European Young Leaders (#EYL40)

Soulaima is a speaker, consultant, author, blogger and an active board member in several public and private companies. It is her vision to change the world to a better more tolerant place through trade and business, and relations between countries and people. She spends part of her time and own money travelling around the world to do “impact journeys”. The past year she has been to Mexico, UAE, India, Jordan, Myanmar and China to work with local entrepreneurs, young global leaders, local schools, change makers and NGOs. Since 2007, she has worked as an advisor and speaker for more than 1000 clients. She has received several prestigious awards among others the Rising Star, the Talent 100 price 2004, PowerWomen, 20 Greatest Nordic Thinkers. Soulaima holds an E-MBA from the Copenhagen Business School.

In his current position as special advisor to the UK government under Boris Johnson, Luke works on fostering greater unity amongst the different countries of the United Kingdom. He was previously a member of parliament for the Conservative Party and served as the parliamentary private secretary to the Cabinet Office. Before entering politics, Luke worked in the private sector as an accountant for over a decade. Upon returning from five years abroad in China, Thailand and the United States, he campaigned for Scotland to remain in the United Kingdom. He also notably took on the role of finance director for Stronger In, the official Remain campaign during the Brexit referendum. 

As one of the most charismatic conductors of his generation, Dionysis made his debut at the age of twenty-one with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra. Since then, he has been awarded with several honours and was the first Greek to receive a Conducting Fellowship at the Aspen Music Festival. By the age of twenty, Dionysis had won European Young Musician of the Year Prize and had been featured on a Greek postage stamp. This young virtuoso has performed in some of the world’s most prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Cité de la Musique in Paris and the Barbican Centre in London and has worked with orchestras such as the Vienna Symphony and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, among others.

A Bulgarian social entrepreneur, Iva is the Founder and CEO of Humans in the Loop, which provides remote online employment to conflict-affected and displaced people, such as refugees, in the field of dataset annotation and model validation for computer vision and artificial intelligence. The award-winning social enterprise has provided work and training opportunities for over 500 people in Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Yemen, and maintains a dedicated programme to promote the economic inclusion of women. Humans in the Loop is part of MIT SOLVE’s ‘Good Jobs and Inclusive Entrepreneurship’ cohort of social enterprises and has also been awarded by the Global Innovators programme of the Dubai 2020 World Expo. Iva is passionate about promoting the role of humans in AI pipelines and the mitigation of bias in AI systems through diverse and representative data. She is also part of Forbes 30 under 30 in her country.

Benjamin Haddad is a prominent leader in European and international affairs, known for his expertise in diplomacy, politics and transatlantic relations. Currently serving as France’s Minister Delegate for European Affairs, Haddad is a vocal advocate for Europe’s global role. He previously served in the National Assembly as a member of the Foreign and European Affairs committees, and chaired the French-Ukrainian parliamentary friendship group. As former director of the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., he was an advocate for a stronger and more responsible Europe in world affairs. A skilled communicator, Haddad regularly contributes to major media outlets and public debates, underscoring his commitment to informed, forward-thinking leadership that bridges diverse perspectives for a more united and resilient world.

Prior to his current position of Global Head Consulting at Forvis Mazars Group, Jakob Haesler was the CEO and Co-Founder of Tinyclues SAS, a Paris-based software startup with the objective of industrialising datamining on Big Data with the help of advanced machine learning algorithms in a Cloud Computing environment. Previously, he was a partner and consultant at McKinsey & Company in Germany and France, where he worked on topics ranging from Banking to Public Sector Reform to Global Public Health issues, notably the creation and distribution of child HIV treatments. Haesler is also a founding partner of the ‘Cercle du Leadership’.

In addition to her role as a biochemist, Suvi is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sulapac, a company that develops innovative and fully biodegradable wood-based packaging. Named one of Helsinki’s hottest start-ups in 2018 by WIRED magazine, Sulapac products offer a viable alternative to the plastic packaging most commonly used for food, commodities and cosmetics. A former researcher at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, Suvi holds a PhD in biomaterials and is committed to halting the build-up of microplastics in the world. In 2017, Sulapac was awarded Europe’s first founder’s prize for the circular economy, going on to win both the Green Alley Award and the Sustainable Beauty Award in Paris that same year.

Jasminko Halilović is a leading conflict researcher from Bosnia and Herzegovina, who compiled short recollections from people who experienced the Bosnian War as children into “War Childhood”. The award-winning book has now been translated into six languages. He went on to establish the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, the world’s only museum exclusively dedicated to childhoods affected by armed conflict. Awarded the Council of Europe Museum Prize, the museum aims to raise awareness of the specific experience through archived materials, from drawings to personal belongings, and motivate adults to consider the consequences of war. Halilović has developed the museum from a small local initiative into an international non-profit with offices in Sarajevo, Kyiv, The Hague and New York City. A serial entrepreneur since his teenage years, Halilović has co-founded several companies. His passion for peacebuilding and entrepreneurship has earned him spots as a keynote speaker and guest lecturer at universities and conferences in over 15 countries.

Ben is a British writer and technologist, specialising in the effects of the internet and the ubiquitous digital network on the worldʼs political, cultural and social spheres. He enjoys an international career as a speaker, explaining complex technological and sociological topics to lay audiences and as a high-level advisor on these matters to governments and business. He is currently a Robert Schuman fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, an Innovator in Residence at the Centre for Creative and Social Technologies at Goldsmiths, University of London, a non-resident fellow of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institute in Washington D.C., a member of the European Commission High Level Group on Media Freedom and contributing editor of the UK edition of WIRED magazine. He is the accredited inventor of the word “Podcast”, published in The Guardian (2004).

Audrey is a Belgian businesswoman with a wealth of experience in advising corporate, government and philanthropic clients on a range of development and social impact topics. As an Associate Partner at Dalberg Advisors, she works with clients to improve education, employment and health outcomes worldwide through the development, implementation and impact evaluation of inclusive development strategies. Audrey currently serves as the Chair of the Board of Directors at bpost, leading the Belgian postal operator’s transition from a mail to parcel network. She is the Chair of the Board at Be education, an organisation that supports the improvement of education in Belgium. Audrey is also the Co-Founder and former operational director of Spectralys Biotech, a start-up that provides a unique protein analysis technology for the biopharmaceutical industry. She was previously the president of Groupe Vendredi, a think tank focused on societal issues in Belgium, and head of philanthropy at Telos Impact, a venture philanthropy firm.

Oisin became an entrepreneur at the age of 18, when he set up the Clearwater Group, a real estate development company in Budapest while a student at Trinity College, Dublin. Oisin founded Handybook in May 2012 with Umang Dua to address the difficulty of finding a reliable handyman that Oisin experienced in Budapest. Oisin also established MiCandidate, which became the leading source for online election information across Europe in 2009, and set up the Undergraduate Awards, which has become the world’s largest pan-discipline awards programme. Supported by Google, Microsoft and others, it is a global annual awards event hosted in Dublin with the award distributed each year by the President of Ireland. In 2019 Oisin became Chief Product Officer for ANGI Homeservices which operates HomeAdvisor, Angie’s List and other brands.

Currently serving as Ambassador to Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, Jens Ole Bach Hansen is a Danish diplomat focused on the changing international architecture, climate, the United Nations’ sustainable development goals and the role of the UN in addressing global challenges. He is also Denmark’s Permanent Representative to ECOWAS. Previously, Hansen was Counsellor at the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at the Permanent Mission of Denmark to the UN in New York. With 15 years’ experience in international relations and international negotiations, and having worked and studied in Italy, the United States, France, Palestine, Israel, Denmark and Jordan, he notably defines himself as “a dedicated internationalist and multilateralist”.

Julia is a sculptor producing a variety of independent work as well as numerous commissioned pieces. These include urn designs for Bestattung Wien (Vienna funeral service) and a life-size graveyard angel made of bronze for a Viennese crypt. Julia regularly collaborates with artists and gallery owners, creating exhibits showing video and photographic visualisations of her sculptures as well as a glass version of her sculpture “Who killed Smiley?”. She also works with a German jewellery-maker, turning her ideas into pieces of jewellery. In 2014, she was named one of the most important figurative artists worldwide, a recognition which led two of her sculptures to be included in the art book “500 Figures in Clay” (Lark Crafts/New York).

An award-winning journalist and political commentator, Mehdi is the host of The Mehdi Hasan Show on Peacock and MSNBC, and the presenter of the Head to Head, The Café and UpFront shows on Al Jazeera English. Prior to this, he hosted The Intercept’s Deconstructed podcast and was the political editor at Huffington Post UK. At the start of his career, Mehdi worked as a researcher and producer for several programmes on London Weekend Television (LWT), BBC One, Sky and Channel 4. He has been named among the 100 most influential Britons on Twitter and was included in the annual global list of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world. Mehdi is also the recipient of the British Muslim Award’s Services to Media award. In addition to having authored a book on debt and the 2008 financial crisis, Mehdi is the co-author of a biography of the former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband.

Marek Hattas is the Mayor of his hometown of Nitra. He sat in Slovakia’s Parliament from 2020 to 2023. Hattas’ victory in Nitra’s 2018 municipal election was a major upset. With little political experience and a largely self-funded campaign, the youthful activist defeated a longstanding incumbent from the nationalist Direction (Smer) party. Hattas built a groundswell of support in the city of 78,000 inhabitants: he organised anti-racism marches as a teenager; founded the popular Hidepark cultural space; and – as a keen cyclist – was a high-profile campaigner for green mobility. After a first term committed to community development, Hattas was re-elected in 2022.