Our Team
Co-founders
Dr. Kikiope Oluwarore
Head of Field Operations
Kiki is a veterinarian with 10 years of interrelated experiences in providing animal health services, animal welfare programming and nonprofit management.
Isaac Esparza
Head of Logistics
Isaac hails from the for-profit world, and brings years of experience in operations, management and logistics.
Lukas Jasiunas, PhD
Head of Research
Lukas is an engineer and researcher by trade and an active member of the effective animal advocacy movement.
Staff
Fiona Rowles
Research Intern
Fiona completed a master’s degree in natural resources & environment at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and served in the Peace Corps from 2017 to 2019 as an environment volunteer in Malawi.
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João Bosco de Lucena
Research Intern
João comes from Brazil, currently studying Economics at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is passionate about animal rights, meditation, and learning more about rationality.
Advisors
Karolina is co-founder and Director of Programs at Charity Entrepreneurship. There, she ensures delivery of key programs across multiple departments. She also trains and mentors Incubation Program participants in starting high-impact charities.
Karolina also serves as a Fund Manager at Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund and a board member and advisor for various EA nonprofits and think tanks, such as Fish Welfare Initiative, WANBAM, and Legal Priorities Project.
Before Charity Entrepreneurship, she co-founded an organization to improve the impact of nonprofits and social enterprises; worked on measurement and evaluation; and was a researcher for IBM and the Jagiellonian University (JU). At the age of 22, she became a university teaching fellow, lecturing at JU’s Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science.
Karolina Sarek
Cynthia Schuck-Paim
Cynthia has a Ph.D. and post-doctoral degree in zoology (animal behavior and cognition) from Oxford University, and extensive experience in data analysis and global health research, specially in the areas of metrics and the effectiveness of interventions.
She has developed several research projects for research institutions in the UK, USA and Brazil, and authored over 70 scientific publications (list here), book chapters, and education materials. Additionally, she has taught data analysis and experimental design for researchers in the biomedical field for several years. She also has an MSc degree in Ecology and has done extensive work on the impacts of animal agriculture. She is currently the scientific director of the Welfare Footprint Project.
Pablo Andres Albarrán Lama
Pablo Andres Albarrán Lama is the Founder and President of Ecoterra, a farm in Paine, Santiago, Chile that produces eggs. It is the first farm in Chile to join the Certified Humane® program. Launched in 2011, Ecoterra had a goal of changing industrialized agricultural systems in Chile to systems more in harmony with animals and the environment. Pablo studied agricultural engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica in Santiago, Chile, before finishing his degree at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. His thesis was on free-range systems and was the foundation for the animal welfare and environmental farm model he would eventually set up under the Ecoterra brand.
After college, Albarrán returned to Chile, leased nine acres of land and 2,000 laying hens, and launched Ecoterra (“Eco” representing “ecology” and “terra” representing “earth”) with the goal of raising free-range hens as close to nature as possible. As the first egg producer in Chile to promote the welfare of laying hens, Albarrán wanted his animal welfare system to mean something to consumers. Under their additional fair trade certification, they also work in alliance with local farms that produce eggs under the same Ecoterra system and same Certified Humane standards to help local farmers make a more sustainable living.
Dr. Michael J. Toscano
Dr. Toscano obtained a Ph.D. from Purdue University in the United States in 2006 where they sought to develop a multidiscipline means to assess hunger in swine. From there he continued to the University of Bristol in the UK where he investigated disease states within swine and poultry and their relationship to physiological and behavioral phenotypes. Most recently, Dr. Toscano's research focuses on bone fractures in laying hens, a topic he began at the University of Bristol and continue at his current post as Group Leader (Senior Scientist) of the Research Center for Proper Housing: Poultry and Rabbits (ZTHZ). In general, his research is of an applied nature and seeks to bring the benefits of analysis and understanding gained in the laboratory to on-farm settings in order for improvements in animal welfare to be made in an objective manner.
