Chris Talamo, President
Chris Talamo is a professional educator passionate about global issues education and Model United Nations. He was a participant throughout high school and college and served as the Director-General of NHSMUN 2011, the world’s largest high school MUN conference. After college, he founded the nonprofit Education in Motion (EIM), which was dedicated to helping high schools start their own local, affordable Model UN conferences. Through EIM, Chris was able to create new MUN opportunities for thousands of students in the United States and abroad.
Outside of MUN, he also worked as a management consultant for corporate and education clients before eventually becoming a debate teacher in Harlem, NY, and starting the school’s very first debate team. Now, Chris is the Executive Director of the International Model United Nations Association (IMUNA). In this role, he is not only responsible for managing the world’s largest high school MUN conference, NHSMUN, he also helps schools around the world start their own conferences. Most recently, Chris has been developing myDais, a website that makes planning and registering for conferences easy for everyone.
Lisa Martin, Executive Director
Lisa is the Founder and Executive Director of MUN Impact and Online Model United Nations. She has spent the past two decades building and developing MUN programs, leadership events and summits and online programs for middle and high school students.
From 2014-2018 she was the Director of THIMUN Qatar, quadrupling the size of the program and introducing Arabic MUN and an international Middle School conference to the program. Prior to her time in Doha she worked in Malaysia, United Arab Emirates and Jordan. She is a global leader in the Model United Nations community, at the forefront of numerous global initiatives and programs with the aim of fostering greater diversity and inclusiveness in MUN. She is also the Founding advisory member of Hope for Education and Leadership in Afghanistan.
Adib Mattar
Adib Mattar is the Head of Private Equity for Mubadala Capital. Since joining Mubadala in 2008, Mattar has played a lead role in several key transactions across multiple industries at Mubadala, including the acquisition of EMI’s music publishing business in partnership with Sony. Prior to joining Mubadala, Mattar worked as a member of Credit Suisse’s Energy investment banking team in New York. Mattar graduated from the College of William & Mary with a BA in International Relations and he received an MBA and Masters of Foreign Service from Georgetown University. Mattar is also a fellow of the Aspen Institute
Natabara Rollosson
Natabara is a creative producer who coordinates high-level United Nations events that have taken place on five different continents. He recently produced logistics for the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Action Summit in New York. He has worked with multiple UN Agencies, including UNDP, UNEP, UNFCCC, UNICEF, UNFPA, UNOPS and SEFA. In addition to events, he has coordinated logistics for the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Framework, which included heads of state, Nobel Laureates and experts from around the world to develop the blueprint for the Sustainable Development Goals.
In 2015 he co-founded “Comics Uniting Nations” in partnership with UNICEF, illustrating the Sustainable Development Goals through comics to make them understandable and fun. He is an avid runner and travels the world creating short films for the Peace Run.
Darby Sinclair
Darby Sinclair has been an active MUN director for over 15 years in North America, Europe and Asia. She directs the TASMUN conference at Taipei American School in Taipei, Taiwan. Darby holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution and Peace Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. As a teacher of IB Global Politics and Asian History she has a passion for finding ways to increase the pedagogical connections with MUN.
Nicola Dignum
Nicola Dignum started the MUN Club at Colegio Ayalde in Bilbao, Spain in 2014 and has been the MUN Director of MUN Bilbao since 2016. The SDGs form an integral part of the course content in Nicola’s subject and some of her students were responsible for starting the first MUN Impact Partner Club in Europe in 2018. Nicola graduated from the University of Hertfordshire with a BSc degree in Engineering Management and holds a Master’s Degree in Innovative Manufacturing from Cranfield University.
Andrew Newman
Andrew Newman has been an active MUN director for 20+ years at John Burroughs School in St. Louis, Missouri. For almost as many years he served on the THIMUN Advisory Board and coordinated the MUNITY conference newspaper in The Hague. After spending his undergraduate years at Northwestern and Vanderbilt Universities, he received his Master’s in Educations in Gender Studies from Washington University. Andrew spent the 2019-2020 academic year on a year-long teaching sabbatical, committed to the work of MUN Impact, visiting over a dozen conferences all over the world, encouraging students to lift their words off the page of their resolutions and to put them into action.
During this time he personally focused on SDG 3,4,13 and 14, He’d be happy to share the stories of his adventure sailing through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch last July or his journey on the Rio Ozama in December researching the effects of single-use plastic. Perhaps you’ve been in one of his famous selfies?
Shennon Sequeira
Shennon Sequeira is a Law and Criminology student and the Univeristy of Leicester. She currently works as the Head of the Program Coordinator Team and the OMUN Program Coordintar at MUN Impact. As well as, been apart of MUN Impact for nearly 2 years. She also works as the Communications Manager at the National Division Student Network in the UK and hopes to bring better representation and active voice in all areas of society.
Shennon has been an active member of the MUN community for the last 6 years and hopes to echo the importance and the message of MUN Impact to new heights. She has always been a strong advocate of youth voice, empowerment and international rights.
Jaideep Singh
Jaideep Singh is currently the Head of the Online Model United Nations (OMUN) program at MUN Impact. Prior to this, he served as the first Secretary-General of MUN@Home, a novel program which grew exponentially in the time of the COVID-19 Pandemic as one of the largest SDG Education initiatives across the globe. He has been involved in the MUN circuit for over 5 years, with its roots in Doha, Qatar where he served as a chair several times, as well as the Deputy Secretary-General of THIMUN Qatar 2019, the largest MUN Conference in the Middle East with over 2000 participants. In October 2020, he was nominated by MUN Impact to be the Youth Moderator for the International Day of Peace Observance (IDP) organized by the UN Department of Global Partnerships, in the presence of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres. Jaideep is a strong believer in the Sustainable Development Goals as a tool to catalyse ground level action driven by community involvement. He is especially enthusiastic about education, sustainable cities and energy, and believes that scientific studies and engineering should be governed by SDG driven policies to achieve real change in society.
Outside of the Model UN world, Jaideep is a Chemical Engineering student at NTU Singapore, and is involved in research around computational catalytic development. He is an aspiring academic, an avid reader, and involved hands-on with the daily functioning of MUN Impact and its programs.
Vibhu Sharma
Vibhu Sharma is a Toronto based lawyer qualified in Canada and India. Her current work is focused on dispute resolution (including trial and appellate litigation), negotiations and strategic advisory on complex international, commercial, technology and public policy matters. Prior to this, Vibhu practised law at a leading Indian law firm (on regulatory and litigation matters) and worked at the Centre for International Law in Singapore (on international investment law). She completed her BA LLB (Hons) at NUJS, India and then completed graduate studies at the National University of Singapore pursuing dual degrees — LLM (in International and Comparative Law) and a Master of Public Policy.
Paul Johnson
Over the last 20+ years, Paul Johnson has been a pioneer, creator and growth maker of digital products & services in many industries including tv, entertainment, sports, gaming, publishing, commerce and telecoms. As a world traveller he has experience in different countries, multi-national, sme and start-up businesses around the world including UK, Europe, Eurasia, APAC and the USA. On a mission to help make the online world stay a useful, fun, engaging, safe, educational and rewarding place for future generations. Looking forward to helping MUN Impact in their digital and online community initiatives.
Emeritus
David Williams
David L. Williams first became involved in Model United Nations in 1977. Inspired by his own students to continue the involvement, in 1981 he was one of the founders of The Hague International Model United Nations Foundation (THIMUN).
Under his leadership the annual THIMUN conference grew in size from 1,000 participants in 1981 to over 3,500 in 2004, the year he retired from the Chairmanship of the THIMUN Foundation. However, quality was always more important than quantity: it was the promotion of academic excellence which led to the increase in numbers.
David Williams always enjoyed working closely with his students. He trained many hundreds of MUN delegates and accompanied students to MUN conferences in many parts of the world. He personally promoted THIMUN-Affiliated conferences around the world and was instrumental in setting up THIMUN-Singapore.
In 2004, he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany and since his retirement, he has co-authored “Uniting the Nations through Model United Nations” and co-edited “Shaping Tomorrow”.
Kudzai Mukaratirwa
Kudzai Mukaratirwa
Kudzai works as a consultant for the UNODC Regional Office for East Africa Youth Programme. His work is focused on regional youth programmes across Eastern Africa and advising global implementation for the Education for Justice Initiative under the Global Programme of the Implementation of the Doha Declaration. He also worked as an expert advisor for the UNODC HQ and as the Director of Online Model United Nations, an MUN Impact program focused on educational development and youth dialogue through MUN.
He has worked on youth development programs in East Africa, Qatar, Afghanistan as well as larger international projects. In 2019 he was the Moderator for the thematic breakout session on SDG 16 and Rapporteur the High Level Political Plenary at the EcoSoc Youth Forum as well as the Moderator for the UN MUN Youth Summit alongside the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres.