Dr. Maria Furtwängler
Dr. Maria Furtwängler lives in Munich and has been President of the German Doctors’ Advisory Board since 1998. She supports the organization, especially in cooperation with industry and the media.
Maria Furtwängler first became involved in the work done by the German Doctors in Nairobi. Since then she has visited projects in India several times and was most recently in the Philippines to accompany the development of projects there.
Claudia Brück
Claudia Brück is the managing director for communication, politics, and the campaigns of Fairtrade Deutschland e.V., the association for the promotion of fair trade throughout the world.
She was born in the city Gödenroth in the German federal republic of Rheinland Pfalz in 1968 and studied German philology and regional sciences for Latin America in Madrid, Cologne, and San Miguel de Tucumán (Argentina).
Claudia Brück has been active in Fairtrade since 1999. In her position as spokeswoman for the press and chairwoman for communication and politics, she has continually provided impetus to the sustainability debate.
Since 2012 Claudia Brück has been assistant general manager. She has intensively accompanied the structural changes within the expanding association. The 36 member organizations elected her to the managing board of directors in 2015, and in 2020 she was authorized in this position.
Years of experience in foreign countries and various visits to partner organizations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia have made the needs of the populations in the southern hemisphere the focus of her work.
Claudia Brück lives with the university instructor and coach, Paul Wabner, in Cologne.
Prof. Dr. Peter Eigen
Prof. Dr. Peter Eigen was born in Augsburg in 1938 and was a member of the German Doctors’ Steering Group from 2010 to 2016. Since 2016 he has had a new function on the Advisory Group.
After passing the first and second state examinations, he got his doctorate in law in Frankfurt am Main. He worked for the World Bank, last as Director of the Regional Office for East Africa, from 1967 to 1991.
In addition, he founded Transparency International, the Berlin Civil Society Centre, and the Initiative for Transparency in the Raw-Materials Industry (EITI), of which he was chairman until 2011. Peter Eigen taught at the Frankfurt am Main University, Georgetown, Harvard, and is honorary professor at the Free University in Berlin.
Peter Eigen has three children and performed many missions for the German Doctors together with his now deceased wife, Dr. Jutta Eigen. He is an active member of Kofi Annan’s Africa Progress Panel, is chairman of the Advisory Committee of Transparency International and a member of the Advisory Group of the Humboldt-Viadrina School of Governance in Berlin.
Wolfgang Schaffar
Wolfram Schaffar is a German political scientist, development researcher, and Southeast and East Asian scholar.
Schaffar has held the Chair of Development Policy at the University of Passau since 2021. Previously, he taught as a professor of political science and development studies at the University of Vienna from 2010 and was a regular visiting lecturer at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand, Yangon University, Myanmar, and Jigme Shingye Wangchuk School of Law, Bhutan.
His research focuses on digitization and platformization, social policy, and democratization and de-democratization processes in the Global South, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia.
He supports our work with his expertise in development cooperation issues and the special focus on Asia.
Martin Fuchs
Martin Fuchs advises goverments, parliaments, political parties, and administrations in digital communication.
He studied media economics in Ilmenau und Stuttgart and is a university lecturer for political communication at several universities today. During his activity as an election observer in Hamberg, he blogged about digitalization in politics and is a columnist for the magazine "politik & kommunikation" (politics and communication).
He is often cited as an expert in the fields of social media and politics (http://bit.ly/MartinFuchsMedien). Among his other activities, he serves as a volunteer on the Advisory Board of the Social Media Week Hamburg, as well as a Fellow of the Initiativen Brand New Bundestag (Initiatives of the Brand New Lower House of Parliament) and JoinPolitics aktiv.
The books "Demokratieverstärker" (What Strengthens Democracy) and "Parlamentarische Demokratie heute und morgen" (Parliamentary Democracy Today and Tomorrow), in which he was co-author, have recently been published.
Dieter Pool
Dieter Pool is a freelance communications and fundraising consultant for several organizations and individuals.
He was born in 1953 in Würselen and studied social work in Cologne. From 1979 to 1985, he managed a counseling center for young ethnic German immigrants in Cologne at the International Federation. From 1985 to 2010, he was responsible for public relations and fundraising at UNICEF Germany. During this time, the organization transformed from the volunteer greeting card sales to the important voice for children's rights and the professional fundraising organization.
From 2010-2019, he was Head of Communications and Fundraising at Bread for the World and Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe.
With his retirement in 2019, he started his consulting work and founded the Senior Expert Circle (SEC) network for former NGO leaders who are still consulting in retirement.
Thomas Zeltner
Thomas Zeltner is a nationally and internationally recognized expert in the healthcare sector.
He is founder and first President of the WHO foundation in Geneva and President of the Board of Trustees of the Swiss Red Cross Blood-Donation AG. He is also the President of the Swiss UNESCO Commission and Vice-President of the Viennese Medical University.
Thomas Zeltner was Director of the Swiss Federal Bureau of Health from 1991 to 2009. During this time, he functioned as a central figure in the Swiss healthcare system.
Thomas Zeltner was born in Bern in 1947, studied medicine and law there, became Professor for the Healthcare System at the Bern University in 1991, and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Law by the University of Neuenburg in 2014.
