Halla Tomasdottir is the founder & lead partner of Sisters Capital and her passion is releasing the incredible economic potential of women’s ways of doing business. She is a passionate entrepreneur, investor and change catalyst on a quest to bring about better balance in business and finance. She knows that extraordinary businesses are built and developed by diverse teams of people motivated by a meaningful mission.

Halla started her career in the USA, first with M&M/Mars and later she joined Pepsi Cola’s HR team. She was on the founding team of Reykjavik University where she founded and led a successful women entrepreneurship and empowerment program. She was the first woman to become CEO of the Iceland Chamber of Commerce but left the Chamber in 2007 to co-found Audur Capital, a female founded investment company that survived the financial meltdown in Iceland intact.

Halla has been a board director of companies ranging from start-ups to leading businesses. Her sector experience is primarily from consumer products, healthcare, mobile/media and financial services. She is an outspoken advocate for getting more women into the boardroom and is the founding chair of Women Corporate Directors (WCD) in Iceland.

Halla received the Cartier Women’s Initiative Award for outstanding women entrepreneurs in Europe given by Cartier in cooperation with McKinsey and Insead and was a speaker at the TED Women conference in 2010. In March 2011 Newsweek named Halla one of 150 women who shake the world.

Professor Yael (Yuli) Tamir is the President of Shenkar College. She was a deputy speaker of the Knesset and a member of the Finance committee, the Education committee and the Security and Foreign Affairs committee; she served as the Minister of Immigration (1999-2001) and as a Minister of Education (2006-2009).

Tamir received her BA and MA from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (Cum Laude), and her Ph.D. in political philosophy from Oxford University where she wrote her thesis under the supervision of Sir Isaiah Berlin. She was a professor at Tel-Aviv University and a scholar-in-residence at Princeton, Harvard, The University of Pennsylvania, the European University in Florence, the Central European University in Budapest.

Professor Tamir received many academic awards including the Balliol College Domus Scholarship, The Moses Montefiore Scholarship, the Alon Fellowship, the Laurence S. Rockefeller Fellowship and the Fulbright Fellowship, and research fellowship at the Program in Ethics and the Professions, Harvard University.

Tamir is the author of Liberal-Nationalism (Princeton University Press), as well as numerous articles in the fields of moral and political philosophy, philosophy of education, feminism and human rights. She is the editor of Democratic Education in a Multicultural State (Blackwell) and, Moral and Political Education (New York University Press), with Professor Macedo.

Professor Tamir is a founding member of the Israeli peace movement “Peace Now” and served as the chairperson of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel and was a member of the political committee of Women’s Lobby.