Young Professionals Network

She studied in Peru, Finland, and Sweden. She has recently finished her PhD in Australia. Clarissa is also passionate about social development, her vision is to empower Latin students and promote the social and economic development of Latin-American countries through education, science, and technology. Hence, she is the founder and director of the nonprofit Ekpapalek, which offers opportunity for professional development for students from impoverished backgrounds. She is also an advocate for gender equality, she is a United Nations Global Champion for women economic empowerment of the platform Empower women/UN Women.

In his role at the State Department, Schmitt serves as the team lead for European energy security and diplomacy engagement in the Northern European region, drawing on his hard science and technology background, performed on all four continents of the Atlantic rim, to develop and implement novel policy strategies for the advancement of joint U.S. and EU shared priorities at the intersection of energy and security geopolitics, directly advising senior administration officials from the State Department and the White House National Security Council, among others across the U.S. Government.

Previously, Schmitt served as a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow while pursuing masters and doctoral-level research in physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on experimental cosmology research. While at Penn, Benjamin’s research primarily concentrated on the development of novel millimeter-wavelength imaging technologies framed through the design and integration of ACTPol, a polarization-sensitive receiver upgrade for the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, located at over 5,190 meters in elevation on an extinct stratovolcano in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where Schmitt led field deployment operations over a several year period. 

Benjamin’s ACTPol research was also supported by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program award. Schmitt has also previously served as a U.S. Fulbright Research Fellow to the Max-Planck-Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, and before that served as an X-Ray Diagnostics Researcher focusing on inertial confinement fusion research at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Laboratory of Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Astronomy, as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern German Languages and Cultures, and Mathematics.

After having participated in Enpact’s mentorship program, a German nonprofit organization with the aim of strengthening economic relations between young entrepreneurs from the start-up scenes of the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, she is engaged with the organization as the country coordinator of Morocco. Tahri is also part of the startupyourlife initiative, a group of young Moroccan entrepreneurs who aim to enhance the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Morocco.

Before joining IBM, Merel worked as an assistant to Vice-president Neelie Kroes, the former commissioner for the digital agenda at the European Commission. Before this she also worked for six months in the Political & Trade department at the European Union delegation to Israel. She holds a Bachelor of Liberal Arts and Sciences from the University College of Utrecht, and a master’s degree in European Studies from Kings College London.