Board of Trustees
The Board of Trustees of Eurasia Partnership Foundation makes decisions of financial and strategic significance. The full board meets twice a year, once in May and again in November. Various committees of the board may meet more often, including the Executive Committee, the Audit, and Finance Committee, the Nominations Committee a Special Governance Task Force. The purpose of the latter is to review EPF’s policies and procedures and bylaws and to design a self-assessment mechanism for board members. The board is made up of a diverse set of Azerbaijani citizens and international figures from Europe and North America who bring a unique set of skills to the governance of EPF. This includes deep knowledge of the South Caucasus and civil society development and expertise in business, finance and law to ensure that the new Foundation is accountable and fiscally responsible.
Roy Southworth
Member of the Executive Committee (Chair)
Roy Southworth was the Country Manager for the World Bank Office in Tbilisi, Georgia. Mr. Southworth has had a long career in the Bank, joining in 1979 as an agricultural economist, and has worked throughout Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. He completed field assignments in Tanzania and Croatia before coming to Georgia in January 2004. Mr. Southworth graduated with High Honors from Washington State University with a BA in Economics. After a stint in Peace Corps in Ethiopia he attended Stanford University where he earned a Ph.D. from the Food Research Institute. Mr. Southworth has extensive experience in the development, implementation, and evaluation of investment operations in agriculture and rural development. Since 2001 he has been working on country operations and management of field offices in Europe and Central Asia Region.
Mary Sheehan
Member of the Executive Committee
Mrs. Sheehan brings more than 30 years of experience in the field of migration, including eight years with IOM in the Caucasus. From 1998-2002 she was the Chief of Mission in Yerevan, and from 1998-2002 she was the Regional Coordinator for the Caucasus based in Tbilisi. After a three year break from the region during which she opened the IOM office in Sri Lanka to provide emergency response and livelihood replacement for tsunami victims, Mrs. Sheehan returned to Tbilisi as Chief of Mission for the Georgia Office where she currently works. She has also served as Deputy Director of Volunteer Programs to the Governor of California on issues related to the influx of Southeast Asians after the Vietnam war; Director of the International Catholic Migration Commission training program in Sudan for Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees involved in a U.S. resettlement program; and nine years in a law office dealing with immigration. She began her career with the United Farm Workers Union in California and Arizona, advocating for the rights to unionize and strike, on political campaigns and with voter registration.
Andrew Coxshall
Andrew Coxshall is the Managing Partner for KPMG in the South Caucasus. Andrew has over 20 years of experience working in a number of different countries around the world including Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Uganda, Botswana, South Africa and the UK. He specializes in finance and audit issues in the infrastructure, government and healthcare sectors, with additional experience in communications, financial services, industrial markets, consumer markets, World Bank projects and mining. Mr. Coxshall holds a Masters of Business Administration from Heriot Watt University and is a Chartered Accountant.
Sabine Freizer
Sabine has been working for twenty years on women, governance, peace and security issues in Europe and Central Asia. Before becoming the Advisor for Governance, Peace, and Security at the UN Women Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia, she served from March 2014 – April 2015 as Senior Advisor to the Open Society Foundations’ Eurasia Program. Between 2009 and May 2013, she was the Europe Director at the International Crisis Group (ICG) supervising projects in the Western Balkans, Turkey, the South and North Caucasus (Russia). Previously she was the ICG South Caucasus Director, and before that, she was posted both to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Central Asia Liaison Office (Tashkent) and Mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina (Sarajevo). Sabine has a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics focussed on the role of women’s organizations in post-conflict peacebuilding in the Balkans (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and Central Asia (Tajikistan) supervised by Prof. Mary Kaldor. She has a master’s degree from the College of Europe (Bruges), which she earned as a Fulbright scholar after graduating from Dartmouth College (USA). She has been a Board Member the Eurasia Partnership Foundation and a Nonresident Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center and Program on Transatlantic Relations.
Hamlet Isakhanli
Hamlet Abdulla oglu Isayev was born March 1, 1948, in Kosali, near Gardabani, Georgia. He finished high school with a gold medal and then graduated in 1970 with honors from Azerbaijan State University’s School of Mechanics and Mathematics. In 1973, he defended his postgraduate dissertation “On Problems of Spectral Theory of Operator Pencils” and received his Ph.D. (Kandidat Nauk) degree in Physical-Mathematical Sciences from Lomonosov Moscow State University. From 1973 to 1983, he carried out research in mathematics in Moscow and Baku through the Moscow State University, the Steklov Institute of Mathematics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, then Azerbaijan State University. Later he also worked as a professor at the Azerbaijan State Institute of Oil and Chemistry (currently the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy) and chaired the department of mathematics in the Baku campus of the Leningrad Institute of Economics and Finance.