Leena is a strategic thinker who has been a fund manager, investment banker, business owner, social entrepreneur, and international affairs and peacebuilding professional since embarking on her career in 1989. She is committed to integrating best practices from the business and social sectors in support of good causes globally.
Inspired by her experiences over a 15-year period while working on conflict transformation projects in multiple countries, Leena published a seminal book on gender equality in December 2021 as part of the Sustainable Development Goals Series co-branded by the United Nations, Palgrave Macmillan and Springer Nature. "No Truth Without Beauty: God, the Qur'an, and Women's Rights" has been widely endorsed by experts and scholars around the globe and welcomed by the international development and diplomatic worlds. It is free to download from the Springer website and on Kindle, while hard copies are available at subsidized prices from most booksellers.
Leena's earlier geographic and start-up expertise consisted of South and South-East Asia, the Middle East and North Africa in the field of conflict mitigation programming; Latin America and Emerging Europe/Middle East/Africa in finance; and London, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico in the business sector.
She has published several articles, spoken extensively on radio and TV, and addressed diverse audiences globally on cross-cultural and interfaith issues. She is a member of the UN's Alliance of Civilizations "Global Experts". Her experience in finance was garnered at British houses Schroders, Foreign and Colonial, and Rothschild's, and at the Dutch ABN AMRO. She studied Economics at the American University of Beirut and Oxford University and speaks Arabic, English, French and Spanish.
Leena is an affiliate member of the Chartered Financial Analysts Institute, has served on the board of American Near East Refugee Aid (2015-2021), and since 2014 has been an oral examiner for Georgetown University's M.S. Foreign Service program.
