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The Executive Committee
Dr. Sandra Knight is Acting Chair and works in the Caribbean Regional Office of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where she manages a regional AIDS program. Sandra is a medical doctor who specialized in Public Health and epidemiology and lends expertise to the development of HIV case-based surveillance systems, Public Health Systems Strengthening and survey strategies of HIV infections in Most-at-risk populations. Her technical assistance is now focused on the twelve Caribbean countries with the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). In the past she has managed and implemented systems to strengthen Malaria, Dengue, H1N1, Hepatitis and Chronic non-communicable diseases programs. Sandra has lectured and presented papers and several international conferences and provides expert knowledge on continuing medical education for physicians as a member and past president of the Caribbean College of Family Physicians. She enjoys running marathons and is an expert Spanish speaker in addition to her native English. She received a Fulbright/ Humphrey fellowship to the Rollins School of Public Health/ Emory University and focused on the epidemiology of HIV/AIDS and cancers.
 Dr. Philip Rakita is Treasurer of FAST and Managing Director of Armour Associates, with offices in North Carolina and France. He is a senior executive with more than thirty years of international experience in the chemical and related industries. For eighteen years he held various management positions in fine and specialty chemicals and plastics for the Elf Aquitaine Group. He also served as CEO of Syrgis Performance Products, LLC, a privately held $50 million diversified group of specialty chemical companies. He has lead numerous successful projects in new business development, technology assessment and transfer, divestitures and acquisitions. He has worked and lived in France, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, and the United States and has extensive experience with multinational technical and cultural interfaces within organizations. Prior to his industrial career he was Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Minnesota, and Senior Fulbright Visiting Professor at Moscow State University (USSR).
 Mr. Torsten Kracht is our General Counsel and a Partner at Hunton & Williams, LLC, in their Washington, DC office. His practice is concentrated on the representation of clients involved with disputes in the United States and abroad. His litigation and arbitration experience includes: complex contract disputes; fraud and unfair competition claims; intellectual property disputes such as trade secrets, trademarks and copyright; securities arbitration; bankruptcy preference defense and the defense of multi-billion dollar restitution claims. He has particular expertise in the application of the United Nations Convention on the International Sale of Goods and in issues arising from international service of process and discovery. Previously, he was with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP and with Alston & Bird, LLP. He received a J.D. with International Law Honors and Distinction from Rutgers University in 1998, and a B.B.A. in Finance and Operations, cum laude, from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1993. He spent the 1995 - 1996 academic year studying law in Berlin, Germany, as a Fulbright Scholar.
Board of Directors
Dr. Virginia Carson is President of South Georgia College. Dr. Virginia Carson was Vice President for Academic Affairs at Georgia Highlands College (GHC) in Rome from 2001 until coming to South Georgia College in 2008. She served as Dean for Academic Services for Georgia Perimeter College’s (GPC) Clarkston campus from 2000 to 2001. During the 1999-2000 academic year, she was a Fellow of the American Council on Education (ACE) at Northern Virginia Community College. Dr. Carson previously chaired the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering, also on GPC’s Clarkston campus, where she was Professor of Mathematics. She presently represents Georgia on the Executive Council of the SACS Commission on Colleges and is chair of the Georgia SACS Trustees. She was appointed to the American Association of Community Colleges Commission on Academic, Student, and Community Development and was president of the National Association of Community College Teacher Education Programs in 2008-09. From 1998 to 2003, she was the Editor of The AMATYC Review, the journal of the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges. She is a Rotarian and has served in community organizations, connected with health, arts, criminal justice, and chambers of commerce. Dr. Carson holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Georgia and an M.Ed. and Ph.D. from Georgia State University, all in mathematics education. She was awarded a Fulbright for International Education in Germany in 2004.
Dr. Woodrow Clark, II is a qualitative economist and founder of Clark Strategic Partners. A long-time advocate for the environment and renewable energy, he is an internationally recognized author, lecturer and advisor on sustainable communities. In 2004, he founded Clark Strategic Partners (CSP), an environmental and renewable energy consulting firm using his political-economic expertise in order to guide, advice and implement public and private clients worldwide – specifically on sustainable smart green communities, ranging from colleges and universities to shopping malls, office buildings and film studios. Dr. Clark was Senior Advisor on Renewable Energy, Emerging Technologies, and Finance to California Governor Gray Davis from 2000-2003 and was the Manager of Strategic Planning for Technology Transfer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) for the University of California and U.S. Department of Energy, during the 1990s. Dr. Clark earned three masters’ degrees from different universities in Illinois and his Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley. He has written five books and 50+ peer-reviewed articles on global sustainable communities. From 1999-2000, he was a Visiting Professor of Science, Technology and Entrepreneurship at Aalborg University, Denmark, where he had been a Fulbright Fellow in 1994.
Mr. Kim David Eger is President & CEO of Eco Smart Shutters, a Georgia-based company that increases home energy efficiency, security and convenience with contemporary roller window shutters. He also serves as VP of Lawn and Garden Products for Garick, a subsidiary of Waste Management. Prior to these positions, he was at Scotts Miracle-Gro, selling their products to major retailers such as Home Depot and Lowes. He was the student from Christopher Newport University to earn a Fulbright scholarship. His 1992 Fulbright was to the University of Cologne, where he studied politicial science. After his Fulbright, he returned to the USA to earn a MA in international relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Kim is fluent in German and French and proficient in Italian.
 Dr. Christopher Kelley is an associate professor of law at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, where he teaches in the areas of economic and environmental regulation of agriculture in the Graduate Program in Agricultural and Food Law. He also teaches Administrative Law, International Commercial Arbitration, and a Rule of Law Colloquium in the J.D. program. Professor Kelley was a Fulbright Scholar in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in 2005 and in Chisinau, Moldova, in 2011. He continues to teach in Ukraine and Moldova through interactive digital video conferencing and will return to Moldova in May 2012 on an extension of his Fulbright Scholar grant. He has also been a lecturer at law schools in Belarus and Lithuania. He earned his BA from Louisiana State University and his JD from Howard University School of Law.
 Dr. Ramesh Ramakrishnan is the Director of Molecular Biology at Fluidigm Corporation, in South San Francisco, since 2005, and has spent an equal amount of his life in the USA and India. He has more than 15 years of R&D experience in commercial settings, and is passionate about science and the scientific process. He is currently involved in projects involving molecular diagnostics, with an emphasis on digital PCR, using microfluidic technology. He is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the China Medicinal Biotech Association and was the Invited Chair and Speaker at the BIT’s 4th Annual World Congress and Expo of Molecular Medicine in September 2011 in Beijing. He was also a Member of the Developmental Pathway Funding Scheme ( DPFS) Expert Group, Cambridge, UK. He earlier developed oligonucleotide expression and SNP microarrays for the pharmaceutical marketplace, when he worked with Motorola Life Sciences, as the Section Manager. As a Research Scientist at Vysis, Inc., he worked on developing multi-fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) probes to examine chromosomal aberrations. He loves West Coast Jazz and Chicago-style blues, originally hails from Bangalore (now Bengaluru) in south India, and attended Bishop Cotton Boys' School there. He was a Fulbright scholar from India in 1985-86 in Genetic Engineering, at Georgetown University, and completed his Ph.D.in 1990 with a degree from the University of Poona, India. He also has a Masters degree in Biochemistry from the Maharaja Sayaji Rao University of Baroda, and an M.Phil. in Zoology from the University of Poona, both in India.
Dr. Herma Williams was Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Fresno Pacific University from 2006 to 2010. Before going to California, she was associate provost at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts. During her career, she has been deeply committed to strengthening faculty scholarship and promoting student research. Williams has published one book and authored numerous articles and papers. She is in high demand as a speaker and is very active in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. She earned her B.A. and M.A. from Southern Illinois University and her Ph.D. from Iowa State University. Dr. Williams completed post-doctoral studies at Harvard University and was named a Kellogg Foundation and Ford Foundation fellow. As a Fulbright Scholar, she directed a program designed to strengthen academic excellence at the University of the Western Cape and the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Mr. Daniel Wolf is Chairman of The Xecura Group, a developer of counter-bomb robots for the Defense Department, and President of Terra Segura International, a nonprofit technology company pioneering market-oriented solutions for landmine removal. During his career, he has been a principal in several environmental and public health-oriented companies and organizations, and was the founding Director of the TransBorder Institute at the University of San Diego, where he taught political science. He has a law degree from Harvard University, and his Fulbright was in 1990-91 to conduct research in Nicaragua on institutionalization of democracy as part of graduate studies at the University of California, San Diego.
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