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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Darja Osvald, Chief of Administration makes Anteja businesses and projects function efficiently across Europe.

Darja brings a background in finance with more than 29 years of experience in private-sector development and helps clusters with cross-regional collaboration and digital transformation of value chains and networks.

Before joining Anteja, she led various business innovation initiatives for smart service development and led processes for establishing the Innovation platform at the Post of Slovenia.

Through strategic partnerships with research institutions, she designed two successful project applications supported by the Horizon 2020 Programe for research and innovation in the field of cognitive logistics and smart infrastructure development for open education resources. She was part of the initiating team for strategic partnerships and innovation projects in the field of digitization of postal services and innovative services for smart cities, communities, logistics, e-mobility.

Previously, in her capacity as State Undersecretary in the Slovenian government, she led program initiatives in regional agencies, technology parks and related business support centres.

She coordinated the European Charter for Small Enterprises in Slovenia, designing reforms for improvement in the business environment through vouchers and other financial instruments for SMEs. This has involved expert consultancy work relating to the conception of local and regional development strategies, scope definition and execution of various types of strategic and operational business transformation initiatives.

She is well experienced in the development of Public-Private Partnerships for sustainable local development.

Darja Osvald has a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) degree in Economics and International Trade obtained at the University of Maribor.

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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.

Jadranka Jezersek Turnes, Scientific Engagement and Community Building, helps clients organize advocacy, communications practice and community building by embracing scientific and industry engagement, road mapping, and high-level events.

As a member of an international network of science communicators, Jadranka and awarded the title of Science Communicator of the year 2017 by the Slovenian Science Foundation.

Jadranka is a certifiedmentor/coach for young entrepreneurs in the framework of the Central European Entrepreneurship Development Network.  She has been involved in marketing and knowledge management throughout her professional career, advising clients in the areas of global brands, public relations and corporate communication management.

Her professional focus in recent years has been communications management in innovative environments.  Jadranka was a Head of the Program of the Slovenian Innovation Forum (2010 – 2013) and led the innovation and knowledge transfer office of the Centre of Excellence PoliMaT, in Akron, Ohio, the USA (2012-2013).

She was engaged in coordination and organization of practical training programs for Slovenian start-ups in the USA,   including meeting with USA investors (2012).

In 2014 Jadranka coordinated two business missions of the American Chamber of Commerce in Slovenia to Pennsylvania (2014) and Colorado (2015).

In collaboration with the Slovenian Research Agency, she conceived and organized science journalism workshops with the science editors of The Guardian (2014), BBC (2015), New York Times (2016) and MIT Knight Science Journalism Program (2017) for the purpose of empowering science reporting.

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Jon Goriup Dermastia, New Ventures and Blockchain, joined Anteja as junior trainee to support 3S-4AlpCluster project.

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 for phytopharma added network. 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.

His continuing studies are in Business Administration at ESADE Business school in Barcelona, one of the leading business schools in Europe.

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.