ELIOT PENCE: DIRECTOR
As a Director for the Whitaker Group, Eliot leads the firm’s work in the financial services and energy sectors. Recent projects have included conducting an extensive opportunity landscaping of the West Africa Transform Margin for an independent oil and gas exploration and production company; conducting due-diligence on a power project in West Africa; helping a major commodities producer navigate sector reform in a post-conflict environment and analyzing the role of pension funds in development.Eliot has written extensively on doing business in frontier markets in outlets including CNN and the National Interest. In 2012, he was recognized by Diplomatic Courier as one of the “Top 99 under 33” foreign policy professionals and selected as a Global Governance 2022 Fellow, a program exploring future scenarios of global governance jointly run by the Global Public Policy Institute and Brookings Institute. Eliot holds a Masters degree in International Relations from Yale University, where he was the recipient of the Coca Cola World Fellow and the Kirby Simon Human Rights International Fellow distinctions. While at Yale, he served as an assistant for diplomatic historian Paul Kennedy, published for Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, and contributed to a book publication on the evolution of the World Intellectual Property Organization. His work experience has included working with the World Bank in Nairobi, Kenya, as a Deputy Field Organizer for the Obama presidential campaign, and as a political affairs intern with the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC. Eliot received his BA from the University of Victoria.