Our Team
Co-Founder & Co-Executive Director
Isabel Arjmand
Isabel is the co-founder and co-executive director of Lead Research for Action (LeRA). She previously spent eight years at GiveWell, a global health research organization directing hundreds of millions of dollars annually to highly cost-effective programs. Her experience spans research, communications, and nonprofit management. Her academic background is in engineering, with published research in health policy modeling.
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Co-Founder & Co-Executive Director
Tammy Tan
Tammy is the co-founder and co-executive director of Lead Research for Action (LeRA). Prior to LeRA, she was a researcher at Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP). Tammy has previously also worked in statistical genetics research at the National Bureau for Economic Research, and environmental economics research at the US Environmental Protection Agency. She has published first- and second-author papers in journals including Nature and Science.
Director of Operations
Matt Beer
Matt is the Director of Operations at Lead Research for Action (LeRA). Before LeRA, he founded a charity in East Africa and he has 6 years’ experience founding and running startups in the social and nonprofit sectors. He was also a Senior Civil Servant for the UK Government working for 8 years across the Department for Education, Cabinet Office and Treasury overseeing the delivery of major government programs.
Research Manager
Austin Bodetti
Austin Bodetti is the research manager at Lead Research for Action (LeRA). Before LeRA, he spent seven years with the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control and worked as a reporter in Iraq, Myanmar, and South Sudan. He also lived in Morocco, where he studied renewable energy and sustainable agriculture as a two-time Fulbright Scholar, and in Sri Lanka, where he researched land reform for the World Bank.
Advisors
Director, Global Health Policy Program and Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development
Rachel Bonnifield
Rachel Bonnifield is the Director of the Global Health Policy Program and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, where she leads policy-oriented research and convenings on global health financing and policy. Her current research focuses on procurement and access models for global health products; incentives for global health innovation and delivery; neglected global health crises such as the spread of antimicrobial resistance and widespread lead poisoning of children; and financing for pandemic preparedness and response. In addition to her role with CGD, she has also consulted extensively with the World Bank, and previously worked with the National Democratic Institute to support democracy and governance strengthening programs in Kosovo. She holds a Master of Philosophy with distinction in public health from the University of Cambridge, and a BA with distinction in international relations and economics from Stanford University.
Director, Project Unleaded, Human and Planetary Health, Stanford University
Jenna Forsyth
Jenna Forsyth, PhD, is an interdisciplinary environmental health scientist. She has focused on lead exposure research for 10 years and currently oversees the research portfolio for Project Unleaded - an initiative to identify and mitigate priority sources of lead poisoning globally, with an emphasis in South Asia. Based on her team’s discovery and effort to address lead poisoning from turmeric in Bangladesh, she was named one of the 100 most influential people in Global Health by Time Magazine in 2024. Prior to studying lead contamination and poisoning, she spent nearly 10 years addressing global and environmental health problems from contaminants in the air, water, soil, and food. Her work has been featured in The Economist, The Washington Post, Vox, The Scientist, Undark, Think Global Health, Environmental Health News, Stanford Medicine, Effective Altruism and other outlets. She holds a PhD in Environment and Resources from Stanford University and a Master’s of Science in Engineering and Certificate in Global Health from the University of Washington.
Executive Director, Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP)
Clare Donaldson
Clare is the Executive Director of Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP), a nonprofit that drives effective policies to eliminate lead poisoning across the globe. Clare was previously Chief Operating Officer at the Happier Lives Institute, a nonprofit think-tank. She is a trustee of Suvita, an organisation which works to increase uptake of immunisations to combat vaccine-preventable diseases in India. She has a PhD in Earth Sciences from the University of Cambridge and has published multiple peer-reviewed papers in international journals.
Director of Research and Strategy, Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP)
Juliette Finetti
Juliette is the Director of Research and Strategy at Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP), a nonprofit that drives effective policies to eliminate lead poisoning across the globe. Juliette was previously a Research Director at the University of Chicago, designing and overseeing the execution of multiple development economics studies. She acted as co-Principal Investigator in a study of incentives to increase malaria vaccine uptake in Sierra Leone. Juliette was also the Lead Researcher for Family Planning at Charity Entrepreneurship. Juliette holds a Master of Arts in International Development and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Economics from the University of Sciences Po Paris.