, during which her programmatic approach was adopted by the United Nations as a regional model. Her Los Angeles Times article after her work, “The Political Implications of Humanitarian Aid,” highlighted the political role humanitarian aid workers unwittingly play in their effort to do good.

Her current work focuses on how to work across culture and class in ways that empower everyone involved. She is on the advisory board of the United Nations Association Film Festival, a member of the Global Women’s Leadership Network and a member of the Priority Africa Network. She is also involved with the global indigenous food movement and recently completed a book on the history of dried fruit.

Nicolás di Tada is a software developer and project manager with a strong background in scientific and technical applications of software crafting.

Prior to starting his company, Manas Technology Solutions, Nicolás spent 10 years as a software architect and project leader for a diverse range of organizations, including startups and large corporations, acquiring a varied background in information retrieval, machine learning, information visualization and web development.

Passionate about the possibilites of the convergence between technology, science and art,  Nicolas provides consulting services that help organizations build state of the art software solutions with a strong emphasis in usability and user friendliness.

Nicolas currently works with the distributed INSTEDD engineering team, open source contributors, interns and volunteers to incorporate these areas into the InSTEDD platform components.

Prior to joining InSTEDD, Romdoul worked in Cambodia as part of the senior management team for a Cambodian anti-human trafficking NGO and has previously worked for other international NGOs.  In those positions she has been responsible for Programmatic Management and for Operations, including budget, administration, human resources, logistics, and other program-related matters, ensuring adherence to all donor requirements.  In the US she was a contract administration manager for a corporation that provided the US federal government with technical support in monitoring and evaluation on the Department of Housing and Urban Development public housing program for the poor.

Now serving as InSTEDD’s Director of Government Affairs for the Mekong Region, Romdoul assists government partners in discovering ways to improve their work flow through the innovative use of free and open-source technology. She also cultivates potential partners by introducing methods by which technology can have an impact in reducing human suffering within their domain.  Her cross-sector work allows the bridging of agencies with collaborative tools, facilitating new communication pathways and improving both their efficiency and their effectiveness.

Luke Beckman arrived at InSTEDD in the spring of 2007 and serves as the US National Response Manager developing InSTEDD's US-centered efforts in humanitarian relief and disaster response. In that position he manages relationships with crisis response organizations around the nation and his focus is geographical rather than topical, focused primarily on issues inside US borders, but capitalizing on InSTEDD's international experience. Luke has been working in disaster response and pandemic influenza for the past five years, focusing on community resilience and the increasing of collaboration between citizens and the government in times of crisis.

He began working in disaster management as a Red Cross office and shelter manager following Hurricane Katrina as a member of the Washington, D.C. Armory Disaster Response Team, and has most recently worked in the U.S. Senate on the design and implementation of a National Disaster Response Corps. He has worked in Southeast Asia on regional health and disaster initiatives, on health education and treatment in the highlands of Guatemala as a public health team leader for the Global Healthcare Project, and in Palo Alto as a member of a team writing a Pandemic Flu Preparedness manual that is now distributed globally in more than seven languages. Most recently, he helped to coordinate the cross sector response to the earthquake in Haiti. Mr. Beckman also serves as a member of the National Institute for Urban Search and Rescue.

Robert Kirkpatrick is an expert in the design and use of technology to facilitate cross-organizational collaboration in austere field environments, developing countries, and sudden-onset emergencies. He has spent more than 12 years in collaboration technology, developing systems for health data collection, disaster relief, NGO field security, telemedicine, conflict mediation and civil-military cooperation. His work with technology industry partners, government agencies, and international humanitarian organizations has explored ways that the design of virtual interaction environments may influence trust-building, information sharing, and joint decision making across technical, organizational, and cultural boundaries. Robert co-founded and led solutions development for two pioneering humanitarian technology teams, first at Groove Networks, and later at Microsoft, where he served as Lead Architect for Microsoft Humanitarian Systems (MHS) under Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie.