Cristina Guevara is a public policy programs associate at Americas Society/Council of the Americas, where she covers the Andean Region, the Women’s Hemispheric Network initiative, and her home country, Panama. Cristina has conducted extensive research on corruption, gender equality, public-private partnerships, and sustainable development across the Americas.

Jackie Berardo is a former venture capitalist and current UX researcher at Instagram. It was her passion for financial empowerment and the creator economy that led her to NFTs and Web3. Jackie joined Surge to identify and mitigate barriers to mass adoption.

As a software engineer and programming teacher, Juliette Chevalier works as a developer advocate at Aragon, helping engineers build the future of work through DAOs. She met co-founder Denise Schaefer online through a Web3 online course. The two have been building Surge remotely ever since.

Yamaguchi Naotaka is Resident Representative of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in Guatemala.

Prior to joining JICA he served as a researcher at Global Environmental Forum in Japan and devoted in Project World Heritage. He covered all the UNESCO World Heritage sites in South America and India for conservation.

In JICA he worked at several departments in Tokyo headquarters. He has experiences as a resident official in Bolivia and Dominican Republic.

Work Experience

September 2021- Ambassador, Assistant Minister,
Director-General, Latin America and Caribbean Affairs Bureau
Ministry of Foreign Affairs

August 2017-September 2021 Executive Director Communications & Engagement
Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games

June 2015- August 2017 Director, European Policy Division
European Affairs Bureau, Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Jonathan C. Hamilton is Global Co-Chair of International Arbitration with leading global law firm Paul Hastings, based as a partner in the firm’s Washington, D.C. office.

Marisa Lago is the Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade. She was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden and sworn in on Dec. 28, 2021, to lead the federal government’s efforts to assist American businesses entering or expanding into international markets, enforce fair trade policies, promote travel and tourism to the United States and U.S. products and services overseas, provide in-depth trade analyses, develop strategies that will shape the future of international trade, and engage in commercial diplomacy across the globe.

Manuel Felipe Gutiérrez Torres is the President of the Colombian National Infrastructure Agency, and is a lawyer and economist from Universidad de Los Andes, where he also completed his master's degree in law; He has extensive experience in the public and private sectors, and expert in infrastructure and public-private partnership contracts.

He has performed as a professor of public law at Los Andes, Javeriana and La Sabana Universities, and director of the Public Procurement Research Group at Universidad de Los Andes.

Julián Ventura Valero is a Mexican diplomat, who served as Deputy Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Mexico from December 2018 to January 2020, G-20 Sherpa, and Chair of the Matías Romero Institute (Diplomatic Academy).

He joined the Mexican Foreign Service in 1990 and was appointed to the rank of Career Ambassador in 2006.