Team

Clara H. Whyte is an economist and a political scientist. She holds two Master’s degrees, one in Political Science from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (IEP de Paris – Sciences Po Paris), and one in Ecological Economics from the University of Versailles (France). She also completed many undergraduate and graduate courses in biological sciences (microbiology, neuroscience, biochemistry, pharmacology, food science, plant biology, etc.) with the Université Laval (Québec, Canada).

As a professional, she has almost 25 years of international experience mainly in the Americas, and to a lesser degree in Asia, working with NGOs or on consulting mandates. Fiercely independent, she has extensive experience at building and leading her own projects from scratch.

Over the past few years, she has been working hard at understanding the “existential” and “meaning” crisis that is currently plaguing some parts of the world, by recurring to a multidisciplinary approach based – among other fields – on political and moral philosophy (Western, Chinese, Indian, First Nations), economics, social psychology and psychoneurology. As such, she is able to envision how some complex issues arise from the wrongful interactions of various individual and collective spheres, and this at various levels from the molecular and cellular ones, to the global one. This enables her to escape what some have called the “mereological fallacy” which tends to ascribe problems to lower levels of interventions only, when they really result from a complex blend of multilevel interactions.

Highly skilled in intercultural relations – both at a political level and on the ground, she is fluent in French, English, Spanish and Portuguese. She also has an advanced – although slightly untrained – level in German as well as an intermediate level in Mandarin Chinese.

In 2020, she created Paideia Mundi with the hope of finding solutions to the main crises of our times, including the existential meaning crisis which is at the root of so many destructive tendencies in our societies from the opioid crisis to biodiversity destruction and the climate emergency.

Following chemist Charles P. Snow[1], she believes that this can only be done by fostering a dialogue between the “two cultures”, that is between science and technology on the one hand, and the humanities on the other hand. That requires that we learn to think anew, stop partitioning and isolating the various fields of human knowledge, and envision our societies as complex dynamic systems made up of many interacting realities from the smallest molecular and cellular mechanisms, to the most complex high-level socio-economic and political dynamics. In this setting, she thinks that computational modeling and artificial intelligence – if properly managed – may have a positive and ethical role to play at increasing our understanding of complex public health and social issues, this with the purpose of promoting the wellbeing of all human and living beings on this Planet.

[1] Snow C.P. (1959). The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, The Rede Lecture, Cambridge University Press.