Megan Epler Wood
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
Megan Epler Wood is a conservationist, ecotourism pioneer, research leader and consultant on questions of managing sustainable tourism for destinations, business, and civil society.
She has led her firm EplerWood International since 2003 to design net positive regional tourism development projects working in over 35 countries with support from the World Bank, IFC, IDB, GIZ and USAID. Since 2010 her research and teaching with Harvard and Cornell universities vetted a wide range of solutions to help protect destinations using business management techniques dedicated to long-term conservation and local well-being, environmental and public health, social science, advanced technology and landscape design, and biodiversity research.
She is dedicated to helping global industry and governments to leverage the positives of tourism while genuinely addressing the tough questions of managing tourism as it scales upward without the local skills, metrics, or governmental oversight required.
Epler Wood wrote her 2017 book, Sustainable Tourism on a Finite Planet and the 2019 report Destinations at Risk: The Invisible Burden of Tourism to address these gaps and review solutions. Her latest 2020 report, A Marshall Plan for Tourism: Can it be built? asks how a travel and tourism economic recovery from COVID 19 can be financed via blended investment which focuses on small and medium enterprises and destination sustainability for the long-term.
Supriya A N
COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER
Supriya manages EplerWood International’s communications efforts via public relations, social media, and events.
She hails from India and has a graduate degree in biotechnology. She has 12 years of experience working in various verticals like market research, Spanish language translation, travel intelligence, and digital marketing. Her first job monitoring the social and traditional media of a leading US airline inspired her to take a plunge into the travel and hospitality domain.
She pursued a Master in International Tourism from Ostelea School of Tourism and Hospitality in Barcelona. She has worked with various clients in the industry – like Sustainability Leaders United, Enchanting Travels, and Timeless Travels Magazine, among others.
Supriya’s core skills are project management, social media, and content marketing. She currently works as a freelancer in the sustainable tourism domain consulting brands with their content and social media marketing needs.
Sofia Fotiadou
SUPPORTING RESEARCH MANAGER
Sofia Fotiadou is the Eco-design & Sustainability Lead for an international company specializing in the design and construction of major transport infrastructure based in Paris.
From 2016-2018, she was the Research Manager at the International Sustainable Tourism Initiative (ISTI) of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she oversaw the Tourism and Environmental Health in a Changing Climate project. Within this project, she has worked on the development of an ISTI Framework for Sustainable Destinations and a pilot implementation of the framework, funded by GIZ, in two destinations in Tunisia.
Sofia is an Architect-Engineer and holds a Master’s degree in Sustainability from Harvard University DCE. She has a strong technical background with many years of experience in buildings and infrastructure, design and construction. As a researcher, she has worked on research on Mediterranean tourist destinations with a focus on direct and indirect impacts of tourism’s water and energy consumption, short and long-term effects of climate change on destinations, and carbon management at the accommodation and destination level.