USA

MR. RANDY BERRY (Honorary Chair)

Randy William Berry is United States Ambassador to Nepal. Ambassador Berry is a career diplomat and member of the Senior Foreign Service, class of Minister-Counselor. He has served as a diplomat since 1993, and spent more than twenty years abroad on assignment for the U.S. State Department. Most recently, he served in Washington DC as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, a position he held since late 2016. He served as the first Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTI Persons in the United States Department of State, as well as a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.

MR. PAUL S. THOMAS (Board Chair)

Paul Thomas is the Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Embassy and the Board Chair of USEF. He has worked for the U.S. government as a Foreign Service Officer for 15 years, previously serving in Shanghai, Taipei, Seoul and Ulaanbaatar. Prior to this he worked as a stockbroker and was enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. Paul studied Political Science at the University of Colorado.

MS. MAGGIE DOYNE

Maggie Doyne is an American philanthropist who has built a children’s home, women’s center, and school in Surkhet, Nepal. Maggie created the BlinkNow Foundation to sustain, grow, and support Kopila Valley Children’s Home and School in Nepal, and to serve as a vehicle to share her ideas with young people, especially children in the U.S.
Maggie believes that in the blink of an eye, we can all make a difference. At age 19, Maggie used her life savings to build a home for orphaned children in war-ravaged Nepal. Today, she is mom to over 50 children. In 2010, she opened a school for the region’s most impoverished children. The school now serves 400 students and is rated top in the region. Maggie was named 2015 CNN Hero of the Year. She was honored by the Dalai Lama as an Unsung Hero of Compassion in 2014. Her work was championed by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof in a cover story for the New York Times Magazine. In 2012, Maggie shared her story at the Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy, and in 2013 she received the Forbes Award for Excellence in Education.

MR. JOEY F. ELLIS

Mr. Joey F. Ellis prefers many names such as Joey, Zhou-Yi, Yousef or José, for within each one lays a identity that he has developed in the culture where that name evolved from. He is a native of Auburn, New York.
He is an alumnus of both the Putney School and Alfred University and received his BFA in Beijing from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), becoming its first American graduate. In 2015, he graduated with an MSc in cultural heritage studies and conservation science at UCL Qatar, part of University College London’s inaugural class.
Joey’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout Asia and North America and is in numerous private collections. He has received several site-specific commissions, including from Greenpeace, Bank of America, Chevron, and Manulife, and his work has been featured in such publications as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek. He is a recipient of the 2010 TEDGlobal Fellowship and was selected by the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum as one of 40 under 40, a major exhibition highlighting the work of forty artists born since 1972.

MS. MEGHAN NALBO

Meghan W.T. Nalbo is The Asia Foundation’s country representative in Nepal. She brings over a decade of experience in governance and development in Asia, the majority of which is focused on Nepal’s political transition.Meghan was a Fulbright Fellow in Nepal in 2003-2004, where her research focused on indigenous political and cultural identities and rights with the backdrop of Nepal’s ten-year civil conflict.
Prior to joining the Foundation, Meghan was a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) where she most recently served as director of the Democracy and Governance office at USAID in Nepal. Her work at USAID spanned over nine years during which she held a variety of positions, including as USAID’s Asia regional coordinator for the Global, Regional Policy Team, where for two years she was the technical lead in the Center for Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance in Washington, DC and as a program officer in Bangladesh.

Nepal

MR. HARI P. BASHYAL

Hari Prasad Bashyal is a Chief Secretary of Gandaki Province.

MS. SHIWANI NEUPANE

Shiwani Neupane is a novelist whose two novels – Monica (2012) and Crossing Shadows (2015) – are of the best-selling novels written by a Nepali writer in English. Currently, Shiwani works as an entrepreneur and is leading a fin-tech startup in Nepal. A graduate of the Columbia Journalism School, Shiwani’s views, opinions and political analysis have regularly appeared on national and international news outlets. She is the current curator of the Global Shapers Kathmandu hub and a member of YPO Nepal.

MR. SHANKER RAJ PANDEY

Shanker Raj Pandey currently works as a development professional and is associated with a bilateral agency in Nepal. A graduate of Xavier University and Georgetown University, Pandey has over three decades of professional experience in both the public and private sectors, particularly in the areas of commerce & industries, health, energy and economic development. He is also affiliated with not-for-profit organizations working in education and mental health. He was a Humphrey Fellow at American University in 1997-98.

DR. ARCHANA SHRESTHA

Archana Shrestha is a Senior Divisional Meteorologistin Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, Kathmandu. She recently led a field observation, research and report preparation taskson the devastating tornado that lashed Bara and Parsa districts. She has also been involved in number of projects on regional climate modeling and climate change adaptation in Nepal. She received her Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received a Fulbright Foreign Student Fellowship.

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