Facilitators and mentors

Birdie Salva is the general manager and co-founder of Curiosity, a design research consultancy that provides local insight through ethnographic approaches to help organizations design new products and services. In the past 7 years, Birdie has been involved in over 100 research projects for companies like Ayala Healthcare Corporation, Globe Telecom, Sun Life Financial, Meralco, The Fred Hollows Foundation, and the National Anti-Poverty Commission. Prior to starting Curiosity, Birdie was a user researcher at the industrial design start-up Inovent, and a brand manager in L'Oreal Philippines. He also taught as a lecturer on the elective "Managing Business Innovations" in the Ateneo de Manila University.

Joane is an Associate Professor of the Faculty of Management and Development Studies, University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU). She obtained her Bachelor of Science in Development Communication from the University of the Philippines Los Baños. She also earned her Master of Management Major in Development Management and Doctor of Philosophy Major in Development Communication from the same niversity. Dr. Serrano serves as the current Director of the UPOU Information Office. She also serves as the Editor of the Journal of Management and Development Studies and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Nature studies. Her experiences in teaching, research, and public service have equipped her with competence that make her an accomplished educator in various areas such as Open and Distance eLearning, Environmental Advocacy, Development Communication, and Educational Technology and other related fields. As part of her commitment to lifelong learning and sustainability research, Dr. Serrano continues to find ways of discovering innovations that improve education and research practices in the Philippines.

Klara is a psychologist, a dancer, an improviser. She is a founder member of CogNovo Foundation, a network of researchers working to advance Cognitive Innovation, an umbrella-term for creativity, innovation, learning, development, and adaptation. Her research focuses on situated, embodied cognition, promoting an interdisciplinary dialogue between scientific inquiries and creative practices. In particular, she uses structures of dance improvisation as a laboratory to observe in details embodied, yet shared and social creative process. Simultaneously, in her dance practice, she explored group improvisation as a performance strategy that highlights the unpredictable, highly adaptive and open-ended character of creativity. Recently, she joined RURITAGE project, in which she inquiries into situated, environmental aspects of cognition, social interactions and creative resilience of the communities located within varied natural/cultural landscapes.

Sol is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at the UP Open University. She was trained as a molecular biologist and biochemist who has published papers in national and international journals in plant biochemistry. An online science educator who teaches biology and chemistry teachers in basic education, she is an advocate of science education and indigenous knowledge for local and national development, and is currently writing her PhD thesis on the institutionalisation of Philippine Traditional Medicine (particularly Hilot) and sits as a member of the National Certification Committee for Hilot of the Department of Health-PITAHC.

"Niva" is is a marine biologist by training, an environment and development management specialist by practice and a social and human rights activist by vocation. She has more than 30 years of extensive experience in the multidisciplinary dynamics of community based management of natural resources including protected area establishment and management, coastal resource management, biodiversity management and in recent years, climate justice advocacy. She has served as consultant to various ODA funded projects with government agencies such as the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Department of Agriculture and the National Economic and Development Authority. She has also undertaken project preparation and evaluation work in Cambodia on sustainable livelihood development in the Mekong Sub Region for Action Aid and Oxfam Great Britain. She served as Third Country Expert to the Department of Fisheries of the Royal Kingdom of Cambodia in the development of appropriate fisheries co-management models, policies and approaches in 2003. She belongs to the select pool of reviewers of the Environmental Management Bureau (DENR) tasked with reviewing the Environmental Impact Assessment procedural and substantive compliance to the Philippine EIS system of environmentally critical industries and projects prior to the issuance of Environmental Compliance Certificates. So far, she has participated and completed the review of more than 20 projects nationwide. She serves as the chairperson of the board of ESCR-Asia, vice chairperson of the board of the Center for Empowerment and Resource Development (CERD), an NGO engaged in developing learning communities and sustainable coastal resource management and also active in the board of Tbak, an organization of Martial Law activists.

Pieter is an artist who uses advanced computational methods to create interactive artworks and performances. He gets his kicks out of collaborations, building and hacking stuff. Furthermore he has been bringing live visuals at a wide range of music festivals for over a decade. As one of SEAD’s founders, Pieter worked on an extensive range of Biomodd and Seeker projects in the USA and Europe. He spearheads the development of tools and platforms to support the global SEAD community. Most of his artistic and scientific activities are data-driven and deal with exploring digital lifeforms. Pieter is a lector at Art and Technology, at the Erasmus Hogeschool in Brussels and is currently living in Manila as Content Expert for UPOU.

Rita Ramos is an Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Management and Development Studies in the UP Open University. She finished her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from San Juan De Dios College. She obtained her Master of Arts in Nursing from the University of the Philippines Manila. Her research interests include Item Response Theory; Classical Test Theory; tool validation; motivation in distance education; achievement goals in education; self-regulation; clinical learning environment; dignified dying; and aggression. She is taking her PhD in Educational Psychology, major in Quantitative Methods in De La Salle University Manila, currently on dissertation writing.

Sue is the director of Wotelsat UK Lld Company (UK), which focuses primarily on satellite telecommunications activities and engineering-related scientific and technical consulting activities. Prior to her position at Wotelsat, Sue was Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Plymouth (UK) where she worked for 24 years. She was the director of CogNovo, an innovative doctoral programme funded by the EU Marie-Skłodowska Curie initiative and the University of Plymouth, to foster research training in the emerging field of Cognitive Innovation. Between 2014 and 2017, CogNovo offered transdisciplinary training that combined scientific studies of the neural correlates and mechanisms of creativity, with investigations into the role of creativity in human cognition, and their application in sustainable technological and social innovation.