Mateja Dermastia, President and Chief Executive Officer, brings extensive public and private sector leadership experience to Anteja.

As the founding head of the organization, sheleads Anteja’s focus on the importance of including sustainability provisions in all aspects of economic growth policy. Under Mateja’s leadership, Anteja has reached beyond Slovenian borders and has become an International consulting firms with offices in Ljubljana, Stuttgart, Tbilisi and Boston, with assignments in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Mateja works with governmental, business and community leaders to design approaches for industrial transformation based on sustainable growth models, related value chains for increased investments and jobs. She has served in high-level government capacities including State Undersecretary and a member of the Ministry Cabinet for Innovation in the Slovenian government.

As an advisor and consultant, Mateja has worked for international financial institutions/organizations, multilateral and bilateral donors, national and regional government entities, business associations, and private companies in some of 30 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, US and Latin America. As CEO of the center of excellence PoliMaT, and, as leader of Poly4EmI network, she provided guidance and leadership on industrial transformation towards bio-based industry. Mateja serves as a member of the EU State representative groups for Bio Based Industry and various other high-level EU expert groups.

She also served as a member of the Advisory Panel for Innovation in Agriculture in Africa, sponsored by the Gates Foundation. Originally trained in biochemistry, Mateja has a Masters in Economic Sciences and received post-Masters executive education at the Harvard Kennedy School in the area of science and technology for development.

She has written extensively on value chains, clusters, competitiveness, and innovation.

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Nana Adeishvili, Vice President, Central Asia, CEO Anteja Inno Tbilisi, leads Anteja’s work in Organization in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

She is a specialist in private sector development with an emphasis on enterprise restructuring, value chain analyses, competitiveness and sector analyses in transitional and less developed economies

Nana has significant experience as a corporate executive.  During the past years, Nana has expanded her focus to include collaborative regional economic development strategies and policies to promote sustainable business growth. She has worked to set the policy context to create new business opportunities through multi-stakeholder engagement to bring people together in a productive way.

For more than 20 years Nana has served as an established consultant for the World Bank and other international organizations (EU, UNDP, and DFID) in the field of private sector analysis, project and implementation design, development of regional competitiveness strategies and business climate analysis.

Her assignments have included work in Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Ethiopia, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and Macedonia.

She has a Ph.D. Economics and Demography from Moscow State University and obtained her M.I.A. in Economic Management Policy from Columbia University, New York.

She obtained a PMBA from IEDC-Bled School of Management

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Jon Goriup Dermastia joined Anteja as junior trainee to support 3S-4AlpCluster project and became a full time digital project manager at Anteja ECG in 2020.

With a strong leadership potential and forward-looking digital thinking Jon helps Anteja’s leadership in managing organizational change and in developing digital and blockchain solutions. Jon is passionate for the future of blockchain technologies and solutions which are only now becoming possible due to technology advancements in the last couple of years.

Jon finished his studies in Business Administration at ESADE Business school in Barcelona, one of the leading business schools in Europe, and at the Kenan Flagler school of business at the University of North Carolina.

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Mateja Novak is a project manager of EU co-financed projects with more than 8 years of working experience in public and private sectors. She started her career as an Associate expert of Eco Fund and later on she set up her own consultancy business aimed at providing support to SMEs in obtaining the funds for innovative and development projects. Her ambitious spirit led her to enrol in Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs, which enabled her to spend few months working with senior project managers in one of the Italian consultancy company, where she took part in Erasmus+ Sport projects.

Her expertise is market research, project reporting, drafting studies and project proposals related to EU and national programmes (SME Instrument, Horizon 2020, CEF Transport). She worked at GoOpti International as a project manager, where she successfully managed the SME Instrument (phase 2) project and obtained more than 1 million € of co-funding. Recently she worked at Petrol d.d., Ljubljana as a project controller of multimillion e-mobility projects.

She is eager to work within multinational teams and enjoys being involved in multicultural environments. Her focus are international projects aimed at leveraging the sustainable practices. Mateja finished her masters’ studies with Dean’s honours at the Faculty of Economics Ljubljana, where she obtained a Master’s Degree in Business Administration, majoring in Tourism.

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Martina holds a University degree in Spanish and Italian language and literature from the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. For the past 6 years she worked in The Netherlands, where she supported Project Managers in the fields of Environmental Sustainability, Circular Economy and Conservation. In light of present climate issues, Martina is passionate and committed to contribute to environmental protection and fair societal transition to climate-neutral economy.

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Fernando Quezada, Advisor, Strategy and Sustainability, guides teams on technology-based innovation and public policy.Fernando is based in Boston and is Executive Director of the Biotechnology Center of Excellence Corp., a US-based private, non-profit organization providing technical assistance for program development.

His consulting assignments have included program evaluation for the Ministry of the Economy of Chile, the US-Mexico Foundation for Science, the Puerto Rico Science, Technology and Research Trust, and the US-Israel Science and Technology Foundation.

He also coordinated a study for the German Agency GIZ on The Knowledge Economy in Central America. He was appointed to Chile’s National Commission for the Development of Biotechnology by the President of Chile, and served as consultant to the UN Industrial Development Organization, the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean and the Board on Science and Technology in International Development of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the area of regional development policy and areas of innovation, he has served as an advisor to the International Association of Science Parks and to S&T parks in Europe and U.S. He received the 2015 Foreign Minister’s Commendation from the Foreign Minister of Japan for his work in the area of science and technology cooperation.

Fernando Quezada studied at UCLA and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has taught at the Federal University of Para and University of São Paulo, both in Brazil, the Monterrey Institute of Technology in Mexico, and Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Maja Berden Zrimec has earned her MSc and PhD at the Department of Biology of Biotechnical faculty of the University of Ljubljana.

Her main expertise is plant physiology, ecotoxicology, environmental health, wastewater treatment with algae and biomass production.

She co-founded and lead the algal & ecotoxicology laboratory at the Institute of Physical Biology, where she was the Head of scientific research and development.

She cooperated in building the international educational platform on Harnessing the Power of Biopolymers for Human Well-Being (including Biopolymer Workshops, Talent Camps, Training Courses, Global Biopolymer Network) in the Centre of Excellence for Polymer Materials and Technologies. She closely cooperated as a Subject Matter Expert and content provider in the American Chemical Society educational programme Sci-MindTM.

She has certificates on the Ecosystem Services: a Method for Sustainable Development by Coursera (University of Geneva), and Tropic101x: Tropical coastal ecosystems from The University of Queensland through EdX. She has co-authored 24 scientific papers.

Currently, she works at AlgEn and Anteja as a project leader, developer and senior researcher in several EU (h2020 Water2Return, LIFE AlgaeCan, several Interregs) and national projects.

Michael McManus, the international trade and development expert, spent over a decade working in the European Parliament. In this role, he worked as an expert on international trade and its role in the economic, political, environmental, and security profiles of partner countries. Michael’s work has particularly focused on the use of statistical and economic diagnostic tests to measure the impact of trade and development policy in developing countries. This has included the role of economic underdevelopment in resource-rich countries in the Global South.

He completed his Master of Science Degree whilst working at the European Parliament, being awarded a Merit Award for the quality of his analysis of the role of resource rent overdependency in Arab Spring rebellions.

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Aljaž Urbanc is an Anteja ECG intern focusing on sustainable development of value chains

Alexis Mallet is an Anteja ECG intern focusing on sustainable development of value chains