Mara is a seasoned corporate sustainability professional with 12+ years of in-depth sustainability/ESG experience in Asia Pacific. She joined ANZ in July 2021 as Director in the ANZ Sustainable Finance International team, based in Singapore, to provide technical sustainability expertise.

Her key expertise is integrating sustainability in business strategy having worked with a wide range of organisations on advancing their sustainability agendas. Extensive sustainability advisory work, community impact, innovative finance and impact investing form part of her track record.

Before joining ANZ in 2021, she worked at Johnson & Johnson as an APAC Director in Global Community Impact where she spearheaded the innovative finance and impact investment strategy for the Asia Pacific region, closing Johnson & Johnson Impact Venture’s first impact investments transactions and social impact bonds in Singapore.

Prior to that, Mara led a sustainability advisory firm in Hong Kong. At CSR Asia (now ELEVATE) - an ESG pioneer in Asia - she led a wide range of sustainability advisory work for hundreds of clients ranging from multinational and local companies to government and non-governmental organisation.  She was also an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong teaching Corporate Sustainability, Shared Value and Inclusive business.

Mara holds a Master’s Degree in Environmental and Energy Management at Bocconi University in Italy and a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics at Transylvania University in Romania. She is a graduate of the Oxford Scenarios Program at the Said Business School, University of Oxford and a systems change practitioner at the School of Systems Change of the Forum for the Future.