Twenty years after she taught her first English class at China’s most renowned high school, Renda Fuzhong (RDFZ) in Beijing, students of that class still call her for all manner of advice, whether they should marry, take a post, or move to another city. To them, she will always be “Laoshi,” translated as “old teacher,” no matter one’s age as a show of respect. And teaching will always be at the heart of her career. She rose quickly at RDFZ: by her mid-20s she managed its extensive international connections, including its membership in G30, the organization of the top 30 schools in the world. She created and oversaw more than 40 outbound and inbound international programs to 30+ country destinations annually for its 4,600+ student body. Soon she was recruited to become Secretary General for China's most highly regarded bilingual school, YK Pao School in Shanghai. And, then, on to a global leadership role at Whittle School & Studios, where she managed a team of 30 members in the US and China (including 4 CPAs, 2 hedge fund managers, a nuclear energy scientist, a physicist, Ivy League admission officers, and a presidential special assistant!). She led the creation of Whittle’s 1000-student campus in Shenzhen. In her spare time, believing students should not be judged on mere academic excellence, she cofounded a multi-city art organization.
Raised in a small town along the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, he’s the one who recommended the Baret Fellowship 73-mile trek on the Appalachian Trail! Early on, Chris enjoyed building things, organizing his childhood friends to construct forts and cabins in the woods they would play in. And build he did. In his 50-year career, Chris founded and led 5 education and media endeavors, collectively employing over 8,000 team members. Founded in his college apartment, Whittle Communications grew to be one of America’s top 100 media companies, publishing Esquire and broadcasting daily to 8,000,000 students through the Channel One network, with Anderson Cooper as its first anchor. In the mid-1990s, along with former Yale University President Benno Schmidt, Chris pioneered America’s charter school movement, founding over 100 campuses with 60,000 students. In 2012, Chris co-founded and led Avenues: The World School, now one of the largest private schools in New York City with important campuses in São Paulo, Shenzhen, and Silicon Valley as well. Chris led the creation of the two Whittle School & Studios campuses in Shenzhen and Suzhou. He is one of the few entrepreneurs to found not one but two “unicorns,” the Silicon Valley created moniker for entities realizing market valuations of over $1B. He is the author of “Crash Course: A Radical Plan for Improving Public Education.”Inspired by his own, year-long, post-college circuit of the globe and by the 180 full-ride, 5-year scholarships he funded to his alma mater which included a year abroad, Chris conceived and is full-time Executive Chairman of Baret Scholars. He regrets being one of only two monoglots on our team but argues his lingering southern accent qualifies him as bilingual.
Since receiving his MBA from Stanford, Tomas has been a peripatetic problem-solver, a continent and career hopper: beginning his career as an Analyst at McKinsey, he has since been as an executive in Latin America and Europe in tech and media, for both start-ups and long-standing organizations. He has also worked in venture capital in Paris and London. His talent for organization is such that he even rustled up an international University Polo tour around the US in just one week.
Since joining Baret in the spring of 2025, Tomas has made everyone’s lives easier with his dry wit and pecuniary sense. He understands what it takes to sustain financial and operational systems across currencies, cultures, and time zones. Forgive the sports metaphor, but we like to think of him as the jockey who rides our financial and operational horse, making sure our bold vision for our scholars’ best year yet proceeds at a smooth gallop.
Reading the Iliad and the Odyssey in the original Homeric Greek and hosting one of the largest and most successful parties Yale has ever seen (Electro) reveal the range of Farhad’s personality. He’s a natural-born advisor to students. Following Yale, he worked at ReD Associates in New York and Copenhagen, but he soon moved back to India to form a highly successful, full-service college consultancy, guiding 100s of students over a decade. Studying to one day become a psychoanalyst, his Saturdays in London are spent at an institute understanding Freud and Lacan. He enjoys writing metrical poetry and is the author of a beautiful book on grammar— he also co-wrote and edited the book you are reading right now. We’re told he can identify almost any tree in Delhi where he also became a national level swimmer. Quitting his first job, he took a gap year around his home country of India, in Greece (Athens, Delphi, Arcadia, Hydra), Israel, Jordan and Thailand. Crossing the Allenby Bridge into Jordan during that year remains an important moment for him.
With a mother who was the Rhonda in The Beach Boys hit “Help Me Rhonda” and a stepfather who was twice Mexico’s Ambassador to the United Nations, the easy path would have been to become a diplomat (or groupie!). She chose the world of art. For 20 years, Alexandra has broadened access to art as an editor and publisher of over 100 art titles; she’s been the artistic director of several leading international galleries and curator of important art exhibitions. She’s held publisher or editor positions at Turner Libros and A&R Press. In São Paulo, she co-founded and was Artistic Director of Associação para o Patronato Contemporâneo and was Artistic Director for Galeria Nara Roesler. For the 2015 Venice Biennale, she produced the monumental Dansekwa and Lee Ufan exhibition. Alexandra opened the first Latin American gallery, Galeria Nara Roesler, in New York City. She is right at home in Basel, Hong Kong, Miami, FIAC in Paris, or MACO in Mexico City.
Her mandate includes production of The Morning Program.
While his Italian grandfather was scoring goals for AS Roma, his Brazilian grandfather built roads, bridges, and tunnels as Secretary of Transportation for the State of São Paulo. Guilherme’s life has merged the two fields with a career in sports and transportation—and a healthy dash of education. His career included nearly a decade with world shipping giants, including Maersk. In the past decade, he had leadership posts at Somos, one of Brazil’s most important education companies. He co-founded Complete Sports Solution Complete Sports Solution, an organization taking Brazilian student-athletes around the world for training. His life has been a rolling, global experience! Following an early childhood in Brazil, he did his high school days in Milan, Italy and his university ones in England. For 11 months, he signed on to the crew of a cruise ship, visiting ports from the Black Sea to Drake’s Passage. His career in shipping led him to live in Norway and Denmark, and while on a sabbatical year of volunteer work, he set up camp in Mozambique and Zambia. Buenos Aires remains one of his favorite cities and he believes Patagonia, one of Baret’s Fellowship locations, is the most beautiful place in the world.
Surrounded by the beauty of the South China Sea, Hainan Island was Naijing’s first home. Alongside a rigorous high school education, Naijing also taught herself the US high school curriculum in countless libraries and cafes in her hometown, designing her course of study along with her parents. It worked—and her self-study established a thread of educational endeavors throughout her life, including her recent Master's degree in Education from the University of Oxford. Naijing brings to Baret a deep belief in the power of educational design informed by data-based learning methods. At the age of 15, she founded her first school, a summer camp for primary schoolers in the fishing village where her mother grew up. During Cambridge and then at Deloitte, she was co-founder and Chair of the Trustees of DirectEd Development Foundation, providing coding bootcamps to 150+ under-resourced students in Kenya and Ethiopia. A few thousand hours short of the blues scales she desires, she’s working on her jazz piano.
Road tripping as a youngster from a small Wisconsin town across all 48 continental United States, she seemed destined to go beyond them. And she did, particularly to India. Kalady has won 15 scholarships, research awards, and fellowships, including a U.S. Department of State Fulbright/Nehru Student Research Award: India became her second home, and Bangla and Hindi her second and third souls. To help other students benefit as she has from scholarship opportunities, in her spare time, Kalady advises college students on grant-writing for Fulbright awards and serves as a volunteer for the Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship awards. In addition, she helps scientific expeditions connect with students to increase the diversity of students in exploration and research.
Xian is from Harbin, famously known as the “Ice City”, home to the world’s biggest ice sculptures. And, true to her roots, Xian has sculpted an incredible and inspiring career for herself. She attended Harbin’s first bilingual boarding school, a foreign language private school in Beijing and then, at age 14, left China to pursue her A-level studies in the UK.
At school and university, Xian focused her attention on drama – having been inspired by her role as Hermia in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. She attended the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London where she produced two commercially successful plays (Lovesong by Abi Morgan and Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen) and took them on tour to Beijing and Shanghai. However, Xian’s love of drama didn’t continue on stage but she found her own Lovesong in the theatre of education. She returned to China to take on the role of Head of Enrichment at Beijing BISS International School and was soon a part of their Senior Leadership Team.
She’s a champion of bespoke learning, finding unique ways to enhance a student’s educational journey. At BISS, she developed new Extra-curricular Activities, Events, Festivals, and student leadership related projects in mentorship and entrepreneurship. After her global educational experience, she’s passionate about creating responsible, resilient, and reflective global citizens.
Isabella has volunteered at an animal refuge in Bolivia, helped build a school in Uganda, taught English in Spanish prisons, and worked as an intelligence analyst in London. Though it might be hard to join those dots, for Isabella it’s simple: she’s fascinated by people and inspired by travel.
Raised in London by German parents, Isabella took a gap year after school to explore Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, and Uganda. Her travel and experiences brought her to Madrid to study psychology, Spanish, and International Studies. However, Isabella wasn’t content with just being a student – she wanted to work with people, and she found a volunteer position at a Spanish prison that changed the course of her career. Teaching in prison showed her that she wanted to be a step ahead of crime – not working in its aftermath. Isabella then went to get Masters in Forensic Psychology at Newcastle
University and then moved to London where she pursued a career in intelligence analysis and strategic campaigning. She worked tirelessly to stay that step ahead, becoming an expert in decoding behaviours and understanding the complexities of people.
Now in Mexico, she brings her range of expertise and understanding of how careers and passions emerge to our programming efforts at Baret Scholars.
A native of Michoacán, Mexico’s Avocadoland, Daniel developed a profound interest in international affairs from an early age. In fact, he organized his very own model UN in middle school: to engender better relations among his young classmates.
His passion for creating these better relations continued – on a much more international scale - and he went to Mexico City to study International Relations and later to serve in his country’s Foreign Service Corps. After serving for six years, Daniel decided to broaden his horizons and enrolled in Columbia University’s graduate program in International Studies. During his time in New York City, Daniel even had the opportunity to achieve one of his long-desired goals: to work at the United Nations Headquarters. The M had fallen out of MUN; Daniel had a come long way from middle school.
Education has been central to Daniel’s and his family’s endeavors. Both his parents taught in classrooms and held senior academic positions. Daniel is committed to bringing diverse people together and engendering dialogue, essential qualities for his work in the programming team at Baret.
Muzi is, like many of his Baret Colleagues, exceptionally well-traveled. Born in Jiangsu Province and spending part of his childhood in Johannesburg, South Africa, he spent one year at Fudan University studying Biology before coming to Los Angeles to study Math and Applied Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. His career has taken him as far afield as Vancouver and Johannesburg. He has the questionable privilege of being the only Baret member to have been captured by a baboon (don’t worry, his mother rescued him!).
Muzi’s expertise is finance. In his career, he has been an financial analyst for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, an Investment Analyst for Yingjia Capital in Shanghai, and an accountant for Lincket Technology. Muzi is also a talented lyricist, having written lyrics for the songs for many Chinese TV dramas and pieces with other artists as well.
Muzi’s role at Baret is as diverse as his talents. He contributes to the development of Baret’s programming, while also coordinating financial operations, social media, and outreach in China– and if Baret ever needs to write its own song, we know Muzi will be there.
Ma Jing brings almost a decade of experience in mass media and digital communication to Baret. With extensive experience as an anchor woman and producer for the Beijing Finance Channel, she will spearhead our social media strategy in China. Like all of us at Baret, she is passionate about education and its role in changing the minds of young people. Her background in television, as well as her master’s degree in entrepreneurship management, will make her a valuable addition to our recruitment team.
Ma Jing’s first response to learning about the Baret Scholars program was that she wanted to join the program–not as a member of the Global Team, but as a student. Baret’s President, Li Jing, reluctantly had to inform Ma Jing that she was a little too old for the program. Luckily Ma Jing is an avid meditator, and was able to accept this disappointment with aplomb. A marathon and trail runner, as well as a boxer, she also won’t hesitate to challenge you to a deadlift competition. She’s always willing to try new things and believes in living in the present, and as Baret is all about trying new things, she fits right in with our ethos and culture.
Evan’s desk drawers (like himself) are capacious and full of potential: it’s where three versions of his entire novel live. To be in conversation with Evan is a calming, creative, and cultured experience. He brings the care of the 650 person small town of Windsor, Massachusetts where he grew up, the empathetic listening he learned as a crisis counselor for Alachua County during the pandemic, the philosophy he read at Williams, and the voice of Peter Griffin from Family Guy.
Evan used to play baritone saxophone, and you can tell — His sensitivity and sensibility play out musically on the page. His writing has been mentioned in the New York Times; he was an author’s must read at Pocket in 2023, and his fiction, criticism, and personal essays are in places like the Los Angeles Review of Books, Southern Humanities Review, and the media newsletter Dirt.
After graduating from Williams in 2013, Evan interned at the highly reputed publishing house Farrar Straus & Giroux. He then went on to get an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Florida where he then spent 3 years as an adjunct professor and tutor. At Baret, Evan distills our global program and its people into the ever growing and galloping sentences that you read about us.
Viraj, a recent graduate of NYU and teacher at Success Academy Charter Schools, is the youngest member of Baret’s global team, bringing a special, youthful perspective to Baret’s Global team. Having made the Dean’s List at NYU, focusing on psychology, finance, and marketing, he has a prestigious academic track record, and impressive internships at KPMG Global Services where he contributed to M&A projects as well as data analysis. His background, warmth, and expertise will be an enormous asset to our recruitment team.
Viraj’s roots with Baret go all the way back to high school, where our very own Head of Global Recruitment, Farhad Anklesaria, was his ACT prep tutor. Viraj claims to have nearly perfect recall for birthdays (a 95% success rate!), so feel free to test him on that, as many of us are skeptical. He can also recite the lyrics to most post-millenium Bollywood, and as a traveler, he is willing to do anything to see the sights: for example, he once went to Ibiza for one day to see Calvin Harris perform. This kind of love of the journey is what Baret is all about, and we know Viraj’s expertise as an educator will bring great dividends to our Recruitment team.
Born in Argentina, Marie has a strong sense of adventure and curiosity, which she gets from her father. A soldier in World War II, he was stationed in India for three years, and his tales have long inspired Marie to make memories of her own abroad. In one sense, Baret is taking her on those adventures, and in another, she is taking Baret: as part of Baret’s advance location scouting team and an absolutely essential part of its production team, Baret would not be able to get off the ground without her.
Marie’s career is a story of a firebrand entrepreneurial spirit: beginning as an executive assistant, she transitioned to selling spare parts for heavy machinery and then to teaching English for over a decade. She came into event organizing rather unexpectedly: organizing small happy hour meetups to reconnect with friends, she suddenly found herself orchestrating large-scale events with up to 3,500 attendees. For the past twenty years she has been the behind-the-scenes magic for a variety of corporate and social events.
An avid athlete, she has been the captain of her club’s tennis team for many years. Her drive to make our Morning Program a truly special event is felt day-in, day-out at Baret.
Florencia grew up in a family of Spanish and Italian descent, and in her own words, it was a very diverse family. When she was 16, she went to London for a month to improve her English and meet people from other nationalities. This formational experience gave her the resolve to make a life of these sorts of experiences, and now she has friends from all over the world!
Florencia has worked in marketing and event production ever since she was 20 years old, and has been organizing events across America ever since. She is a font of curiosity: meeting people from different countries, learning about their customs and cultures, is a source of enormous enrichment. Joining Baret was an easy decision: where else could she get such an opportunity to see the world? And be aware when traveling with Florencia: a lover of Broadway, she is especially enamored with musical comedy, and if she sees a mic and a stage, she will jump up and sing!
Florencia is one-half of Baret’s advance team and an absolutely vital part of the behind-the-scenes work that keeps our Morning Program running so smoothly: before Baret arrives in any region, she has been there to scout locations and collaborate with our local contacts. We could not do it without her.
Originally from Chicago, Sophie moved south to pursue a Bachelor’s in Marine Biology, Chemistry and Studio Art at the College of Charleston. After graduating, she was awarded back-to-back Fulbright grants to teach in Mexico. Sophie likes to make friends with everyone she meets: as an educational diver at the deepest aquarium in the United States, she had, in her own words, a very amicable relationship with a red snapper who would follow her around the tank whenever she entered.
Sophie’s greatest joy is to facilitate learning, exploration and creativity (preferably all at once). She designed REACH at the Island School in the Bahamas, a summer program for college students that included scuba lessons and overnight camping trips, and subsequently spearheaded program design at Expedition Audacity and Reach The World. She has led classrooms on the decks of kayaks, while harnessed to rock climbing walls, and inside the splattered walls of art studios.
Sophie is also a dedicated artist working in a number of mediums. She studied screenprinting at Studio Kraków in Poland and Risograph Printing at the School of Visual Art in NYC. She also created her own bespoke coloring book based on her experience in her Fulbright in Mexico.
Born in Paris and raised in the Tramuntana Mountains of Mallorca, at 16, Olivia left for a UK boarding school to pursue art. During her gap year she spent three transformative months in rural Nepal on a project supporting access to education for girls of all ages. Olivia then graduated with a First in Fine Art from Oxford University, where she secured funding & support to create a film about dyslexia, which was exhibited at international conferences and made its way to the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission.
Her love of starting with a blank page in a studio transitioned into a love of the zero-to-one stage of startups, leading her to join PreWwarp, a fashion-tech startup. She was also part of the founding team of open-ended design, curating art & tech conversations, launching 30+ podcast episodes, and producing two art-tech summits. She was the Event & Creative Producer for the LabKO Summit with KOKO, helping to curate the launch of a tech design platform hosting the world’s most exciting tech innovators and thought leaders. From set design to ceramics, Olivia enjoys thinking on different scales, and her next project, CIRCOL, a semi-circular sketchbook, launched this summer.
Born in Koblenz, Germany, in the last ten years Caren has lived in six countries. As an undergraduate, she earned a degree in Business Administration and Management at WHU - Otto Beishem School of Management, traveling to China, England, and Spain through internships and study abroad opportunities to see international collaborations first-hand. She moved on to Durham University in London, where she obtained an MSc in International Business and French. Throughout her education, she retained her sense that leadership was vital to any business.
While studying, she was recruited by Google to join their marketing solutions team in Dublin. While there, she also became an #IAmRemarkable facilitator to encourage underrepresented minorities to speak up about their achievements at the workplace. Her next stop was at Russell Reynolds & Associates, where she worked on everything from CEO searches to helping author a “CEO Review” of leaders in the consumer sector. Her interest in giving back continued, as she supported the Smart Works Charity and the Princess Trust. She loves cooking and trying out new recipes, particularly Mediterranean dishes.
Caren's fascination with leadership and international innovation, in addition to her warmth and compassion, is what makes her so vital as a member of Baret. Leading Fellowships primarily in Innovation, she will bring her considerable acumen in international business to her mentorship of scholars.
An old saying goes: “the front-line troops are always in favor of retreat.” Not so with Kristal Shipe. For 38 years she has not just held the line but run to the problem, any problem she has been asked to tackle. She does so with a patience and charm that belies her immense capacities. In 1983, she joined Whittle Communications (then called 13-30), a rapidly rising media endeavor with team members scattered across 7 buildings in Knoxville. Two years later she became the EA of Chris Whittle, and for nearly 4 decades hence, she has helped make possible the 5 media and educational endeavors he founded. Though in later years not based where the companies were, during the annoying days of dial-up, she could have patented the concept of virtual work. Her home base in Knoxville is not an outpost of, but an inbox for the leadership teams she has helped coordinate. For sanity, she’s a strength and fitness buff, owning Downtown Gym. She’s a top-shelf gardener, hands deep in the dirt.
If you’ve ever met Eduardo, you know his energy is infectious. A lover of life, Eduardo appreciates that nothing lasts forever. He started working at 17 in the world of finance, having been selected to be a part of a prestigious young cohort of JPMorgan professionals, traveling the world and becoming a global citizen in the process. The experience changed his life: he knew that the global life was the life for him.
He sees in Baret the same advantages: the opportunity to make lifelong friendships, experience the world in all its vast diversity, while honing one’s critical thinking and values along the way. Opportunities like the one Baret provides are not to be missed. He sees valuei n meeting and connecting with people unlike him, and is excited to help Baret grow a network of alumni that willr each to all four corners of the world.
After 13 years at JP Morgan, together with a partner he opened the Rep Office of Oppenheimer and Co. in Brazil as Managing Director. A few years later he founded Rafter Investimentos, a boutique investment management firm. He loved the bird’s eye view that one gets while managing money. He is currently in the process of fully divesting from Rafter and joining the Advisory Board of a preeminent Multi Family Office in Brazil. Father to three boys and married for forty years, he makes time for his daily meditation and sports routine and also to tour the world on his motorcycle, and now, to advise and help lead Baret into the future. We’re thrilled to have his expertise and enthusiasm to guide us.
Salta, Argentina to Bremen, Germany is 6,958 miles. To a 16-year-old, it's even further. During high school, Fernando thought a year outside his home country would broaden his education, and off he went from Bachillerato Humanista Moderno to Ökumenisches Gymnasium zu Bremen. He looks back on this year as foundational to his multi-cultural life. His 30-year financial career took him further afield to Hong Kong, New York, London, and Madrid. JP Morgan was the first decade and foundation of his professional path in finance before launching his own asset management company focused on hedge funds, Antarctica Asset Management in 2001, and after that BAU Advisors with a broader investment mandate in 2015. BAU, with partners in New York, Buenos Aires, and Miami, operates across a number of sectors, but one appealed particularly to Baret: a focus on the financing of cultural institutions from museums to schools. Over the past 15 months, BAU has provided instrumental advice on our global corporate structure, our financing strategy and broadly on our capital raising efforts. They also introduced us to both our CEO and our Co-President.As an Advisory Board Member, Fernando will continue to do what he has already done for Baret: guide us in a wide range of matters from capital to program. Fernando says: “I firmly believe having more than 100 best friends is possible.” Baret’s team looks forward to being 20 or more of those.
Francisco spent his youth almost entirely on the 35th parallel, albeit in two different hemispheres. A childhood in Buenos Aires (35.9 degrees South) and his college days in Chapel Hill (34.6 degrees North) were interrupted only by a year-long exchange program as a high school senior in Columbia, Missouri. “It was tough: different language, different country, different culture, and my first time away from home,” he recalls. “But after that experience, my desire to get to know the rest of the world increased significantly: After my first year in college, I backpacked around the globe.” He and an Argentinian friend (see Fernando Moncho Lobo, another Baret Advisory Board member) both applied for scholarships to UNC—and they both won. Little did they know then that their careers would intersect at JP Morgan and that they would later co-found both Antarctica Asset Management and then BAU Advisors.Francisco serves on the Board of Advisors of Baret Scholars and, since our inception, has guided the organization in multiple ways, including being one of its earliest investors. His parents are founders of a significant Buenos Aires school and his father was the Secretary of Education in Argentina: Francisco brings a wealth of educational experience to Baret.
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