Former SEC Acting Chair and Commissioner Allison Herren Lee served as Commissioner from June 2019 through July 2022. She served as Acting Chair of the Commission from Jan. 21, 2021 to Apr. 17, 2021. During her tenure, Commissioner Lee focused on bringing transparency and accountability to markets on issues related to climate change and other ESG-related information.

Commissioner Lee has been a securities law practitioner for 25 years. She has written, lectured, and taught courses internationally in Spain and Italy on financial regulation and corporate law. Commissioner Lee served for over a decade in various roles at the SEC, including as counsel to Commissioner Kara Stein and as Senior Counsel in the Division of Enforcement’s Complex Financial Instruments Unit. In addition, she has served as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney, was a member of the American Bar Association’s former Committee on Public Company Disclosure, and participated on a USAID project in Armenia assisting in the drafting of periodic reporting and disclosure provisions for a comprehensive law of the Republic of Armenia on Securities Market Regulation.

Prior to government service, Commissioner Lee was a partner at Sherman & Howard LLC, focusing on securities, antitrust, and commercial litigation. A member of the Colorado bar, she holds a bachelor’s degree in Business from the University of Colorado and a JD from the University of Denver College of Law, where she was salutatorian, a Chancellor’s Scholar, and served on the Law Review.

Gabriela Figueiredo Dias is the IESBA Chair and co-CEO of the International Foundation for Ethics and Audit (IFEA). Gabriela previously served as Executive Chair of the Portuguese Securities Commission (CMVM), the financial markets regulator. She has been member of the Board of IOSCO and ESMA and Vice Chair of OECD Corporate Governance Committee. She is President of the General Board of the University of Coimbra. She has published extensively on topics like capital markets, corporate governance, auditing, and sustainability. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in law from the Coimbra University (Portugal) and a certificate in Leadership and Communications from Nova University (Lisbon).

Jeffrey C. Thomson, CMA, CSCA, CAE, served as president and CEO of IMA® (Institute of Management Accountants) and led the turnaround and transformation of the organization to become one of the fastest growing and most influential accounting associations in the world.  Mr. Thomson retired in April 2023 after nearly 15 years of leading the organization, including two terms serving on the COSO Board..

He currently is Senior Strategic Advisor for Competent Boards, Inc., and Executive in Residence – Thought Leadership for Becker Professional Development, both global brands focused on competency development for senior business leaders in the face of a disruptive, high velocity and transformative global market.  Mr. Thomson was also recently named to the Board of the Coleridge Initiative, a non-profit focused on using data and analytics to effect positive outcomes in US workforce development and K-12 curricula advancement.

Marc is the CFO of Persefoni, prior to which he spent 17 years as Managing Director and Global Co-Head of Corporate Finance Advisory at J.P. Morgan and Managing Director and Global Head at Citi. Before his career on Wall Street, Marc was a Professor of Finance and the Chairman of the finance and economics area at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Marc also serves on the Board of OneSpan, is Executive in Residence at the University of Miami, a Senior Advisor to Radar, and serves as an expert witness.

Mark Babington is the Executive Director of Regulatory Standards at the Financial Reporting Council. He leads the division responsible for the FRC technical and public policy work covering audit, corporate reporting, corporate governance and stewardship, actuarial and the FRC Lab. Prior to joining ExCo, Mark led the FRC’s UK Audit Policy programme, measures to support greater competition in the UK audit market and work to support the reform of international standard setting for auditors, by global regulatory authorities.  Before he joined the FRC, Mark had a twenty-year career in audit and was a Director at the UK National Audit Office.  

Mark is an Independent Governor, Board Member and Chair of the Audit and Risk Committee of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, which is the UK public body dedicated to supporting democracy around the world. He is also a member of the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants, which sets the global Code of Ethics for the accountancy profession, and chairs IESBA’s Sustainability Task Force, tasked with developing revisions to the International Independence Standards. He also represents the FRC on the International Sustainability Standards Board’s Sustainability Standards Advisory Forum. 

Mark Vaessen is President of Accountancy Europe and partner at KPMG, where he is the global head of corporate and sustainability reporting.

In addition to working in practice with global corporations in both an assurance and advisory capacity, he has extensive experience with reporting standard setting, inter alia as a former board member of EFRAG and SASB.

Mark van Baal | Follow This | Shareholders change the world

Mark van Baal is the founder of Follow This, a group of over 9,000 green shareholders in Big Oil. The mission if Follow This is to empower shareholders to compel Big Oil to drive down emissions in line with the Paris Climate Agreement.

Thanks to the votes of institutional investors in favour of the Follow This Climate Resolutions, Shell, Equinor, BP, Phillips66, and Chevron promised to cut product emissions (Scope 3). Now, together with these supporting investors, we must compel Big Oil to cut emissions in line with the Paris Climate Agreement.

The Follow This Climate Resolutions support oil and gas companies to set Paris-consistent reduction targets for Scope 3 (product) emissions in 2030.

Our vision is a financial culture in which investors use their shareholders’ rights to support the long-term interest of companies, the global economy, and the planet.

Mark van Baal (The Hague, 1968) studied Mechanical Engineering, was a conscript navy officer, sales manager and energy journalist before he founded Follow This in 2015. He lives in Amsterdam with his wife Marijke Voerman (1976, interim manager) and their son Barend (2010).