NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Kate Hyder is a MAP research fellow with New Ventures, and over the next three months she will be assisting with research to support the program goals of fostering sustainable, market-based solutions to poverty across the world. Kate joins the New Ventures team after nine months in Tanzania, during which she was working with the non-profit 2Seeds Network to begin an agricultural-development project to improve food and income security in the rural Tanga region. In 2011, Kate graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. in Earth Systems, an interdisciplinary program in environmental science, policy, and economics. During college, she worked as a research and teaching assistant with the Program on Food Security and the Environment and wrote an Honors thesis on land-use change relating to the livestock industry in Brazil. She also interned with the state government of Amazonas, in Brazil, to assess the state?s REDD program. In the fall, she will return to Stanford to complete a M.S. in Earth Systems, with a focus on Sustainable Development.

Logan Yonavjak is the Business Development Officer for New Ventures at the World Resources Institute in the Markets and Enterprise Program. New Ventures is WRI’s center for environmental entrepreneurship, helping environmentally-focused small and medium enterprises in six key emerging markets compete in a global economy. In her previous role at WRI Logan was a Research Analyst with the Southern Forests for the Future project. The goal of SFF is to scale up economic incentives (such as payments for watershed services and forest carbon offsets) for private landowners in the southern U.S. to conserve and sustainably manage their forests. Logan received her Bachelor’s Degree with Distinction from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Geography, with a concentration in Geographic Information Systems.

Logan Tweets via @new_ventures