BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Carla D. Martin, PhD - Board President, former Executive Director (2016-2023)
Carla D. Martin is the Founder and Board President of the Institute for Cacao and Chocolate Research and Deputy Director of Undergraduate Studies and Professor at the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her work as a socially engaged anthropologist is currently focused on the ethics of labor in cacao and chocolate, and before that on the politics of language and music in Cabo Verde and its diaspora. She lectures widely and has taught extensively in African and African American Studies, critical food studies, social anthropology, and ethnomusicology, and has received numerous awards in recognition of excellence in teaching and research. Additionally, she founded and continues to collaborate with the Institute for Cacao and Chocolate Research, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to reducing inequality and information asymmetry throughout the cacao and chocolate value chain. This work has brought her into community with workers at cacao farms and chocolate factories in dozens of countries
Find her online at LinkedIn.
Michael Ehis Odijie, PhD - Board Vice President
Michael E. Odijie is a Research Fellow at the University College London, working on the AFRAB project ‘African Abolitionism: The Rise and Transformations of Anti-Slavery in Africa’. His training training was at Ambrose Alli University, Nigeria (BA [Hons] History and International Studies) and University of Sheffield, UK (MA and PhD, supervised by Professor John Hobson). I spent two years as a postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge.
Adam McGee, PhD - Board Treasurer
Adam McGee is the Managing Editor of Inquest, the magazine of Harvard’s Institute to End Mass Incarceration. Before joining Inquest, he served as Managing Editor of Boston Review for nearly a decade, where he was also founding Arts Editor of the magazine’s Arts in Society project. He had previously served as Acting Managing Editor of Transition. As an editor, he has worked with New York Times best-sellers, MacArthur geniuses, and winners of Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, NAACP Image Awards, the Robert Frost Medal, Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke Awards, and Lambda Awards. He holds a PhD in African and African American Studies from Harvard University and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. Prior to becoming a full-time editor, he taught religious studies and anthropology at Harvard, Tufts, and Northeastern. His scholarship focused on religions of the Black Atlantic and the role of religious bias in perpetuating racism.
Find him online at LinkedIn.
Kathryn Sampeck, PhD - Board Secretary
Kathryn E. Sampeck is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Illinois State University and a 2015-2016 Central American Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and Fellow at the Afro-Latin American Institute at the Hutchins Center of Harvard University. Sampeck is a specialist in the archaeology and ethnohistory of Spanish colonialism. Her current research project, “Black Market: Early Colonial Cacao Wealth, Contraband Economy, and Afro-Central Americans in Colonial Guatemala,” examines the role of Afro-Central Americans and their daily lives in one of the most extreme colonial environments in Latin America, the birthplace of chocolate. Her writing has appeared in American Antiquity, Historical Archaeology, The International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Mesoamérica, Ancient Mesoamerica, The Journal of Latin American Geography, and Ethnohistory. She has received fellowships from the John Carter Brown Library and the John D. Rockefeller Library at Colonial Williamsburg and grants from the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Social Science Research Council, Fulbright program, and Cherokee Preservation Foundation.
Find her online at LinkedIn.
Amanda Berlan, PhD - Board Member
Amanda Berlan is Associate Professor in Responsible Business at the School of Work Employment Management Organizations in the University of Leicester. Amanda previously held research and teaching posts at Coventry University (2013-2016), the University of Manchester (2009-2012) and the University of Oxford (2006-2009). A Social Anthropologist by training, her broad interest is in the field of sustainable agriculture, with a particular focus on cocoa and the chocolate industry.
Find her online at LinkedIn.
Megan J. Elias, PhD - Board Member
Megan Elias is a historian whose work and research explore the rich history of food and culture through prisms of food writing, markets, and home economics. She is currently the Director of Boston University's Food Studies Programs, as well as a University's Professor of the Practice. Dr. Elias has designed and taught classes in the areas of food studies, food in world history, food and gender, American women’s history, and African American history. Elias is the author of Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture (2017) as well as four other books about food history, including Food in the United States, 1890–1945, which was selected by the American Library Association as an Outstanding Academic Text for 2009. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters about food history and serves as editor-in-chief for Food, Culture & Society. She has been a co-recipient of several grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other organizations.
TEAM
José López Ganem - Executive Director
José López Ganem is an academic and nonprofit professional conducting interdisciplinary research drawing on the fields of food, history, culture, public policy, trade, and sensory analysis. Since 2024, he serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Cacao and Chocolate Research. He is currently a lecturer at Boston University's Food Studies Programs. His professional experience includes work in cultural ambassadorship for Mexico and Mesoamerica, as well as an engaged period in the food industry in New York City. He concluded his business administration studies at Culinary Institute of America in 2018, and received a master in Food Studies at Boston University’s Metropolitan College in 2022.
Find him on LinkedIn.
Caitlin Galante DeAngelis Hopkins, PhD - Senior Advisor
An author and historian with a special interest in cemeteries. If I’m not out in a burial ground with my camera, I am probably in an archive, reading other people’s mail. I live in Massachusetts with her wife and two children. In the past, I have written about burial grounds in 17th- and 18th-century New England and served as the head Research Associate for the Harvard and Slavery Project.
My new project is a book, The Caretakers, about gardeners who cared for British military cemeteries in France after the First World War and joined the French Resistance in the Second. Dr. Hopkins graduated from Brown University in 2005 with a BA in and in 2014received a PhD in American Studies and an MA in History from Harvard University.
Alexis H. Villacis, PhD - Senior Advisor
Alexis Villacis is an Assistant Professor of Agribusiness at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (ASU). Alexis is an applied microeconomist studying the social welfare implications of cacao and chocolate value chains, with a particular interest in food security, behavioral economics, and climate change. Previously he was a Visiting Scholar at Innsbruck University (Austria), and has received fellowships from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and the Association for International Agriculture and Rural Development (AIARD). Alexis has been a recipient and co-recipient of several grants from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the Inter-American Development Bank to study cacao and coffee value chains in the Latin American and Caribbean region. Before joining ASU, he worked for the government of Ecuador and collaborated with the International Cocoa Organization (ICCO) promoting policies and programs aimed at assisting cacao producers in Latin America. Alexis holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Applied Economics from Virginia Tech, a M.Sc. in Agricultural Economics from Purdue University, and a B.Sc. in Agribusiness Management from Zamorano University.
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Dara Adamolekun - Research Fellow
Dara is a student at Harvard University, where she concentrates in Social Studies with a secondary in Economics. Her academic focus is on the socioeconomic development of postcolonial societies, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. She has extensive experience in development studies through various opportunities, such as conducting academic research for the UN Development Program Pacific Office, creating US-Africa/MENA policy recommendations with the Harvard Undergraduate Foreign Policy Initiative, writing for the Harvard International Review, consulting on development projects with a USAID-funded organization in Uganda, and serving as a student ambassador for the Harvard Kennedy School Center for International Development and a delegate at the World Bank Youth Summit. Her research will focus on the impact of demographic shifts on the future social and economic development of sub-Saharan Africa and how governments and other institutions can help support the region's progress.
Megan De Kok - Creative Manager
Megan has been doing it all for over 10 years: writing, photographing and designing for social media, revamping brands, styling and concepting photoshoots, managing websites and designing storefronts. But at the end of the day, she’s the type of person to keep candles and a lighter in her bag for your birthday cake, donut or burger. She lives in Hamtramck, a city within the city of Detroit.
Find her online at MeganLikesFroop.com.
Richard M. Juang - Legal Counsel
Find him online at LinkedIn.