Julian hails from the Pacific Northwest, USA where he graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle with a bachelor’s degree in International Studies. He has been an avid follower of Kiva and its peer-to-peer micro lending model since first learning about it in a college course on the politics and economics of development. After a year-long internship working in Seattle-based Russell Investment’s Global Indexes division, he spent a year working in central Chile for an educational outreach initiative co-administered by the Chilean Ministry of Education and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). He joins Kiva after two and a half years working as a Senior Consultant with Linksbridge SPC, a boutique consultancy in Seattle providing strategy consulting support to a host of local and international organizations working across global health, development, emergencies, and human rights. He looks forward to working directly with constituents in Kiva partner communities to help them access otherwise unavailable financing and help them effectively communicate their stories to the Kiva lending community. As an aficionado of idioms, he is also excited to take on the eccentricities of the Nicaraguan dialect of Spanish.