• Board of Trustees

Paul_Achleitner

Dr. Paul Achleitner has been Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Bank AG for ten years from May 2012 to May 2022. He was born in Linz, Austria, in 1956.

He was educated at the University of St. Gallen (HSG) and Harvard Business School (HBS), holds a PhD from HSG and an honorary professorship from WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management. After four years at Bain & Co. in Boston he joined Goldman Sachs in 1988 where he worked in New York, London and Frankfurt in various capacities, since 1994 as a partner of the firm. Between 2000 and 2012 Paul Achleitner was CFO of Allianz in Munich.

Besides chairing the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Bank Paul Achleitner is a member of the Supervisory Board of Bayer as well as of the Shareholders’ Committee of Henkel. He is Chairman of the Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft Board of Trustees, the Board of Trustees of the HSG Foundation (University of St. Gallen), as well as Co-Chairman of the Hong Kong / Europe Business Council. Paul Achleitner is a member of the European Financial Services Round Table, the International Advisory Board of Allianz, the International Advisory Council of Bocconi University, the Board of Trustees of the Brookings Institution, the European Advisory Board of the Harvard Business School and the Advisory Council of the Munich Security Conference.

Prof. Dr. Martin R. Stuchtey is a Professor for Resource Strategy and Management at Innsbruck University.He is also founder and managing partner of The Landbanking Group Gmbh, a technology company that documents, values, securitises and thus makes investable natural capital. He is also the founder of SYSTEMIQ, a consultancy and investment firm in the fields of sustainable land use, circular industrial systems and renewable energy systems. Martin Stuchtey is Deputy Chairman of the Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft Board of Trustees.

Prior to founding SYSTEMIQ, Martin Stuchtey worked at McKinsey for 20 years, most recently as Director of the Center for Business and Environment. In 2006, he co-founded McKinsey's Sustainability Practice, working with numerous corporate, government and social sector clients on the challenges of climate change, water scarcity, ocean degradation and resource depletion. He initiated the 2030 Water Resources Group and has been a long-time strategic advisor to the World Economic Forum. Over the last ten years, Martin Stuchtey has been leading many efforts to accelerate the transition towards circular industrial systems.

Martin Stuchtey is the author of numerous articles, radio and television contributions such as "Towards the Circular Economy", "Growth Within", "Breaking the Plastic Wave", "Plastic Positive Chemicals", or "A System Change Compass". He is also the author of the book "A Good Disruption - Redefining Growth in the Twenty-first Century".

He served as a company commander in the German Alpine forces and worked as geologist in Southern Africa. He holds a BSc. Hons.-degree in economic geology/mineralogy from Rhodes University (South Africa), a master’s degree in business economics from WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management (Germany), an MBA from Lancaster University (UK), and a PhD in regional economics from the Technical University of Dresden.

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Joana_Breidenbach

Dr. Joana Breidenbach is author and co-founder of the donation platform betterplace.org. She studied ethnology, art history and Eastern European history at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich and graduated with a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology. Her academic career included stints at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the University College London.

In cooperation with fellow scientists Dr. Breidenbach has conducted research on a wide range of topics and wrote articles and books such as “Tanz der Kulturen”. Her research interests are cultural globalisation, migration and tourism.

The idea for betterplace.org emerged during a five-month world trip with her family. Since then, betterplace.org has become the largest online platform for social projects. In 2010, Dr. Breidenbach founded the betterplace.lab, a think and do tank that examines the interfaces between digital media and public welfare. Since summer 2015, she has withdrawn from the operating business of gut.org gAG and is active on the supervisory board.

Dr. Breidenbach is also involved at the ReDI School for Digital Integration which gives refugees access to IT competences and to the Berlin start-up scene. She is further involved as mini-investor in various mission-driven start-ups.

Prof. Dr. Andreas Dombret is a Global Senior Advisor at Oliver Wyman, a leading global consulting firm.

From 2010 to 2018, he was a member of the executive board of the Deutsche Bundesbank. While at the German Central Bank he held responsibility for Banking and Financial Supervision, Financial Stability, Markets, Statistics, Economic Education, University of Applied Sciences and Technical Central Bank Cooperation, Risk Control and Bundesbank's Representative Offices abroad. From 2014 to 2018 Andreas Dombret represented Germany in the Supervisory Board of the European Central Bank. He teaches at Columbia University in New York and at European Business School in Wiesbaden and sits on the Board of Trustees of the Österreichische Bankwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft in Vienna, Atlantik-Brücke, Westfälische Wilhelms University in Münster, the European School for Management and Technology in Berlin as well as Schirn Kunsthalle and Städel Museum in Frankfurt.

He started his career at Deutsche Bank Head Office from 1987 to 1991 and continued at JPMorgan in Frankfurt and London as managing director from 1999 to 2002. From 2002 to 2005, Andreas Dombret served as co-head of Rothschild Germany before joining the Bank of America as vice chairman for Europe between 2005 and 2009. He studied business management at the Westfälische Wilhelms University, Münster and received a Ph.D. from Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen.

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Klaus_Hommels

Dr. Klaus Hommels is one of Europe’s leading business angels and venture capitalists. He is also a prominent voice for the European Tech Ecosystem with the aim of strengthening Europe’s position in times of digital transformation.

Klaus has repeatedly been recognized as one of Europe’s top venture capital investors, having invested in many major players in the tech sector. He was an early investor in companies such as Skype, Xing, King, Facebook, Spotify and Airbnb. He founded Lakestar in 2012 after running his own venture capital fund, Hommels Holding.

As a passionate advocate of the European Tech Ecosystem, Klaus frequently interacts with politicians, regulators and corporates to bring European technology and capital flows on the global agenda. He is a founding member of think-tank initiatives such as the Internet Economy Foundation and the European Center for Digital Competitiveness in Berlin.

Klaus Hommels is part of Henkel’s digital board and sponsors an associate professorship for Venture Capital at Humboldt University Berlin, as well as Ashoka to support those entrepreneurs that seek innovations for the good of society.

Klaus started his career at Bertelsmann, before joining AOL Germany in 1995 as a board member. He was also a venture partner of Benchmark Capital Europe. He earned his PhD in finance from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.

Prof. Dr. Charles A. Kupchan is Professor of International Affairs in the School of Foreign Service and Government Department at Georgetown University, and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2014 to 2017, Kupchan served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European Affairs on the National Security Council in the Obama White House. He was also Director for European Affairs on the National Security Council during the first Clinton administration.

His most recent books are “No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn” (2012), and “How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace” (2010). In 2020, he will publish “Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World”.

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Jean_Louis_Missika

From 2014 to 2020, Dr. Jean-Louis Missika was a Paris councilor and Deputy Mayor of Paris, in charge of urban planning, architecture, Greater Paris projects, economic development and attractiveness. From 2008 to 2014 he served as Deputy Mayor of Paris in charge of innovation, research and higher education.

Jean-Louis Missika is a media sociologist. He holds a PhD in management, a degree in philosophy and is graduated of Sciences Po Paris, where he has also taught media sociology. He was head of the Information and Dissemination Service of the Prime Minister Michel Rocard and director of BVA, before setting up a consulting firm. He also served as Vice President of Iliad.

Jean-Louis Missika has written several books, notably on media and politics: “La Folle du logis. Television in Democratic Societies”, with Dominique Wolton (Gallimard, 1983), “La Fin de la television” (Le Seuil/La République des idées, 2006), “Parler pour gagner, sémiotique des discours de la campagne présidentielle de 2007”, with Denis Bertrand and Alexandre Dézé (Presses de Sciences Po, 2007) and “Des robots dans la Ville”, with Pierre Musseau (Taillandier Essais 2018).

Miriam Wohlfarth is managing director and co-founder of Ratepay GmbH and is responsible for marketing and sales. With almost 20 years of experience in online payment and sales, she was most recently Country Manager Germany of the internationally operating payment service provider Ogone (Ingenico Payment Services). Before that, she was instrumental in building up the electronic payment business for the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and its payment services subsidiary Bibit in Germany.

Next to her role as managing director, Miriam Wohlfahrt is co-founder of Payment and Banking, the leading fintech blog in Germany, which organizes the Payment Exchange and Banking Exchange events. She is also a member of the Fintech Council of the Federal Ministry of Finance, the Bitkom Presidium, the MRC European Advisory Board, Mentor at Accelerator Axel Springer Plug and Play and Board Member at FinCompare Plattform.

In her free time, Wohlfarth dedicates herself to her favourite topics, digital education and start-up support. As a partner in the Startup Teens initiative and as a mentor of the Hacker School, she brings students into contact with future-oriented subjects such as programming. With her membership in the executive committee of the German Startup Association, she supports measures and actions for the development of the German startup ecosystem.

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Christiane_Woopen

Prof. Dr. Christiane Woopen has been Heinrich Hertz Professor of Life Ethics at the University of Bonn and founding director of the Center for Life Ethics with the House for Young Thought since October 2021. Previously, she was Professor of Ethics and Theory of Medicine at the University of Cologne, where she was the founding and managing director of the interfaculty Cologne Center for Ethics, Rights, Economics, and Social Sciences of Health(ceres).

Within the framework of national and international research projects, she and her team investigate ethical aspects of the life-changing dynamics of technologisation, economisation, ecologisation and globalisation of individual and social life.


She is also involved in the field of policy advice, including as chair of the German Ethics Council (2012-2016), as president of the Global Summit of National Ethics Councils (2014-2016), as a member of the UNESCO International Bioethics Committee until 2017, as co-spokesperson of the German government's Data Ethics Commission from 2018 - 2019, and as chair of the European Ethics Council (EGE) from 2017 to 2021. Christiane Woopen is a recipient of the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class and a member of several academies of sciences (NRW, BBAW, Academia Europaea).