About us
Meet the team
To meet the complex challenges of an initiative that extends beyond borders and addresses an extremely diverse audience, Youth Talks relies on a dedicated team whose mission is to keep the project’s ambitious goals on course and adapt them to operational challenges.
The team
Director
Marine Hadengue
Marine is the Executive Director of the Higher Education for Good Foundation (HE4G). HE4G is a Swiss-based not-for-profit organisation that helps educational institutions transform their curricula to meet the needs of the mid-21st century. As part of this, Marine leads Youth Talks, a groundbreaking initiative that marks the first-ever global youth consultation asking open-ended questions to young people worldwide and using advanced AI tools to analyze their answers.
Also a professor at SKEMA Business School, her expertise includes responsible management education, innovation, and social entrepreneurship. An engineer by training, Marine holds a Ph.D. from Polytechnique Montreal, a master’s degree in political science from University of Montreal and completed her postdoctoral studies at Polytechnique Paris. Member of the International Advisory Board of the Peter Drucker Society, she is also the CEO of the Arbour Foundation, a Canadian philanthropic organization specializing in access to higher education.
Chief Operations & Products Officer (bluenove)
Kristy Anamoutou
With a strong background in product management and technical operations, Kristy is responsible for overseeing bluenove’s products and technical operations development. She leads the product strategy and R&D roadmap, with a focus on massive collective intelligence methods and opportunities to create large-scale hybrid and inclusive experiences. Kristy is also responsible for bluenove’s commitment to youth and education as a corporate citizen.
Kristy’s expertise lies in product management and semantic analysis, including API, no-code, dataviz, prototyping, and generative AI algorithms.
The scientific committee
To ensure the utmost methodological rigor and the integrity and reliability of the results, Youth Talks also leveraged the expertise of a scientific committee, which guided the team and made sure the data collection and analysis processes were as robust and dependable as possible.
Director of the Scientific Committee
Frédérique Vidal
Frédérique Vidal is a professor in molecular biology, academic administrator, and politician who served as Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation in the government of Prime Ministers Édouard Philippe and Jean Castex from 2017 to 2022. She was the president of the University of Nice from 2012 to 2017.
She earned a Master of Advanced Studies in molecular virology from the Pasteur Institute, and a PhD in biology from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. During her first term (2012-2016), Frédérique Vidal founded Université Côte d’Azur, a consortium consisting of the university, and business schools, art schools and research centers, to increase the international attractiveness of the university and obtained the label “Initiative of Excellence” for the University in 2016. She was then re-elected as president in 2016.
Frédérique Vidal is now special advisor for the European Foundation of Management Development and volunteer scientific advisor for the Higher Education for Good Foundation.
Associate Professor of Marketing, SKEMA Business School
Rodrigo B. Castilhos
His research focuses on the interplay between market systems, space and markets, and consumption and social class. His studies seek to understand how different agents shape and are shaped by the dynamic evolution of markets, how space and markets co-constitute each other, and how market-mediated class dynamics unfold in different consumption contexts. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Business Research, Marketing Theory, Consumption Markets & Culture, and the International Journal of Consumption Studies. Rodrigo has also consulted for companies in the fields of education, retail, sports goods, packaged goods, real estate, and technology.
Research Officer, INRIA
Éric de la Clergerie
Eric de la Clergerie is a Research Officer working at INRIA in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), more specifically on Parsing and Syntax. He is the main developer of FRMG, a large coverage French grammar. FRMG has been used to parse all kinds of corpora (including French wikipedia), in particular to perform knowledge acquisition (terminology and semantic networks). It has also been used for information extraction. More recently, he has also worked on statistical/neural transition-based parsers, and on the coupling of symbolic parsers (such as FRMG) with statistical ones or neural ones. And even more recently, he got involved in neural language models (such as French CamemBert), investigating their training, capacities, potentialities and limits.
Professor of Economics, SKEMA Business School
Rodolphe Desbordes
Rodolphe Desbordes is a professor of Economics at SKEMA Business School in France. He was previously a Reader (Associate Professor) in Economics at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow UK. He holds a BA in political science (Sciences Po Paris) and a PhD in international economics (University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne). His research interests cover the fields of foreign direct investment, economic growth, epidemics, and applied econometrics.
