Tarek Ketelsen
Director General | Principal Integrated Assessment Specialist
Tarek is an Environmental Systems Engineer (UWA) experienced in integrated environmental assessments, climate resilience planning, eco-hydrology, hydrological modelling, river basin planning, policy formation, and stakeholder engagement.
His skills lie in utilising the principles, processes and characteristics of environmental systems to build better relationships between human communities and the environment. He specialises in building evidence bases and deliberative processes to improve the sustainability of how we manage, conserve and utilise natural resources.
Tarek has also studied at the Renewable Energy Academy Berlin (RENAC) and has experience designing and delivering distributed renewable energy systems for villages, businesses and households in Southeast Asia and Australia.
Tarek has 15 years of professional experience, in 15 countries in Asia, Africa, Australia and the Pacific. He worked in the mining industry undertaking flood modelling, EIAs, pipes and pump design and end-of-mine closure planning, before moving to Vietnam where has has been involved in more than 30 development assistance projects.
He was project manger and hydrologist for a Strategic Environmental Assessment of Mekong mainstream hydropower which was awarded by the International Association of Impact Assessment (2012) and designed a program on water resources and river basin planning for Australia in Myanmar which was show-cased as a leading sector example, in Australia’s 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper.
In recent years, Tarek is leading an Asia-Pacific regional water scarcity policy assessment for the FAO; and designed and managed implementation of the Ayeyarwady State of the Basin Assessment (SOBA) (2015-2018).
John Sawdon PhD
Principal Environmental Economist | Political Economist
John is an environmental economist, energy and climate change specialist with over 16 years of professional experience in international development. John holds a PhD on the political economy of energy policy and climate change mitigation with a focus on South East Asia from the University of East Anglia, UK, an MSc in Economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London and an MA in social sciences with a specialization in philosophy from the University of Glasgow.
John is interested in utilising the tools and frameworks of economics to understand environmental technological change in the energy and power sectors and to influence the levers of the market and policy/planning to accelerate the shift towards renewables in the developing world.
John has considerable technical experience working on policy and planning issues relating to urban development, the transportation sector, the electricity sector, energy security and climate mitigation and adaptation in the energy sector. He has worked as Team Leaders or Lead Economist on these issues for the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, IFC, UNDP and UNICEF, bilateral donors such as JICA, DfID, GIZ, and DFAT, NGOs including WWF and CAFOD, research organizations, developing country governments, and private sector companies and financial institutions in delivering high quality technical support and research for policy formation, planning and project development and implementation.
John is leading AMPERES’ work to understand policy reform of power sectors and the economics of renewable energy deployment in both grid and off-grid applications. More generally he is instrumental in setting the strategic research agenda for applied research program.
Timo Räsänen, PhD
Principal Modelling Associate | Principal Hydrologist
Timo is a water, climate and environment professional (D.Sc.) with 15 years of professional research experience. He's interested in understanding the interface between biophysical systems and human activity - especially in the complex, muddy context of the large tropical river basins of Southeast and East Asia. Timo has a Masters and PhD in engineering from Aalto University and has produced 29 research publications.
Timo has been instrumental in geospatial and modelling analysis at AMPERES since our founding in 2017. He has led analysis on the impacts of climate change and hydropower on river hydrology, electricity access and consumption and water-energy-food trade offs.
Proficient in mathematical modelling and GIS, Timo's strength is on the creative application of these technical tools to solve real-world policy problems. He's worked on estimating GHG emissions from large hydropower, analysing species distribution in marine environments, forest loss in global protected areas, landscape erosion, paleoclimatological hydrology, flood management, ENSO and drought teleconnection, hydropower operations and the application of remote sensing for environmental management.
Timo has worked extensively in South, Southeast and East Asia as well as Northern Europe. His modelling experience is complemented by experience fixing distributed microhydropower systems in Ladakh and lecturing in hydrology and the scientific method in Helsinki.
Tran Tuyet Phuong
Office Manager | Senior Community Development Specialist
Tran Tuyet Phuong, A Mekong Delta citizen in Vietnam, has worked for almost 20 years with INGOs. Phuong’s experience spans multiple fields including community development such as disaster risk management and resilience, hygiene, water and sanitation loan/ credit via revolving fund programs for livelihood, housing, water and sanitation. She is also a good practitioner on community participatory processes, M&E tools, conducting community-based approach activities, and training for trainers.
Phuong manages our office, our operations and our accounts. She was trained on project management skills and involved in organisational strategy planning, resource and financial management during her time with INGO life of 3.5 years with Danish Refugee Council, 8 years with CARE International in Vietnam, more than 7 years with Habitat for Humanity International in Vietnam
Some of her significant milestones during the past 20 years: Deputy Manager for U Minh Thuong National Park Nature Resource Protection and Development Project – CARE; Project Coordinator for Community-based Resilience Nature Disaster Project – CARE , Senior Program Coordinator for Housing & WATSAN Loan Program – Habitat; Project Manager for WATSAN Community Awareness Raising – Habitat.
Marko Kallio
Senior Geospatial Data and Modelling Associate
Marko is a researcher with a multidisciplinary background, with education in environmental engineering, international water management, geoinformatics, cartography and hydrology. He is currently closing in on the final stretches of his doctoral studies, which deals with methodological development of water scarcity estimates in data scarce areas. He is particularly happy when developing ways of wrapping complex geospatial phenomena about water in packages which are consumable by large audiences.
Marko is the creative and technical force behind most of the evidence bases that AMPERES’ develops, combining multi-disciplinary experience with a deep understanding of programming, he helps us integrate monitoring, remotely sensed and stakeholder data into models, tools and databases that provide strategic insight for planning and decision making.
In the last few years, Marko has conducted research on hydrology and socio-economic dimensions of water availability in the Mekong Region. The research includes estimation of country-wide water poverty in Laos, development of a new synthesis method for using global hydrological data in local application, estimation of hydrokinetic turbine potential in Myanmar, drought and water scarcity spatio-temporal trend analysis, and the interconnections of water in the Sustainable Development Goals.
Marko received two awards - ProGIS award for meritorious thesis in the field of GIS, and Finnish Universities Network for Asian Studies Thesis Award - for his 2016 Master's Thesis in geoinformatics, titled "An Exploration of Water Poverty in Lao PDR".
Nguyen Quoc Khanh, PhD
Senior Renewable Energy & Climate Change Mitigation Associate
Khanh Nguyen is an energy expert who combines expertise in economics and renewable energy systems. He has been an advisor for sustainable development and renewables in Viet Nam for more than 15 years and is a recognized expert in energy systems modelling, GHG inventory and monitoring, power sector planning, rural electrification, and energy efficiency.
Khanh is instrumental in supporting our climate change mitigation, renewables promotion and power systems analysis and planning work. He has worked on number of projects with various international donor organizations in the last few years spanning project level inputs to test feasibility of wind farms to high level planning inputs into Vietnams National Power Development Plans.
Khanh has a bachelor degree in the field of energy economics and energy planning from the University of Science and Technology in Hanoi in 1997. He earned a MSc degree in Renewable energies from the University of Oldenburg in Germany in 2001 and a PhD in energy system modeling in 2005 also from the University of Oldenburg.
Tien Le
Water Resources Research Analyst
Tien Le is a Mekong Delta citizen and an enthusiastic coordinator and researcher with 3 years of experience working in rural development and climate change mitigation and adaptation projects, particularly in community-based disaster risk management, water saving and greenhouse gas reduction in agriculture with an application of sensing devices and Internet of Things.
She has worked with a variety of stakeholders including NGOs, universities, local governments, technical consultants, cooperatives, farmers and practiced to be a good planner and deliver work in a results-oriented and timely manner. The close proximity to the grassroots whose lives were highly susceptible to natural conditions and climate variability strongly motivated her to further her career in the climate change and development discipline.
Tien has a MSc in Climate Change and Development from the University of Reading (UK) and Bachelor degrees in both Law and Business Management From Can Tho University. In her Masters she focused on climate challenges and climate services for rice farmers in a coastal province of the Mekong Delta.
Tien joined AMPERES in 2021 and brings her expertise in both the natural and social science of climate change and her empirical experience with quantitative and qualitative research methods to lead our water research program for the Greater Mekong region aimed at understand the implications of climate change and hydropower on the ecology and social systems of the basin.
Tien was awarded a Marshal Papworth Scholarship by the University of Reading in collaboration with the East of England Agricultural Society and recently passed the Master of Science Climate change and Development at the University of Reading with Distinction.
Nga Nguyen
Data science Associate
Nga is a mathematician who believes data and systems thinking can improve the sustainability of food production and natural resource management. Her research interest lies in the modeling of sustainable systems, from sustainable agricultural production to sustainable product consumption.
Currently a PhD researcher in Geospatial analytics at the University of Twente, she also has a Masters in political and environmental sciences, a graduate degree in Geographic Information Systems and a Bachelor of mathematics. In her PhD, she uses tools such as econometrics, social network analysis, spatial analysis, and Agent-based modeling to understand the drivers and barriers influencing sustainable decisions in farmers and consumers.
Nga has worked with AMPERES to use geospatial approaches to understand energy access and reliability in Southeast Asia and Australia. Prior to this, Nga worked at the World Bank and UN as a data scientist. She developed and applied data analytics to the political economy of the education sector in Haiti; tech start-up ecosystem in New York and Lebanon; climate resilience in the Mekong Delta; and spatial evidence for SDG progress in Sri Lanka. She started her career as a risk analyst for the commercial banking sector in Viet Nam.
Nga's work developing a geospatial index to quantify economic pressure on land was presented at COP15, and her research on financing the green economy was presented at Rio+20.
Nguyen Huu Thien
Senior Ecology Associate
An ecologist by training and practice, Nguyen Huu Thien has more than 25 years of experience working on issues of climate change, natural resources management, wetland biodiversity conservation, energy and sustainable development in the Mekong countries. Thien obtained his BSs degree in Waterworks Engineering from Can Tho University, Vietnam in 1990 and MSc degree in Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA in 1990.
He has served as university lecturer, project manager, technical advisor, trainer and consultant, among many other positions. His regional experience includes projects in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, with extensive experience in the Mekong Delta Vietnam. Thien has years of experience in designing, leading and implementing projects and field works.
He is skilled at assessing and analysing climate change risks and developing adaptation response strategies and currently specialises on the natural systems of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam.
His most recent works include advising the Ministry of Investment and Planning on the Integrated Planning of the Mekong Delta to 2020 and advising the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development on the Comprehensive Plan for Agriculture Transformation for the Mekong Delta.
Realizing that there is a big gap between policy makers and science researchers, in the past 15 years Thien has spent time in bridging the gap to promote science-based policy making for the Mekong Delta, his homeland, through digesting technical hard-core science information and communicating to the public and high-ranking decision makers in plain language, educating journalists, and responding to interviews by national newspapers and televisions.
Huyen Thanh Lai
Energy Efficiency & Sustainability Specialist
With 5 years of diverse experience, Huyen is Sustainability/Energy Efficiency Specialist with a background in Network and Telecom administration and Software Engineering. Having worked with international and local engineers on projects in both Vietnam and USA. Her college and post-graduate education from both countries has equipped her with the skills to quickly adapt and attain fluency in new disciplines including sustainability and energy efficiency.
Huyen has worked with numerous companies and organizations including Caritas, OneEnergy, Regus, and Symantec DLP on different kinds of projects including a corporate software of data loss prevention, cloud data migration, and software quality assurance.
Previously, she was the regional IT coordinator for two Regus business centers, working closely with experts in both Vietnam and the Philippines.
Huyen has been working with AMPERES to design and test the feasibility of novel, customised decarbonisation strategies for C&I clients. Drawing on her IT systems experience she has been working to design smart monitoring and energy efficiency solutions that reduce electricity consumption, re-cycle waste heat and utillise thermal storage technology.
Dipti Vaghela
Senior Community Engagement Associate
Dipti is a mechanical engineer committed to advancing technology that benefits marginalized communities and ecosystems. She focuses on the sustainability and scale up of decentralized renewable energy solutions for rural electrification. She is an avid supporter of locally-developed small-scale hydro and biomass mini-grids that enhance rural livelihoods.
She is the network facilitator and manager of the Hydro Empowerment Network (HPNET), a South-South, multi-stakeholder knowledge exchange platform that advances policy, technology, and socio-environmental aspects of small-scale hydropower, which she helped to establish in 2013.
Dipti has been instrumental in supporting AMPERES develop and improve community engagement in our renewable energy projects. She’s helped us explore new business models for mini-grids that enhance local ownership, understand existing and future productive uses and supported us establish partnerships with local mini-grid operators.
Raised in the Mississippi Delta, Dipti holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and a M.S. in Environmental Studies from San Jose State University. She started her professional journey designing handheld devices at Palm, Inc. and Apple, Inc. This product design experience, along with her family’s roots in rural India, inspired her to leave Silicon Valley and commit to technology for rural contexts. She spent the next 18 years developing decentralized renewable energy solutions for rural electrification in the Asia Pacific, bridging rural communities, civil society, local entrepreneurs, NGOs, government, academia and donors. This includes 8 years working with indigenous communities in Kalahandi, Odisha, facilitating community-led renewable energy solutions.
Dipti is a recipient of the 2008 Switzer Foundation Environmental Fellowship, 2013 Switzer Foundation Environment Leadership Grant and the 2016 Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship.
Le Thi Hong Van
Integrated Water Analyst
Van has experience working in multiple fields: water resources management, climate adaptation/ mitigation, disaster risk management, agriculture production, and women’s and children’s health and hygiene, in which she conducted research to investigate existing issues, policy environment and possible solutions to develop intervention strategies toward inclusion and sustainable development. She gained intimate knowledge of local issues and engagement principles to support disadvantaged communities to overcome their difficulties and enhance their resilient capacities. She possesses exceptional program management skills, including planning, monitoring and evaluation of activities and financial management.
She was awarded the Australian Development Scholarship for her master’s degree in Rural Systems Management at The University of Queensland in 2012, and then Research and Training Partnership to carry out her PhD in Human Geography and Planning at The University of Western Australia, Australia, with the central focus on politics of adaptation and transformation. Her research projects focused on how to engage and empower communities, particularly the disadvantaged and vulnerable ones, in climate actions and natural resources management to insert their voices and interests into decision-making as well as increase their social status for better social inclusion and climate justice.
Previously, Van’s positions involved project manager, technical advisor, trainer and specialist in both governmental and non-governmental organizations. Joining AMPERES as an Integrated Water Analyst, she expects to bring her expertise in natural and social science and her empirical experience with quantitative and qualitative research methods to promote water research programs for the Greater Mekong region in particular. Staying in her longtime interest is how to bridge the gap between scientific researchers and policymakers to promote science-based policymaking on climate resilience and natural resources management, especially water resources.
Le Dam Bao Han
Events and Communications Officer
Longing to bring scientific knowledge to everyday life, Han joins as an Events and Communication Officer at AMPERES, where she manages the organisation’s channels and works on the delivery of information to other stakeholders and the public.
Having an educational background in Law at Foreign Trade University, Han is equipped with critical knowledge of how governance can shape the development of society and its persons. Along with that, she genuinely believes that the media and cultural sphere is also a deep-rooted character that can move humankind. She then decided to dedicate her career to the media and communication field, focusing on communication for development and social change.
Prior to joining AMPERES, Han spent years working as a communication staff at several NGOs, whose main interventions ranged from sustainable healthcare services and policies to rural development and improving local livelihoods. Being familiar with graphic design software and content writing, she aspires to turn them into tools to bridge the gaps between academic thinking and ordinary awareness.
Luong Thi Hong Loan
Energy Transition Program Manager
Loan is AMPERES' Energy Transition Program Manager, with over a decade of experience supporting sustainability in Vietnam's climate, energy, and environmental governance projects.
Loan has experience on both sides of climate change action. She has managed climate resilience initiatives with local governments, urban resilience projects, and coordinating with Vietnam's climate adaptation business communities (e.g., VCCI and VIETED). She has also worked on climate mitigation, coordinating several initiatives for The Asia Foundation on energy transition, including high-level panel discussions on CBAM and Extended Producer Responsibility, other stakeholder engagement, and technical activities through the Vietnam Business Forum (VBF). She also worked in Ethiopia for a project to support the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum under a grant from the Global Affairs of Canada.
While pursuing a master's in resource economics and Sustainable Development from the University of Bologna, Loan participated in a one-year Erasmus exchange at the University of East Anglia in the UK. In addition, she has a certificate in results-based management from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, a certificate in gender and intersectionality from the University of Iceland and a Certificate in Urban Resilience through intensive training organised by the Asia Disaster Preparedness Centre in collaboration with UNESCO and The University of Southern Denmark.
Kha Nguyen
Energy Transition Coordinator
Kha Nguyen is the Energy Coordinator at AMPERES, bringing a well-rounded academic background in International Relations and proven expertise in project coordination and relationship management to her role in advancing energy transition initiatives. Prior to joining AMPERES, Kha supported organising and executing high-level events and policy dialogues on energy transition, working with organizations such as GIZ Vietnam, AHK Vietnam, and Forbes Vietnam. At AMPERES, she is behind the production of a biweekly digital newsletter focused on Vietnam's energy transition and fostering the implementation of key energy projects, including the Future of Electricity-Vietnam (FE-V) initiative.