Gillian Marcelle, PhD is a senior leader in economic development and international business with a proven track record in attracting investment to emerging markets. She is currently the managing member of Resilience Capital Ventures LLC, an advisory firm in the blended finance space where she has been successful in capital raising, deal origination and the design of partnerships bringing together organizations across the capital continuum. She also provides strategic guidance to a portfolio of commercial start-ups and social ventures. In the Caribbean region, she assisted international investor MPC Renewable Energies GmbH with its capital raising efforts in renewable energy and energy efficiency and initiated a blended finance partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative. Her Sub-Saharan African activities include serving as a non- Executive Director of Tafari Capital Pty Ltd., an innovative fintech start-up in Joburg, South Africa. She has also established herself as a thought leader in the impact investment space, where her contributions and perspectives on diversity, inclusion, accountability and alignment with the SDGs are becoming influential.
She previously held staff positions with the International Finance Corporation, as well as, with JP Morgan Chase. She has also advised the United Nations on impact investment and innovation for the benefit of the global South. In the role of Executive Director of the UVI RTPark Corporation, a specialist economic development agency for the US Virgin Islands, she was successful in investment attraction and facilitation under challenging circumstances. Her accomplishments included doubling the number of technology and knowledge based investors in three years, while achieving financial sustainability and generating new social investment contributions for the local university.
She is a global citizen with wide networks and various communities of practice drawn from her personal and professional connections in Washington DC., London, Johannesburg and Trinidad & Tobago. Her educational background includes earning degrees in Economics from the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago, and the Kiel Institute of World Economics, Germany; an MBA with a specialization in high technology management from the George Washington University and a doctorate in innovation policy from the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit, SPRU, University of Sussex. For her scholarly work, she is an affiliated researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT, Cambridge MA, working on public policy issues relating to low-carbon transition.
