We’re a multidisciplinary team with a shared passion for applying innovative approaches to complex societal challenges. With expertise in disciplines ranging from accountancy, policy and law through to urban design and organisational culture, we work in fluid teams to ensure compound learning.
Adam Purvis
Adam is based in Edinburgh, Scotland and has spent over a decade building mission led movements and networks. His primary role at Dm is holding the team and driving internal clarity.
Alberto Hernández Morales
Alberto’s work has focused on adapting and applying statistical methods, optimization, econometric and demographic techniques on regional development and policy evaluation for agricultural and natural resources. Alberto trained at Cornell University as a regional scientist and has worked characterizing social and economic systems in Mexico, the United States and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Aleksander Nowak
Aleksander Nowak is a strategic designer, researcher, data analyst and an architect, with expertise in data visualisation, spatial and system mappings. His main area of research within Dark Matter Labs and Urbanism and Societal Change Program (KADK, Cph) has been focusing on food systems, biodiversity & finance, and visual methods as participatory tools aiding societal and sustainable change.
Alex Anghel
Alex is an urban planner with a background in urban innovation, governance and program development. She is passionate about cultivating collaborative relationships while supporting cities in addressing complex challenges that drive systemic transformation. She is driven by her desire to bring more of our humanity and connection to nature to how we develop our cities and interact with each other, the systems and societies that impact our lives and the wellbeing of the planet. Before joining Dm and the NetZeroCities Mission, her work focused on working with Romanian cities to build their capacity for collaboration, innovation and holistic approaches to urban challenges.
Alexandra Bekker
Alex is a strategic designer and policy researcher and holds graduate degrees in international law, public policy and strategic design. Her work focuses on understanding, critiquing and reimagining the ways social, legal and economic systems exercise power. At Dark Matter Labs, she works on care infrastructures, deliberative democracy and new commons. Previously, Alex worked at the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and nonprofits in social innovation and human rights.
Alexandra Hansten
Alexandra is a newly graduated Architect from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, currently based in Copenhagen. At Dark Matter Labs, Alexandra works as a strategic designer with main focus on systems change in urban planning and the built environment for a more sustainable future.
Alicia Carvajal Rowan
Alicia is a strategic designer at Dark Matter Labs. An architect by training, after completing her postgraduate studies in Strategies and Technologies for Development (UPM & UCM), she has worked as a Sustainability Consultant in Madrid where she will be supporting Dark Matter’s work in the region.
Alizé De Buck
Alizé holds Dark Matter Labs financial and operational processes and structures. Having studied Politics & Sociology followed by an MSc in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, she has a love for questioning our underlying social assumptions and how these impact the way we interpret and understand our social and natural environments, something she is looking forward to apply in the financial and operational planning at Dark Matter Labs. She also recently started studying Cognitive Neuroscience part-time to explore the human mind and its interconnection with the different environments that shape it. Before joining Dark Matter Labs, Alizé was overseeing the operations and finances of a leading international Interior Design practice.
Anahat Kaur
Anahat is a visual communication and UI designer at Dark Matter Labs. She creates beautiful and effective design solutions for digital and print platforms. She holds a Master's degree in Design from The Basel School of Design in Switzerland and has worked for a diverse range of clients and companies across Europe and India. Her creative process is non-linear and informed by a cross-pollination of ideas from different topics and personal experiences. With years of experience in brand design and development, she creates powerful narratives and believes in using her skills to bring important issues to light.
Andrea Fernandes
Andrea graduated from the University of Southampton with a first class honours degree in French and Spanish. Andrea spent a year teaching English and studying cultural diversity in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Northern Africa. A Chartered Accountant and Fellow of the ICAEW, before joining Dm as Group Accountant she trained with Deloitte in audit and then worked for a variety of organisations including listed groups such as De La Rue Plc and Estée Lauder Companies. She most enjoyed working for a developer of affordable and sustainable homes for people in housing need. A financial reporting specialist, Andrea’s work focuses on using financial information to contribute to the growth and development of businesses.
Anette Olovborn
Anette is a Swedish multidisciplinary strategic designer using system thinking to work with social and environmental sustainability building a just society where we live within our planetary boundaries. She holds a MSc in International Business from Uppsala University complemented with environmental studies. At Dm, Anette works in the Cities Transitions team designing and implementing strategic processes and system demonstrators, supporting local governments and their partners to scale and speed up their efforts towards a climate-safe future. Anette has a special interest in changing culture, behaviours and moving from thinking to acting. Knowledge is not enough to change the world, we need action!
Anna Rosero
Anna has recently graduated from the University of Glasgow with an MA in modern languages and cultures and Business & Management. After working on projects as a researcher, she now primarily focuses on our people processes.
Annette Dhami
Annette has worked in mission-led organisational and network design for over a decade. This includes the crafting and implementation of organisational practices, processes and infrastructure across finance, teams, strategy, culture, programme design, workspace and more. Her focus is on how we build distributed, democratic, collaborative and beautiful ways of working together fit for the transitions ahead of us.
Annie Gallon
Annie is based in the UK, and calls Australia home. Her studies in Creative Direction inform her adventurous approach to people processes, whilst a decade in Melbourne’s thriving hospitality culture inspires how she welcomes and holds space for others. She is committed to the notion that every workplace has the potential to be a space for human flourishing, and loves nourishing environments where individuals feel safe and supported to contribute from their truest expression of self.
Arianna Smaron
Arianna is a Product and Visual designer working through digital and physical materials and perspectives. She has experience working with Private and Public Institutions, Art Museums, and Universities. At the same time, she is the Director of the educative program of an experimental school called La Scuola Open Source and part of various collective groups of artists and designers between Italy and Switzerland. Her design is defined through the combination of collaborative and non-linear methodologies and the definition of alternative visual narratives.
Calvin Po
Calvin Po is a strategic designer at Dark Matter Labs, where he co-leads the Radicle Civics Arc. His work explores institutional and governance systems as sites of design for a new grammar of civics based on agency, entangled relationships, and commoning. He has led projects with the Scottish Government’s Land Commission on land governance reform, the Taiwanese Government on decentralised web3 civic infrastructure, and is developing multi-actor governance approaches for river ecosystems, and in FreeHouse, a commons housing model based on ‘self-owning’ houses. At the Architectural Association School of Architecture, Calvin is a unit master of Diploma 9, ‘Universal Free Housing’, focusing on strategic, policy, and economic pathways for realising housing as a universal human right. Calvin is also a writer, publishing most regularly as an architecture critic for The Spectator magazine. He has also written for The Sunday Times Magazine, The Architectural Review, The Critic, e-Flux, and the Design Museum’s Future Observatory Journal.
Carolina Ribeiro
Carolina co-holds People and Finance Processes at Dark Matter Labs. With a background in social start-ups within FinTech, Food, and Participatory Arts, she loves juggling multiple projects and complexities at the same time, as the whole tends to unlock its parts. Carolina is passionate about local communities mobilising for social transitions and is dedicated to analysing #power dynamics and how it can be made truly accessible to all.
Chloe Treger
Chloe is research and analysis lead for Dark Matter. With degrees in Mathematics and Philosophy from Oxford University and an MSc in Urban Planning and City Design from the UCL Bartlett School of Planning, at Dark Matter Labs she has built up a wide-ranging experience in strategic projects, including innovative approaches to unlocking collective investment in urban civic assets; building narratives to explore regulatory futures and developing experimental pathways towards a technologically enabled next generation system of environmental governance.
Dan Hill
Dan works with residents, businesses, institutions, partners and collaborators on deliverable projects that make fairer, more resilient and friendlier communities and neighbourhoods. He is particularly passionate about genuinely affordable homes, keeping culture and mixed workspace in the city, thriving local centres, bringing nature into everyday life, and demonstrating change in the food system. He's a life-long Londoner.
David Brito
David is an urban planner and engineer that is passionate about making cities more liveable. In his work he has coordinated master planning and public space improvement projects with strong sustainability components, advised cities on the implementation of the New Urban Agenda, and worked on governance and funding models for innovation districts around the world. His work has included roles in several public sector agencies, including leading significant organisational change at one agency in New York. At Dark Matter Labs his work is focused on helping cities get to climate neutrality by 2030.
Doeun Kim
Doeun is in charge of accounting and finance at Dark Matter Labs in South Korea. Before joining Dm as a group accountant, she worked in deal advisory and audit at KPMG. She has a particular strength in financial analysis and business feasibility review in the deal advisory sector, and focuses on presenting directions for corporate growth and development based on these strengths.
Donghun Ohn
Donghun Ohn is a versatile professional with expertise in technology and cultural research. As a backend developer at Dark Matter Labs, he focuses on web technologies and system development. Donghun also has substantial experience in project management and cultural projects, having led various initiatives and contributed to ecological and cultural research. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from Hanyang University and studied Farsi at the International Center for Persian Studies (ICPS).
Emily Harris
Emily is a Chartered Accountant and a Fellow of the ICAEW. She also holds an MA in Regenerative Economics (Distinction) from Schumacher College and a BSc in Medical Sciences from Imperial College. She originally trained with Deloitte in London and was a manager in their Big Ticket Restructuring Team during the 2008 global financial crisis. For the last 11 years she has been running her own consultancy business which has taken her all over the world and included a number of international CFO positions. Emily is deeply interested in exploring the subjectivity of economic value creation and how the hierarchical interplay of 'use' Vs 'exchange' value manifests at the systemic level. She is committed to challenging the imagined order or our financial and economic systems, with a focus on the role that the accountancy profession might play in catalysing a transition to a more regenerative economy.
Emma Pfeiffer
Emma is a strategic designer at Dark Matter Labs, and an architect by training. She has a particular interest in the overlap between technological and cultural bases for reimagining material life-cycles. Following several years practicing architecture in New York City, between 2017 and 2022 Emma was based at MIT’s School of Architecture + Planning as a graduate student, researcher and instructor. More recently, Emma has taught at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.
Eugénie Cartron
Eugénie is a transition-oriented and mission-driven transdisciplinary designer. Trained in development economics, innovation management, public administration, systems thinking with a background in social innovation design and place-based design, her multifaceted journey converges to contribute to systems change with structural innovation. Combining complexity sense making with strategic visioning, in the past her practice and research have explored systems of poverty and deprivation, sustainable and inclusive urban futures or the development of a design-led framework for missions accelerating systems transitions.
Eunji Kang
Eunji is systems change and experimental products lead at Dark Matter Labs. She is currently based in Seoul Innovation Park, South Korea, on behalf of Dm and leads projects throughout Europe and Asia regions. Her practice uses visual communication and system thinking to identify complex societal challenges which capture collective intelligence in order to develop strategic pathways for the systems change.
Eunsoo Lee
Trained in cultural studies and urban theory, Eunsoo works at the intersection of humanities and technology, pondering ways to insert critical thought into technological practice and technology into humanities research. At Dark Matter Labs, she combines system thinking and critical analysis to curate narratives on societal challenges and possible interventions. Eunsoo has been involved in diverse research and teaching practices in the past, including an MPhil project on urban space and politics in Hong Kong and projects on digital intimacy, the future of work, and alternative education in the Asian region.
Fang-Jui Chang
Fang is a strategic designer at Dark Matter Labs who graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Service Design. She has worked in a design capacity at both the Taiwanese and British governments plus architecture and design consultancies. Along side these roles Fang has also run courses at democracy and public service innovation related events in Asia, Europe, and North America. The main body of her work focused on digital democracy, public service innovation, citizen engagement, collaborative policy and rule making.
Georgia Cameron
Georgia is a policy strategist and innovator at Dark Matter Labs. For over a decade, she has studied, researched and worked at the intersection of law, public policy, organisational strategy and community organisation in Aotearoa New Zealand. She previously practised as an urban planning and environment lawyer, before completing a Masters in Regenerative Economics (with Distinction) from Schumacher College, UK. At Dark Matter Labs, she works on the legal, regulatory, economic and social barriers to cities pursuing climate neutrality by 2030, and possible policy interventions to overcome these.
Gurden Batra
Gurden is a design technologist at Dark Matter Labs and combines different crafts like systems thinking, rapid prototyping, speculative and critical design, data justice and tech materiality together in his practice. He has a background in Computer Science and New Media Design. Gurden has played multi-disciplinary roles in various industries and different sized companies across US, Europe and India.
Györgyi Gálik
With a background in social design, behavioural science and environmental health, Gyorgyi has seventeen years of experience designing and delivering experimental research, innovation and technology design projects in the corporate, governmental and non-governmental sectors. She is the City Transitions Mission Co-Lead at Dark Matter Labs. Previously she worked as the Head of Strategic Partnerships at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and as a Lead Advisor of the Built Environment Team and as the interim Head of Social Innovation at Design Council. Gyorgyi also did a PhD in Innovation Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art in London (focusing on design, systems and climate change).
Hannah Stewart
Hannah does impact driven research, project management and making to explore what sustainable futures are possible or probable; using artefacts, public engagement, speculative design and action research. Hannah is passionate about design justice, regenerative economies and enabling systemic change – focused on design interventions that consider the ‘dark matter’ of people and culture as much as data and our made world.
Indy Johar
Indy is an architect by training and a maker by practice, he is a Senior Innovation Associate with the Young Foundation. He, amongst other organisations - co-founded Impact Hub Birmingham and Open Systems Lab, was a member of the RSA’s Inclusive Growth Commission and a good growth advisor to the Mayor of London. He is a explorative practitioner in the means of system change & the dark matter design of civic infrastructure finance, outcomes, and governance. Indy is a Director of 00 and Dark Matter Laboratories.
Ivana Stancic
Ivana is a Copenhagen based strategic design partner focused on systems change in urban planning and territorial transition. Her expertise is bridging strategic design and urban planning. To this role she brings more than 10 years research and design lead experience focused on sustainable urban development and future city strategies.
JP King
JP King is an interdisciplinary designer-educator-artist dedicated to creating experimental systems. He collaborates as a thought partner and knowledge translator, transforming complex ideas into compelling learning experiences. With an emphasis on visual communication, JP brings a diverse background, including printmaking, independent publishing, experimental film, storytelling, and coaching. Having quit a PhD, he teaches creative research, regenerative design, and discard culture across institutions.
Jack Minchella
Jack is strategic design lead, combining design-thinking, process management & systems strategy. An architect by training, Jack joined the Dark Matter team two years ago and leads on a wide range of strategic research and futures visualisation projects. He has been leading the creation of client-focussed outputs for workshops and senior external partners communication. Jack has extensive experience in social innovation, sustainable urban futures & policy design. As well as co-founding the think-tank In-Between Economies in Copenhagen.
Jason Brown
Based in Vancouver - Canada, Jason supports and coordinates the internal operations of Dark Matter Labs. A recent International Relations graduate, he is a young and ambitious self-starter who enjoys working in complex environments that require creative innovations, project leadership, and a human centered approach. Jason will be working on our institutional framework, the dark matter of dark matter, that facilitates how we show up as a planetary decentralised organisation.
Jayne Engle
Jayne has a background in urban and regional planning, policy, development, and governance; philanthropy innovation; and social research and participatory practice. She’s worked in diverse societal change contexts around the world and is now a mission co-holder at Dark Matter Labs. Jayne’s passionate about futures of cities, infrastructure, and institutions, and is committed to decolonizing systems and opening possibilities for what that can mean. She holds a PhD in Urban Planning, Policy & Design from McGill University where she’s an Adjunct Professor. She’s currently a Futures Fellow and co-authored the book Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities.
Joost Beunderman
Joost is an urbanist, writer and researcher. A director at Project00, he has led on a wide range of projects across the 00 network - from urban regeneration to employment space, from civic venturing to outcomes-focused finance for green infrastructure. He was educated at Utrecht University, University of California-Berkeley and the London School of Economics, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Jordan Brown
Jordan is currently responsible for governance and operations at Dm Canada. Having played in a touring band for the better part of a decade and spent a portion of his professional career working for a larger “corporate” firms, he has ventured to both sides of the spectrum to eventually find that he thrives somewhere in between. Jordan’s role at Dm builds on a wealth of largely self-taught knowledge accumulated through past experiences as an entrepreneur and within the Canadian non-profit sector creating governance, operation and finance systems from the ground up.
Jorn Verbeeck
With +20 years of sustainability expertise, in both public and private sector, at local and international level, and a journalist by training, Jorn loves embracing the complexity of the fast moving sustainability landscape. He has been working most of his career on urban related challenges by addressing cities as the crossroads of many societal actors and agendas, of many sectors, government and industry levels, and as the place where societal transitions first emerge, become tangible and show impacts, but also drive creativity, innovation, and new types of value. Though often working as a generalist, he has specialist experience in city diplomacy, designing sustainability strategies, multi-level governance, drafting local climate action and investment plans, circular strategies, ESG and CSRD assessments, delivering smart city approaches, facilitating transitions and learning multi-stakeholder communities.
Joshua Stehr
Joshua is a service & product designer, researcher and strategist for climate and social impact. He believes there's no sustainable transition without a just transition, so in supporting climate solutions, Joshua always looks to tackle inequality and implement social co-benefits simultaneously. He's worked in leadership & workforce development, food & agriculture system transformation, enabling circular economies, and is now supporting the Net Zero Cities team to evolve their learning program to accelerate the transition to climate neutrality.
Jungwon Kim
Jungwon, a strategy researcher on the TechEmbassy for the Future project, brings deep expertise in social innovation, social economy, and technology trends to her work. Skilled in policy and case research, she excels at understanding the unique advantages of diverse practices across European and Asian contexts. Jungwon builds robust stakeholder relationships and drives social movements through impactful strategies, emphasising collaboration and citizen engagement. With a background in technology and social sectors, she explores technology's societal impact and stakeholders' roles in benefiting the public and planet.
Leon Seefeld
Leon is leading Strategy to Operations at DmCS and coordinating across the project portfolio of the lab. Thematically, he is leading Bioregional Finance in DmCS. Previously, Leon has been working in social innovation and sustainability consulting for several years, among other things, leading his own consultancy firm for regenerative business model innovation and advising on the B Corp certification. He also worked on large-scale landscape restoration projects through weaving multi-stakeholder processes and social labs. Leon holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Business Management and a Master’s in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability.
Linnéa Rönquist
Linnéa is an architect and strategic designer, committed to drive the intangible infrastructuring in society. With experience from across the planet, she uses systems thinking to understand the root causes of emerging symptoms, such as mental ill-health or nutrition decline, to inform the re-coding of their dark matter.
Marcial Silva
Marcial’s work primary lies within the Net Zero Cities team supporting the activities of the Pilot Cities Programme, which aims to support cities in the implementation of ambitious and innovative projects to accelerate the transition to climate neutrality. Currently conducting research regarding how the justice is embedded in the context of NZC climate activities, and how can National Platforms be organised around this concept to be able to simultaneously accelerate transition efforts, while ensuring that the transition is just.
Maria Klint
Maria is a strategic designer and systems thinker on the Cities Transitions team at Dark Matter Labs. With a background in journalism, visual communication, and creative concept development, she designs, tests, and implements system demonstrators to accelerate large-scale systems change. Maria emphasises a collaborative approach, engaging stakeholders and citizens in the creative process. She has experience as a service designer in international development cooperation and circular economy.
Martin Lorenz
Martin is the Visual Conversation Design Lead at Dark Matter Labs. He holds a B.A. in Graphic and Typographic Design from the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK) in The Hague and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Design Research from the University of Barcelona. He is the co-founder of TwoPoints.Net and FlexibleVisualSystems.info and co-author of over 30 books about art and design. Martin has taught Flexible System Design at over a dozen Universities since 2003.
Meggan Collins
Trained as an Architect (ARB) and Urbanist at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Meggan works as a strategic designer at Dark Matter Labs with a strong focus on systemic shifts within urban environments to help build a more sustainable future. As an architect she designs in the threshold between research-based thinking and physical design as a means of dealing with today's societal challenges. Her personal research is focused on urban logistics from the perspective of infrastructure, emerging technologies, and landscapes.
Melissa Watkins
Melissa co-holds people processes and care for Dm Netherlands. Inspired by living systems theory, her focus is on designing, building and maintaining social and digital infrastructures that support connection, empowerment, and joy in work.
Metadel Mengestu
Metadel is a researcher, project manager and relationship-builder with a background in urban development, dedicated to creating sustainable and inclusive communities for urban inhabitants. She has experience working in public-private collaborations, focusing on urban transformation and the transition of hard-to-abate industries towards Net-Zero. Metadel believes in the transformative power of cities when citizens are actively engaged and have a voice in shaping their environments.
Michelle Zucker
Michelle brings conceptual, human-centred and first-hand practical experience of what it takes to reimagine governance and organisational forms that work for complex, large-scale social change initiatives. At Dark Matter Labs she co-leads the work on the many-to-many governance component of the Beyond the Rules Project.
Mike Duff
Mike is a regenerative systems designer, farmer, masterplanner, and former municipal councillor. He studied Philosophy & Social Psychology, City Design & Social Science, and Architecture & Sustainability. Mike works through the stages of urban design, from visioning, to implementation, and post-occupancy, around the world. He has led trans-disciplinary plans in the areas of urban renewal, [so-called] ‘development’, post-conflict recovery and more recently post-growth and pre-collapse scenarios. He has co-designed with local communities, marginalised groups, government, donors, the private sector, universities, academia and technologists. He co-directs La Bruguera de Púbol, an eco-retreat centre and Degrowth Living Lab, and teaches on the UAB’s MSc in Political Ecology, Degrowth & Ecological Justice, in Barcelona.
Nadim Choucair
Nadim is a curious strategist overseeing and orchestrating the experience of cities piloting original approaches to systems change as part of the Net Zero Cities team. He has 15 years of international facilitation & consulting experience in innovation enablement and deep knowledge of the 2030 Agenda. Nadim comes from Lebanon. He holds degrees in engineering, business, and international affairs. He also hosts the Curiosity That Matters Podcast.
Nasim Forootan
Nasim has worked in areas of people, culture and learning for over a decade, she holds an MA in Business and an MSc in International Management from Henley Business School. She is passionate about the intersectionality between people, leadership and the economy and believes in the power of personal and institutional transformation required to change the world. Nasim is also a Landecker Democracy and Humanity in Action Senior Fellow and engages in dialogues about new types of governance, enhancing diversity and embedding a new culture to shape the world for the better.
Nathalia Del Moral Fleury
Nathalia has 19 years of experience in business strategy and transformation. She holds two master’s degrees: the first in Business Management from the Sauder School of Business (UBC), and the second in Regenerative Economics from Schumacher College, UK. Her latest experience involved co-creating and deploying an impact investing fund across Canada, France, and Mexico. Prior to this, she served as the general manager of Yves Rocher for North America, managing 450 employees and overseeing end-to-end operations. Nathalia is an advocate for life-enabling economic principles. Examples of her involvement include co-creating the LEE Beyond investment program, and the bioregional currency design.
Nathan van Snyder
Nathan Van Snyder is an Operating Partner at Dark Matter Capital Systems, specialising in shaping next-generation capital markets. He co-creates investment vehicles and instruments that support sustainable urban transitions. His research interests include new capital structures, distributed job architectures, and team-based practical wisdom. Nathan has worked as an embedded strategist and organisation designer with AMEX, PepsiCo, GE, and J&J, as well as several distributedly governed SMEs.
Olaf Lewitz
As Trust Artist, Lover and Coach, Olaf helps us explore the dark matter of Dark Matter Labs: synthesising the structures and processing we need to do our work with as much freedom and creativity as possible, improving learning in the organisation and improving the flow of decisions, relationships and value creation.
Oliver Burgess
Oliver is a strategic designer - combining user experience design and systems thinking to work on systems level problems for sustainable urban futures. He has degrees in Engineering from the University of Cambridge and Product Design from the Royal College of Art. He has experience in physical product design and manufacturing engineering - specifically in the areas of a circular economy and zero carbon energy transition - as well as in clean-tech innovation and consulting.
Prateek Shankar
Prateek is a strategic designer and researcher, with training in architecture, graphic design, and cultural studies. At Dm, his work focuses on building planetary-scale civic and institutional capacities for a just transition, and discovering ways in which to sense-make, consolidate, and communicate complex systems of knowledge and action. He is also an early-career scholar with interests in public arts and humanities, cultural anthropology, sociolinguistics, and postcolonial studies, and is deeply committed to decoloniality as a category of epistemic disruption and social justice.
Raj Kalia
Raj is lead of Capital and Investments at Dark Matter Labs, and works across different sectors and cities to develop the financial instruments and mechanisms that are needed to build the novel infrastructures required for our cities in the 21st century. His work includes the valuation of analysis of natural capital. With 25+ years of international experience in senior capital markets and asset management roles at global banks, Raj managed over $8.0bn in structured finance securitisations and derivatives. He developed new markets and structured financing and indexed instruments for hedge fund strategies. At Deutsche Bank in New York and London, he helped build the bank's hedge fund financing / origination as European head of Structured Funds & Derivatives Group, in Frankfurt as head of FI Risk Advisory Group. At WestLB, he led the bank's balance sheet hedge fund investment group and CLO securitisations.
Rob de Jong
Rob is company co-holder for Dm Netherlands, responsible for its “hard” operations and its governance. He holds an MA In Modern Languages from Cambridge University, an MSc in Politics with Sociology from the University of London, and an MBA from the International Management Institute affiliated to the University of Geneva. He has previously worked in project, programme and service management in industry and local government. His real passion, however, is to enable humans to reach their fullest potential, working as a social entrepreneur in a disabling world, as a therapeutic counsellor, and as an educator. With Dm he can combine all his experiences within a unique role in a unique organisation, to build a strong, safe and caring platform that frees our humans to soar aloft in pursuit of their hopes, dreams and missions, and to catch them if ever they should fall.
Romy Snijders
Romy is a multidisciplinary designer using system thinking, design research and speculative design to work towards social and environmental sustainability. She holds a BSc Industrial Design from the Delft University of Technology and a MA/MSc Global Innovation Design from the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. A very holistic approach is applied in her work, because she strongly believes that everything is interconnected. Romy is passionate about challenging people’s understanding of the world to shape a positive future.
Rose Casey
Rose is a Virtual Assistant with over 8 years of PA experience. After completing her Masters in Film & Television studies at Birkbeck University, she worked in Television post-production and as a Personal Assistant to the Board of Directors at a London Design Agency, before setting up her Virtual Assistant business Stow VA. As a VA, Rose works with a number of different clients, juggling a variety of different workloads including diary & email management and travel bookings, amongst many other things. Rose has worked at Dark Matter Labs since 2021, assisting Indy and the team.
Sebastian Klemm
Sebastian holds TreesAI work in Germany and co-evolves its European and international pathways. He thrives on curating relationships, identifying synergistic potentials and fostering collaboration across domains. Sebastian seamlessly delves into project details while maintaining a strategic focus on overarching goals. Stemming from a background in architecture, the arts and sustainability movements, Sebastian retains a profound curiosity and appreciative inquiry for swiftly opening up new contexts to drive forward the shared vision of a regenerative fair future for all.
Shuyang Lin
Shuyang has spent that last decade rearchitecting channels for democracy and technology to support each other. She has a passion for building consensus on a large scale through opinions that bridges divisive groups. Her specialty is designing interactions and discovering elegant solutions through an iterative process of creating and testing prototypes that paints the future of digital democracy. At Dark Matter Labs, Shuyang spearheads AI research and crafts system demonstrators using democratic technologies.
Simon Höher
Simon is Systems Change Lead at Dark Matter Labs and passionate about creating just transformation processes with purpose-driven organisations. In his work he explores patterns of urban governance, public innovation, and digital transformation. Simon holds a background in sociology, political science, philosophy and economics with a specific focus on systems theory. He has been working on innovation and transformation processes with public, private and civic organisations for over a decade and is (occasional) visiting lecturer at the Faculty for Social Design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Sofia Valentini
Sofia Valentini holds a bachelor's degree in Architecture from the University of Bath and a master's degree in Metropolitan Analysis, Design, and Engineering from TU Delft and Wageningen University. Since 2022, she has been with Dark Matter Labs, contributing to multiple projects, most notably the Trees AI initiative. This initiative collaborates with municipalities to explore the organisational infrastructures needed to revalue nature as a critical part of urban infrastructure. Sofia developed the location-based scoring methodology and tool, revealing how specific Nature-based Solution typologies can increase urban areas' resilience to climate risks. Her expertise spans urban data analysis, sustainability, spatial strategies, and data visualisation, driven by her ambition to solve complex urbanism challenges through innovative spatial planning.
Tanya Chung-Tiam Fook
Tanya is deeply engaged in Indigenous, environmental, transdisciplinary and intercultural approaches to research, land relationships and regeneration, climate resilience, innovation, education, health and mental wellness, and placekeeping. She is passionate about reciprocal, collaborative and intergenerational pathways for learning and knowledge sharing, teaching, co-creation, healing, action, and partnerships in her roles within project and research leadership, academia, advising, mental wellness, and community engagement. Tanya’s Akawaio and mixed ancestry from Guyana and the Netherlands, combined with interdisciplinary and international experiences, enable her to bring intercultural and multifaceted perspectives and sensibilities to her work. She holds a PhD in Environmental Studies, postdoctoral fellowships in community climate adaptation and Indigenous health, an MA in International Development Studies, and a diploma in psychodynamic psychotherapy.
Ted Rau
Ted enjoys making, having and studying relationships - between humans in systems and organisations, and between concepts. His first love was linguistics - his PhD was on the interface between syntax and semantics and the question of how we talk about things we think are facts. A co-founder of Sociocracy For All, he has supported dozens of organisations in improving their internal governance. He wrote three books on self-management and working on a new book exploring the interface between governance and wisdom. He spends his days thinking about how foster more multi-partial, egalitarian systems that serve Life. Interrelatedness is a topic at home too - he lives with 70 neighbours in an intentional community, has five children, two partners, and has lived in two genders.
Thao Nguyen
Thao has been on a quest to practice the middle path, both as an individual's way of living and as a lens to explore the world, eventually finding herself committed to the higher purpose of learning to unite seemingly opposite forces. With a background in entrepreneurship, venture capital, and sustainability, this translates into her conviction of combining doing well (material growth) with doing good (spiritual growth), taking shape as a mission of reinventing markets and capitalism to serve life.
Theo Campbell
Theo is a social worker at heart but has always had an interest in technology and how it can be used for social change. He studied a Bachelor of social work at Flinders University in Adelaide Australia and has had a broad range of experience from co-founding a non profit, owning and running a bar and live music venue to working in local government. More recently he has been working in homelessness and harm reduction services in London and Paris as a social worker and data analyst. After learning Python for data analysis he discovered his interest for coding and began building websites for friends and personal projects.
Thomas Theodore
Thomas is a writer and musician from East London. He uses his experience in journalism and creative direction to provide support around research, storytelling and legibility. He has a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University and is slowly learning 3D animation.
Tom Beresford
Tom is a public sector researcher and innovation specialist. He has led a range of research, innovation and system change projects, working with providers of public services, charitable organisations, local authorities and international government agencies, across diverse contexts from Doncaster to Sub-Saharan Africa, London to Australia. Tom's work has tended towards place-based approaches, investing in the mobilisation of broad and deep coalitions across services, communities and industries.
Vlad Afanasiev
Vlad is a strategic designer and researcher, with a focus on urban and environmental governance, the use of forecasting technics, predictive simulation and modelling. Prior to joining Dark Matter he was part of The Terraforming research program and worked on region and nation-scale strategic projects across Ukraine related to territorial development and decentralised governance. He currently serves as a City & Technology program tutor at IAAC in Barcelona.
Zehra Zaidi
Zehra is mission holder for Planetary Civics. She is a qualified UK Solicitor and for the last 20 years, has built up considerable expertise in global governance, security, crisis, diplomacy, international development and humanitarian issues. Zehra has worked with international and multilateral organisations, as well as sovereign governments. Her background spans legal, strategy, policy, innovation and programme delivery. In her spare time, she volunteers to run social cohesion projects and enjoys reading and the arts.
We are a distributed global team collaborating at the intersection of continents, languages, time zones and cultural backgrounds. A critical part of our annual rhythm is for the full team to gather in-person to reconnect, reflect, learn and celebrate.