Ryder Rogers serves as Director of the Environment Office for USAID’s Philippines, Pacific Islands, and Mongolia Mission. He has been a Foreign Service Officer with USAID since 2008, most recently serving as Director of USAID/Central Asia’s Economic Development Office, based in Almaty, Kazakhstan. There he oversaw USAID’s regional portfolio for trade, energy, and environmental resources management. From 2016 to 2018, he served in Uzbekistan, leading USAID’s trade facilitation efforts including spearheading USAID’s support for Uzbekistan’s economic reform agenda. Prior to his time in Central Asia, Mr. Rogers was the Capacity Building Division Chief in USAID/Washington’s Office of Economic Policy (EP), leading the Agency’s efforts on Domestic Resource Mobilization and Public Financial Management (PFM). Mr. Rogers also served as the Director of USAID/Timor-Leste’s Economic Growth Office. His first Foreign Service assignment was in Kyiv, Ukraine, supporting local competitiveness work, with a focus in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Mr. Rogers began his career in international development as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ust-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan, teaching business administration to university students and working to develop local non-governmental organizations. Ryder is joined in Manila by his wife Nailya, and their three children.

Dr. Jose Santos R. Carandang VI is the Vice President for Academic Affairs and concurrent Dean of the National Defense College of the Philippines (NDCP). He is an alumnus of the Master in National Security Administration (MNSA) Regular Class 42 and the Armed Forces of the Philippines Command and General Staff Course (CGSC) Class 51. He has been a member of the Armed Forces of the Philippines Ready Reserve Force for more than 20 years. His current rank is permanent Full Colonel in the Corps of Professors Reserve Force.

Dr. Carandang took his mandatory retirement at age 60, as Professor of Biology and Research Fellow in 2018 at De La Salle University (DLSU) where he was a Lasallian academic for almost 40 years. After a few months, he came back to full time teaching as a Senior Lecturer. He is now on secondment from De La Salle University to the National Defense College of the Philippines.

His recent publications are mostly on food and water security, environmental management and in the biological control of invasive species affecting food production as well as in sustainability science and urban farming. The latter two research agenda are in collaboration with Dr. Robert Taylor of Montclair State University. Dr. Carandang’s academic leadership and management experiences at DLSU include being the Dean of the College of Science, the Chair of the Biology Department and the Director of several offices including the Center for Natural Science and Environmental Research, the Food Institute, the Environmental Research Center and the Alfred Shields Marine Station.

Dr. Carandang earned his doctorate in Natural Science (Dr. rer. Nat.) from the University of Wuerzburg in Germany in 1992 as a German Academic Exchange Services scholar and did his three post-doctoral research projects in Plant Stress Physiology at the same university with the same scholarship. He earned his second doctorate degree, Doctor of Philosophy in Educational Leadership and Management from De La Salle University in 2018. He has a Master in National Security Administration (MNSA) degree from NDCP and a Master of Science in Biology degree from De La Salle University. His Bachelor of Science in Biology degree is from Adamson University.

He was visiting Professor at Lasalle Beauvais in France in 2012. He was also a pioneer module writer and tutor at the University of the Philippines Open University. Furthermore, he was the Member of Biology of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) Technical Panel for Science and Mathematics for more than a decade, and a reviewer of the Environmental Management Bureau for the Environmental Impact Assessment Process. He is also a Regular Member of the National Research Council of the Philippines.