Alfred Watkins
Alfred Watkins is Founder and Chairman of the Global Solutions Summit (GSS) which promotes the large-scale deployment of financially sustainable, disruptive technological solutions to implement the SDGs in emerging markets. In 2021, the Nobel Foundation invited the GSS to host a panel entitled "From Results in the Lab to Results on the Ground" in connection with the 2021 Nobel Prize Summit, "Our Planet Our Future." In February 2022, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine invited him to serve as a member of an expert panel charged with identifying key research priorities and possible actionable steps needed to operationalize sustainable development at the global and local levels. In March 2017, UN Secretary General António Guterres appointed him to the Governing Council of the Technology Bank for the Least Developed Countries (LDCs).
Prior to founding the Global Solutions Summit, he worked for more than 23 years at the World Bank and served for more than six years as the World Bank’s Science and Technology Program Coordinator and head of the World Bank’s Science, Technology, and Innovation Global Expert Team. He has extensive on-the-ground experience leading science, technology, and innovation capacity building programs and projects in Rwanda, Ghana, Vietnam, Malaysia, and various countries in the Former Soviet Union including Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Latvia. Before joining the World Bank, he also served as a legislative assistant to then-Congressman Charles E. Schumer, a staff economist on the staff of the US Congress Joint Economic Committee, and an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin.