Biography

Joanna is currently building Arukah, decarbonising agriculture in Asia and Africa. She has strong conviction on the potential to lift billions out of poverty with verified data, new technology for secure payments and settlement, and financing for scalable access to sustainable, fast growing markets.

Joanna serves as an impact investment committee member for the United Nations Sanitation and Hygiene Fund, and advisor to Figure Technologies, an MUFG and Apollo-backed fintech company that has scaled $12Bn of regulated financial services on blockchain. She has previously served as an independent non-executive board director of Collectius AG, a partner to the World Bank IFC's $40Bn+ DARP program in SE Asia.

She was previously a private assets investor at Morgan Stanley, head of Asia and first dedicated executive hire for blockchain at Figure Technologies and Provenance Blockchain, and led a $700M global private equity portfolio at a listed financial services conglomerate. She has also been part of core teams building two new $2Bn traditional investment management businesses in Asia, including Morgan Stanley.

Joanna received her Bachelor's Summa cum Laude from Harvard, where she was elected one of four Phi Beta Kappa class marshals and was also Phi Beta Kappa (Junior 24), a John Harvard Scholar, and recipient of the Detur and Setchkarev Prizes. She has a Master's from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where she was a recipient of an A. Michael Spence Fellowship and conducted research at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and Stanford Center for International Development.

At Cambridge, Joanna read for an M.Phil in International Relations at Trinity College on a Gates Cambridge Fellowship and set up the Cambridge Society Singapore (now part of the Oxbridge Society) in conjunction with Cambridge's 800th Anniversary Capital Campaign. She is very grateful for the generosity of both the Gates Trust and Trinity College, and has served as regional coordinator for Hong Kong for the Gates Cambridge Alumni Association, and as a committee member for the Oxford and Cambridge Society of Hong Kong.