Annie Ryu, Founder & CEO
Annie hails (pun intended) from blizzard territory -- Rochester, Minnesota. Annie was an avid tennis player and violinist from her early childhood, with a path toward a career as a professional musician. She redirected to pursue her passion for healthcare and medicine, and entered Harvard as a pre-medical student in the fall of 2009. Annie embarked on a path as a social entrepreneur, working on combating pediatric malnutrition in the Dominican Republic and researching healthcare policy and practice to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV in Nicaragua. When she and her brother created an SMS-based maternal and child healthcare program, she traveled to India for the first time in 2011, to implement the program in primary health centers. On her first day in India, she discovered jackfruit. Annie instantly saw the promise of this fruit and delved into jackfruit research. She spent her first weekend in India attending a jackfruit festival and spent subsequent weeks meeting jackfruit farmers and processors across the south Indian countryside.
Since then, she has been the first ever student speaker for Harvard Thinks Big, a Global Good Fund Fellow, and a Resolution Fellow, leading Global Village Fruit to win Harvard's 2012 Innovation Challenge, Harvard Women in Business's 2012 Business for Good Competition, and the 2012 Social Venture Challenge at Harvard. She graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in May 2013 to work full-time on Global Village Fruit in the MassChallenge accelerator, where she built GVF's team of outstanding advisers and deeply strengthened relationships with key suppliers and buyers.
Mithun S. G., India Programs Director
Mithun S. G. is a business school graduate living in Bangalore for work on Global Village Fruit and his own agricultural start-up, Good Harvest. Mithun brings one and a half years of experience working full-time in a jackfruit processing unit and expansive knowledge and experience with agricultural commodities, supply chains, and markets in India.
Surekha Tuntiserirat, Operations & Marketing Associate
Surekha is a Harvard student pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Economics. After growing up in Bangkok, Thailand, for 14 years, she decided to drop her anchor in Tampa, Florida, where she became an assistant manager at Burrito Boarder, a blooming restaurant franchise. There, she used data from the point of sale to develop marketing strategies and brand management projects that increased sales among local high school students.
Being Thai, Surekha is also passionate about cultural diversity, and she founded a program for her county's public high schools that enabled the administrative board to systematically distribute educational funding to students of various cultural backgrounds. She is currently working with GVF in the hope that she can help bring jackfruit, one of her favorite hometown fruits, to the world stage.
Carlos Olaechea, R&D Chef & Marketing Associate
Carlos Olaechea was born in Lima, Peru to an American mother and a Peruvian father before relocating to Miami, Florida at age five. Carlos has had a lifelong passion for food and culture and has been publishing articles on those subjects for most of his life. He received a bachelor’s degree in sociology and anthropology from Florida International University and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in gastronomy at Boston University where he is examining the formation of a Miami culinary identity. Carlos has been the restaurant columnist for FIU’s student newspaper, the Miami dining editor for Joonbug.com, and has contributed articles to several other publications, as well as maintaining his own food blog, carloscuisine.com.
Carlos’s first experience with jackfruit was in its ripe form as part of Filipino desserts like halo halo and turron, and he found the flavor and texture to be uniquely addictive. Later having experienced a green jackfruit “pulled pork” sandwich from a vegan food truck in Miami, he realized that jackfruit’s unique texture makes it an ideal alternative to meat. Carlos enjoys experimenting with new ingredients, finding unique uses for them, and creating recipes that make the exotic more accessible to the average cook. Jackfruit is the perfect foil for Carlos’s culinary creativity, as its texture absorbs flavor and its versatility makes it ideal for salads, stir-fries, and even slow braising.
Michelle Xie, Operations & Marketing Associate
Michelle is a sophomore at Harvard University studying Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Global Health and Health Policy. She first learned about social entrepreneurship and international development in her freshman year, and found it so fascinating that she decided to volunteer in rural Peru over the summer. There, she facilitated a community development project to improve the community kitchens in a rural community. At Harvard, she serves as the Harvard Association for U.S.-China Relations' Co-Director for ATVenture, a conference for young Chinese social entrepreneurs, and the Microfinance Lending Function Director for the Harvard Forum for International Development. In her spare time, she enjoys synchronized skating at the national level. Michelle is extremely excited to be part of the Global Village Fruit team working to increase economic opportunities for rural Indian farmers.
Shuya Gong, R&D & Design Associate
Shuya Gong was born in Beijing, China and moved to the United States when she was five. She has always had an interest in global healthcare policy and alternative medicine but considered being percussionist after being a part of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Percussions Scholarship Group. Her father has always had a strong interest in sustainable agriculture, having grew up on a farm himself, and she started working with him to create an urban farm in their backyard in Chicago, IL.
Shuya is currently a freshman at Harvard College and is excited to be a part of Global Village Fruit.
Wande Osoba, Operations & Marketing Associate
Wande is a biomedical engineering concentrator graduating from Harvard College in May 2014. She grew up in Maryland playing competitive soccer and piano from a young age, with a strong desire for improving the community around her through volunteering. While in college she developed a strong interest in business, serving as an analyst and investment board member for the Harvard Chapter of Smart Woman Securities; here she performed market and industry analysis and gave investment recommendations. She was also an intern for the Bain and Company Building Entrepreneurial Leaders (BEL) program in 2012, where she conducted and presented research for a client case. Global Village Fruit’s mission combines Wande’s interest in social improvement and her affinity for business and she is excited by the potential it has to improve the lives of farmers and processors through social entrepreneurship.
Upasna Sharma, Nonprofit Programs Specialist
Upasna Sharma was born and brought up in Delhi, India, and outside of summer vacations spent in South India, barely stepped out of her home city before coming to Harvard for her undergraduate studies. Yet, Delhi being a city of paradoxes gave her first-hand exposure to the gap between the haves and have-nots, and inculcated in her a desire to devote her life to working for the betterment of the lives of those who don't have their own voice. She is extremely interested in all of health, micro-finance, agri-business, and climate science, and sometimes jokes her ideal date would be chatting about an entrepreneurial venture in one of those fields. Her past experience includes working toward employment generation in rural India through her own entrepreneurial venture as well as with an existing social organization. She has also helped and conducted quantitative and qualitative research on climate/energy issues while at Harvard. She is focusing on using quantitative methods to analyze public health issues in developing countries in her senior Applied Math thesis.
She first heard about Global Village Fruit as a sophomore at Harvard Thinks Big where Annie was a speaker. Upasna was instantly attracted as it brings together the three things she cares most about-- the social sector, India and entrepreneurship. She brings social entrepreneurship and business experience as well as cultural experience to the table. She is working specifically on setting up the Global Village Fruit Foundation, especially on program implementation, as that is where her past experience comes most in handy. She strongly believes in the support that international parties like GVF can provide to India's rural economy and especially looks forward to facilitating livelihoods of jackfruit farmers and women in jackfruit communities across rural India through the GVF Foundation.