Bob Massie has been one of the most respected leaders in the field of sustainability and finance for nearly forty years. A student anti-apartheid activist at Princeton in the 1970s, Massie obtained a master’s degree in social and theological ethics from Yale Divinity School in 1982 and a doctorate in corporate strategy from Harvard Business School in 1989. His dissertation focused on how institutional investors integrated moral and political concerns into their investment policies. In 1993 he served as a Senior Fulbright Scholar on the faculty of the University of Cape Town. In 1998 he published Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years, which won the 1998 Lionel Gelber prize for the best book in the world on international relations. In 1996 Massie became the first president of Ceres and helped to build it into the powerful coalition of investors, corporations, and sustainability organizations it is today. In 1998, believing that key capital market actors needed high quality, comparable sustainability data, he co-founded and chaired the Global Reporting Initiative. In 2002, he created and led the first Institutional Investor Summit on Climate Risk at United Nations headquarters in New York. That same year he was picked by CFO magazine as one of the 100 most influential leaders in finance. He also served for three years on the original International Integrated Reporting Commission (IIRC) chaired by Justice Mervyn King of South Africa. Massie has also had a prominent role in the politics of his home state of Massachusetts, having served as the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in 1994 and as a candidate for governor in 2018. In recent years he has continued to work on mandatory sustainability reporting, the evolution of corporate governance, and the need for fundamental reform in the fields of accounting, finance, and economics. In the summer of 2023, he convened the Materiality Working Group, a monthly discussion group and clearinghouse of US and UK thought leaders who are focusing on charting the evolution of the intersection of sustainability and finance.
Nnamdi Igbokwe is the Director of SIRI Blended Finance and a Senior Research Scholar. As a political economist, his expertise bridges sustainable investing and development finance to drive strategic decision making, guide investment outcomes, and mobilize capital for impact. At SIRI, he will design and lead blended finance programming to mobilize capital for sustainable development, particularly in lower-income markets, through rigorous research, high-level convenings, and practitioner-focused education.
Previously, Dr. Igbokwe served as Director of Knowledge and Thought Leadership at Convergence Blended Finance, the global network for blended finance, where he oversaw data, research, and content portfolios and led intelligence efforts aimed at scaling blended finance and crowding in greater private sector investment for climate and the SDGs into emerging markets. Earlier roles include Senior Vice President leading strategic initiatives for the Data, Analytics, Reporting, and Technology Market Risk team at Citigroup; Director of Research and Investor Relations for a New York global macro hedge und where he managed the research and content ecosystem for institutional investors; Sustainable development advisor on multilateral initiatives with the World Bank Group and the African Development Bank; and management consultant in the Financial Institutions practice at Boston Consulting Group.
His research in International Political Economy examines how institutions, governance, and global policy shape development outcomes. He has held doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the American Council of Learned Societies and holds a B.A. in Political Science from Northwestern University, an M.A. in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University SAIS, and both a master’s degree and Ph.D. in International Political Economy from Johns Hopkins University.
Katherine Ng is the Managing Director of the Sustainable Investing Research Initiative (SIRI) and specializes in bridging the gap between research, practice and policy. Over the past 20 years, Katherine has focused on systemic, global challenges such as climate change, transformational technologies, and inequality. She was the Head of Research at the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) for 10 years, where she built the innovative research programme that supported applied research, and drove further value, impact and dialogue by bringing independent evidence and insights to investment professionals. She grew and scaled up the Academic Network, the community of practice for investment practitioners and academics, to over 13,000 around the world, and spearheaded PhD and Research Fellowships at the PRI. As a programme director, she created and led funding initiatives for pioneering research that addresses current and future investment concerns.
Katherine is passionate about developing rich environments for interdisciplinary field-building in academia and navigating impact channels for communicating research insights. She has worked with leading academics, industry experts and educators.
As a consultant at ECGI (the European Corporate Governance Network), she supported the development of the Patrons Council, an initiative of leading investors, companies and academics that aims to guide European corporations through rapidly evolving global challenges, such as the transition to Net Zero, artificial intelligence, geopolitical shifts and regulatory developments. Katherine was previously the Research Manager at the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), managing projects and sponsorships on sustainability, corporate governance, financial reporting, taxation, auditing, and SMEs. She supported the key relationship with the Economic and Social Research Council.
Katherine began her career at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in the UK working on inequality and was a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster. She was part of a consortium of technology assessment bodies, science museums, academic institutions and public foundations from nine European Countries that investigated the social, economic, legal and ethical implications of brain science and made recommendations to national and European policymakers.
David Wood serves as the Director of the SIRI Legacy Archive flagship program. David studies the field of responsible investment, broadly construed. He holds a PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University. For 20 years he worked at the Initiative for Responsible Investment, where he ran projects on asset owner strategies, investment tactics across asset classes, public policy, place-based investing, economic inequality, and just transition. He is currently working on a history of social investment since the 1970s. He is Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs and the Brandmeyer Fellow for Impact and Sustainable Investing at Columbia SIPA, and adjunct professor at Harvard Kennedy School.
The Founding Director of the research initiative is Caroline Flammer, Professor of International and Public Affairs and of Climate. She is an expert in sustainable investing and the recipient of numerous prestigious awards. Among other roles, she is the President of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability, a global multi-disciplinary network of scholars fostering rigorous academic research on corporate sustainability. Professor Flammer also serves as the Chair of the Academic Advisory Committee of the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), the largest network of responsible investors to date.