Si2’s executive director has analyzed and written about a wide variety of social and environmental issues raised in corporate responsibility controversies since starting her career with the Investor Responsibility Research Center (IRRC) in 1988. She has analyzed institutional proxy voting trends and views on social and environmental issues for seasonal and annual reports, including the annual series Institutional Votes and Views that concluded in 2009. Her coverage of these issues has included careful examination of Securities and Exchange Commission developments related to shareholder resolutions. She also developed IRRC’s first database of shareholder resolution data and helped design and maintain subsequent iterations of the database until her departure from RiskMetrics in spring 2009.

In addition to work on proxy season, Welsh ran the monitoring program on corporate implementation of the MacBride principles fair employment code in Northern Ireland for 16 years. In 2007, she co-authored the Carbon Disclosure Project’s S&P 500 report, examining corporate risks and opportunities posed by climate change. Subsequently, she headed up sustainability research and outreach for a unit of RiskMetrics and served on the Global Reporting Initiative’s Electric Utility Sector Working Group, developing sector-specific sustainability reporting guidelines launched in 2009. She also helped advise Oxford University researchers on an assessment of Northern Ireland’s affirmative action legislation. Welsh received her bachelor’s degree in political science, cum laude, with a concentration in science, technology and public policy, from Carleton College, and holds a master’s degree from the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University.

Peter DeSimone is Si2's deputy director and helped cofound the organization with Welsh in 2009. He has worked on investor responsibility issues for more than 16 years, beginning at the Investor Responsibility Research Center (IRRC) in 1995. At IRRC he first advised investor clients on the challenges and opportunities posed by a post-apartheid South Africa and analyzed how U.S. investor efforts on divestment and engagement helped push South Africa toward non-racial democracy. He also developed proxy voting guides and helped foreign investors initially vote proxies in several emerging markets during the 1990s. He has advised institutional investors about voting on social and environmental shareholder resolutions throughout his career, covering a wide range of environmental issues, indigenous peoples' rights, community displacement, supplier labor standards, equal employment opportunity and HIV/AIDS. Starting in 1996, he investigated sweatshop abuses in companies' supply chains, conducted field research in more than 20 countries and coauthored the 1998 landmark study, The Sweatshop Quandary, Corporate Responsibility on the Global Frontier, supported by a Ford Foundation grant. DeSimone went on to head up RiskMetrics Group's labor and human rights research group and worked with Welsh to develop and manage sustainability research and risk ratings, training research teams on three continents. He also launched RMG's first corporate engagement service for investors, developing strategies for clients and providing them with custom research.

From 2009 through 2011, DeSimone developed the policy, communications and programmatic work of the Social Investment Forum (SIF) as its director of programs. On Capitol Hill and at the Securities Exchange Commission, he advocated for SIF's members on a broad range of issues, including corporate sustainability disclosures and financial reform. He also produced SIF's first integrated annual sustainability report in compliance with the Global Reporting Initiative's G3 Guidelines. Throughout his career, DeSimone has participated as an Organizational Stakeholder in GRI, and in 2009-2011 he participated in the Airport Operators Sector Supplement.

He is an honors graduate of The American University with dual majors in international development studies and economics.

Evan Branosky joined the Si2 analyst team in 2011. He has professional and academic experience in environmental policy, with a particular emphasis on water. Since 2005, he has worked at the World Resources Institute, a global environmental think tank based in Washington, D.C. His early projects assessed the financial opportunities for the U.S. agriculture industry under pending domestic climate policy. In addition, he published a policy brief on options for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions through Farm Bill conservation programs. More recently, analyses by Branosky and his colleagues have demonstrated the financial benefits of using ecosystem services to achieve water quality goals. Low-cost land management practices, such as grass buffers, cover crops, and forest restoration on farms, can often provide more environmental benefits than high-cost water treatment technologies. Branosky holds a B.S. in agricultural science from Rutgers University and a M.P.P. in environmental policy from the University of Maryland. His graduate project focused on the water quality and quantity impacts of hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus shale formation.

David Hauck has a broad range of experience in assessing companies’ environmental and social performance. During his 15 years at IRRC, Hauck headed IRRC’s South Africa Review Service which produced in-depth reports on the labor practices and community activities of more than one hundred companies with operations in that country. He also developed the first customized software application that combined IRRC’s proxy research with the voting guidelines of individual institutional investors to streamline proxy voting and meet Erisa reporting requirements. Later, at Green Seal, he worked closely with environmental organizations, research scientists and leading manufacturers to develop criteria that were used to identify environmentally preferable products. As part of the product certification process, Hauck conducted factory site visits and worked with national testing labs to develop protocols that would ensure certified products continued to meet the environmentally preferable criteria. In recent years, he has worked with the Sierra Club on its innovative Cool Cities/Cool Counties campaign that seeks to address climate change by encouraging local governments to commit to substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; create detailed action plans that lay out how the reduction goals will be met; and then conduct annual greenhouse gas inventories to measure progress towards those goals. Hauck received his government degree from Oberlin College and focused on public policy at the University of Michigan, where he received an M.A. in political science.

Sol Kwon has researched and written about corporate responsibility issues for more than eight years. Kwon started her career at a boutique financial services firm, Trans-National Research Corp., in New Jersey, where she helped conduct macroeconomic research on emerging market countries for institutional investors. She joined IRRC's Social Issues Service in 2002 and analyzed and wrote about sustainability reporting, global health pandemics, climate change, and defense contracting. Between 2006 and 2010, Kwon was the Lead Analyst for Corporate Governance at the Capital Stewardship Program of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, where she worked with labor pension fund trustees on responsible investing and corporate governance reform campaigns. Kwon worked in the Finance and Strategy Practice of the Corporate Executive Board from 2010 to 2011 as a Strategic Research Consultant, helping corporate executives solve critical management-related problems. In January 2012 she became Associate Director at the Center for Political Accountability, a non-partisan group that promotes greater disclosure of corporate political spending. Kwon earned her B.A. in International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University and holds an M.B.A. from the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland.

Jane Meacham has two decades of experience covering corporate disclosures and, more recently, corporate responsibility issues. Until February 2010 she worked on the Sustainability Solutions team at RiskMetrics, analyzing the insurance and communications equipment sectors for responsible investing, business and environmental practices. Meacham also served as editor for all RiskMetrics Sustainability Solutions client publications. She joined RiskMetrics in 2008 to monitor international labor and human rights standards and other sustainability risk factors at companies, to produce impartial research reports for institutional investors. Meacham is currently a member of the Global Reporting Initiative’s Media Sector Supplement Working Group, which is developing sector-specific sustainability disclosure standards that will be released in 2011. Previously, Jane worked for nearly 20 years as an editor and manager for Dow Jones & Co., the international business information publishing company. Jane’s assignments with Dow Jones included writing and editing in newsrooms in Hong Kong, Singapore and New York, in positions of increasing responsibility. In her last role at Dow Jones, Jane managed a wire-service newsroom in Washington, D.C., with a staff of up to 30 reporters and editors that offered real-time news from corporate disclosure documents for hedge fund managers and other sophisticated investment professionals.

Julia Beth Proffitt is a founding director of LanX, a project designed to support local institutions, communities, and economies by providing sustainable investment opportunities for small to mid-size enterprises. Proffitt is currently serving as a visiting scholar at Franklin & Marshall College, where she has taught courses in organizational behavior and decision-making. Her current research investigates the influence of cultural and situational forces on the sustainability of resource decisions. In addition to her academic career doing research, writing, and teaching, Proffitt has worked in market research, museum education, and as an analyst for IRRC in the early 1990s. She earned a doctorate from Northwestern University as well as a bachelor’s degree from Yale University.

W. Trexler Proffitt Jr. is an assistant professor of organization studies in the department of Business, Organizations, and Society at Franklin and Marshall College, a private liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. He also serves on the adjunct faculty for other schools with different constituents, notably Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. His teaching experience centers on competitive strategy but includes negotiation, business and society, corporate social responsibility, and social entrepreneurship. His research examines governance and accountability of large firms, looking specifically at shareholder activism from a historical and social movement perspective. Proffitt worked for five years at IRRC before heading to graduate school. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in organization behavior from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and his B.A. in American history from Yale University.

Pat M. Tomaino was a senior analyst at F&C Asset Management plc, a leading
UK-based sustainable investment manager. From 2007 to 2011 Pat served on
F&C's Governance & Sustainable Investment team, integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in the investment process, voting hundreds of proxies annually, and working directly with companies to improve their performance and transparency. Pat brings experience from all sides of the proxy voting and shareholder proposal process, with particular expertise in water risk, labor standards, food and beverages, and North American and Latin American companies. He is fluent in Spanish and has reading proficiency in Portuguese. After leaving F&C, Pat served
as policy director on the U.S. Senate campaign of Bob Massie in Massachusetts.
He holds a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard College.

Susan Williams has more than 25 years of experience researching, writing and analyzing energy, environmental and corporate responsibility topics for institutional investors. Since 2009, Williams has been an independent consultant, focusing on sustainability and energy issues for Si2 and People 4 Earth Foundation. She previously was a research manager at RiskMetrics Group. Williams began her career in corporate responsibility with the IRRC Social Issues Service in 1984 and continued to provide proxy analysis through IRRC's acquisition by Institutional Shareholder Services and RiskMetrics. From 1982 until 1984, she also worked with energy and environmental consulting firms in the Boston area. Williams is the lead author of more than a half-dozen books and publications, including a series spanning a decade of renewable energy development in the United States. Her findings have been reported in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Economist and other leading newspapers. She also has published work on environmental issues, including large-scale hydroelectric development in northern Quebec and recycling, and has contributed to various journals, including Issues in Science and Technology. Williams has produced in-depth reports and company-specific analyses for institutional investors on a variety of additional corporate responsibility issues, including fair employment domestically and in Northern Ireland, equal credit opportunity, economically targeted investments, and links between executive compensation and social performance. Williams graduated cum laude with a B.A. in American Studies from Williams College, where she also received highest honors from the Environmental Studies Program.

Before joining Si2, where he co-authored the October 2010 study, How Companies Influence Elections: Political Campaign Spending Patterns and Oversight at America’s Largest Companies, Robin Young was a senior analyst for IRRC, ISS and RiskMetrics for more than four years. He has covered a wide range of corporate governance issues, including evaluation of company specific compensation plans, management and shareholder sponsored corporate governance issues with special emphasis on mergers, acquisitions and recapitalizations, as well as management and shareholder proposals related to executive compensation. While at RiskMetrics he also helped collect and verify evergreen and overall dilution data and was a contributing writer to several dilution studies. He helped manage overseas teams and perform quality control checks on data collected by these divisions, as well as helping to maintain and manage the organizations’ databases of shareholder proposals. He also worked for RiskMetrics’ ESG group, covering political contributions and predatory lending. In addition to writing background materials and company analyses on these topics, Young contributed to custom consulting projects for several clients, developing cases for them on corporate engagement. Before coming to IRRC, Young also worked as loan officer for mortgage businesses. He holds B.A. in political science from Colorado College.