Dr. Lisa Maria Rende Taylor

Lisa founded the Issara Institute in 2014 and serves as the Executive Director. She has worked in the field of anti-human trafficking for over 20 years, the last 10 focused on forced labor and human trafficking in global supply chains. Lisa worked in community-based shelters while working on her Ph.D. in Biocultural Anthropology (U Washington), then in her academic work developed the world’s first quantitative predictive model of trafficking risk, based on research with Thai women and girls being trafficked into the Bangkok, Malaysian, and Japanese sex industries. After serving in the U.S. State Department, the Asia Foundation, the ILO, and the UN, she founded the Issara Institute to create a home for innovation, inclusion, and impact in anti-trafficking efforts.

The Inclusive Labor Monitoring (ILM) system and Golden Dreams smartphone app for migrant workers were built within the first five years, now positively impacting hundreds of thousands of workers and survivors each year. The public face of ILM, including real-time metrics on worker-reported labor exploitation, can be found at www.workervoices.org. For more information on the Issara Institute, please visit www.issarainstitute.org.