Passports to Progress Speaker Bios

Join ICRW March 7 for Rude Awakening: The complex epidemic of violence young women and girls face in India and beyond, a conversation on violence against women in non-conflict settings as an urgent human rights, gender equality and global development crisis, from Steubenville, Ohio to New Delhi, India. MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell will moderate a diverse panel of leading experts in the fields of gender violence, human rights and development in our continuing Passports to Progress discussion series.

The speakers:

Michael Elliott
Michael is the President and Chief Executive Officer of ONE. Prior to joining ONE, Michael Elliott served as editor of TIME International, Deputy Managing Editor of TIME Magazine, and was also a columnist on the global economy for Fortune magazine. Elliott was named editor of TIME International in April 2005 after spending a year as editor of TIME Asia. He joined TIME in May 2001 as an editor-at-large after a year spent as editor-in-chief of eCountries, an Internet based news and analysis service on global affairs. From 1995-2000 he was editor of Newsweek International, and from 1984-93 he was on the staff of The Economist, where he was political editor and Washington bureau chief and the founding author of both the "Bagehot" and "Lexington" columns.

Elliott was born and raised in the suburbs of Liverpool, England, and took two degrees at Oxford University. Prior to his career in journalism, he was a member of the Central Policy Review Staff in Britain's Cabinet Office, and before that spent eight years teaching in universities in the United States and United Kingdom, ending his academic career with a tenured position at the London School of Economics..

Christy Turlington Burns
Christy Turlington Burns is the founder of Every Mother Counts, a campaign to end preventable deaths caused by pregnancy and childbirth around the world. Every Mother Counts informs, engages, and mobilizes new audiences to take action to improve the health and well-being of girls and women worldwide. In 2010, Christy directed and produced "No Woman, No Cry", a documentary film about the global state of maternal health. Prior to her work as a global maternal health advocate, Christy focused her activism on smoking prevention and cessation after losing her father to lung cancer in 1997. She collaborated on several public health service campaigns and launched an award-winning website, SmokingIsUgly.com in 2002. Christy is also an avid yogi and merged her love of the practice and writing to author her first book, Living Yoga: Creating A Life Practice (Hyperion 2002). She also founded two successful lifestyle brands; Sundãri, an Ayurvedic skincare line and nuala, a yoga inspired apparel and accessories line.

Christy is an advisor to the Harvard Medical School Global Health Council and the Harvard School of Public Health Board of Dean's Advisors, Mother's Day Every Day and the White Ribbon Alliance. She has contributed writings to Marie Claire Magazine, Yoga Journal and Teen Vogue along with contributions to the Huffington Post, BlogHer, MomsRising, Canada's Globe and Mail and the UK's Evening Standard. She has guest corresponded on NBC's Today Show, which included reporting on the status of girl's education in Afghanistan and an interview with H.H. the Dalai Lama. Christy has a BA from NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Studies and is currently pursuing a MPH at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health in New York City, where she lives with her husband - filmmaker Edward Burns - and their two children.

Stella Mukasa
Stella Mukasa is director of gender, violence and rights at the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW). In this role, Mukasa oversees ICRW's research, policy analyses and programmatic work to develop solutions that address the underlying causes that lead to violence against women.

Mukasa is a lawyer with 20 years of experience in gender and human rights, spanning government, international development and academia. She began her law career in 1993 at the Ministry of Gender and Community Development in Uganda. As a legal officer, she advised political heads, conducted action research and engaged with policy makers for law reform including work on the 1995 constitution, which established some of the most progressive reforms for women in the region. During her time with the ministry, she also provided legal aid to women and participated in preparing Uganda's Joint first and second country status report on the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women.

In 1997, she joined Nordic Consulting Group (NCG) Uganda Ltd., affiliated with an international network of NCG companies in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, a private sector international development consulting firm. During her 10-year tenure, she advised governments, national and international nongovernmental organizations and development agencies on gender-responsive policy development, including Rwanda's Constitution and Uganda's Domestic Violence Act. Mukasa conducted program reviews and evaluations for governments, bi-lateral and multi-lateral donors including DFID, Danida, NORAD, SIDA and the United Nations. She also was a part-time lecturer on gender, law and human rights at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.

She has served as chair and vice chair on the boards of Akina Mama wa Afrika and ActionAid International Uganda, respectively.

Ravi Verma
Ravi Verma is regional director for the International Center for Research on Women's (ICRW) Asia Regional Office in New Delhi, India. In this role, Verma leads ICRW's local and regional efforts to conduct research, provide technical support, build capacity and partake in policy dialogue on an array of issues, including adolescent girls, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, gender-based violence, engaging men and boys and economic development.

Verma brings more than 25 years of programmatic research experience in reproductive health, gender mainstreaming and HIV in South Asia. Prior to joining ICRW in 2007, he was a program associate with Population Council/Horizons, where he collaborated with partners to design, implement and evaluate innovative operations research projects on gender and HIV. For more than 20 years, he was a professor in the department of population policies and programs at the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai, India. While there, Verma managed multi-faceted, collaborative intervention research projects and conducted national studies on reproductive health, fertility, family planning and sexual behaviors.

Verma holds a doctorate in social sciences from the Indian Institute of Technology and a master's in psychology from the University of Allahabad in India.

Andrea Mitchell
Andrea Mitchell, the veteran NBC Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, is also the host of MSNBC'S "Andrea Mitchell Reports," an hour of political news and interviews with top newsmakers that airs each day at 1pm ET on MSNBC. Mitchell covered the entire 2008 presidential campaign, from the kickoff in February 2007, broadcasting live from every major primary and caucus state and all the candidate debates for NBC News and MSNBC programs, including "Today," "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams," "Hardball," "Morning Joe" and "Meet the Press." She also covered Barack Obama's trip to Iraq, the Middle East and Europe during the presidential campaign. Mitchell currently covers foreign policy, intelligence and national security issues, including the diplomacy of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for all NBC News properties.

A native of New York, Mitchell received a B.A. degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania where she currently serves as a Trustee, a member of the Executive Committee and Chairman of the Annenberg School Advisory Board. She also serves on the board of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and is a member of the Gridiron Club.

Kavita N. Ramdas
Kavita N. Ramdas serves as the representative for the Ford Foundation’s office in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, where she oversees all of the foundation’s grantmaking in the region and a team of five Program Officers.  The regional work focuses on issues of equity, inclusion, economic fairness, freedom of expression, human rights, sexuality and reproductive health and rights, transparency and accountable governance and sustainable development. Kavita also nurtures and cultivates the foundation’s relationship with government, civil society and the private sector, placing an emphasis on leveraging these relationships to advance social justice. 

Kavita served as the founder and first Executive Director of ;the Program on Social Entrepreneurship (PSE) housed at the Centre for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The PSE brings global leaders in social innovation to share their expertise as practitioners with the academic community.

From 1996 to 2010 Kavita served as President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, which grew under her leadership to become the world’s largest public foundation for women’s rights.  During her tenure, the Global Fund’s assets increased to $21 million from $3 million, giving women in more than 170 countries access to financial capital that fueled innovation and change.

In addition, Kavita has broadly promoted women’s human rights, social justice philanthropy and international development through her membership and professional affiliations on the boards and advisory councils of a diverse array of organizations.  She currently Chairs the Global Agenda Council for India for the World Economic Forum and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Kavita has a master’s degree in public affairs with a focus on international development from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She holds a bachelor’s degree in politics and international relations from Mount Holyoke and her academic training from Delhi University. She is fluent in Hindi/Urdu, English and German and is conversant in Tamil, Spanish and French.