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University of Cape Town Fund Inc.
201 Allen St Unit #10019, New York, NY 10002

UCT Fund Board of Directors


Jeannette Safi, Board Chair President and Assistant Treasurer
Paul Kumleben, Secretary and Director
Duncan Robertson, Treasurer and Director
Roxsanne Dyssell, Director
Valerie Mizrahi, Director
David P. Meachin, Director



Jeannette Safi

Jeannette Safi, Board Chair President and Assistant Treasurer
Jeanette Safi

Jeannette Safi is Chair, President, and Assistant Treasurer of the UCT Fund Inc., having joined the Board in 2015. She is a New York admitted attorney, legal and business advisor, and strategist, with extensive corporate law experience, capital raising and management expertise, and transactional prowess. With over 15 years of experience advising global companies on all aspects of business formation and growth in both developed and emerging markets, Jeannette currently consults on corporate transactions and strategic matters across multiple jurisdictions.

Born and raised in Lesotho, Ms. Safi received her Bachelor of Laws (cum laude) from the University of Cape Town in 2006. Jeannette began her legal career at the world-renowned law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, practicing for over a decade in their New York, London, and Paris offices. During her tenure, she represented major financial institutions, investment banks, and global corporations, leading hundreds of deals that raised over US$10 billion in equity financing and secured over US$70 billion in debt funding. Her expertise spans public and private equity and debt offerings, including IPOs, spin-offs, and acquisition financings.

More recently, Jeannette has broadened her practice to include transactional and advisory work in the venture capital markets. She is passionate about harnessing legal and business structuring and risk mitigation strategies to overcome barriers to international capital for EM/FM start-ups, particularly in South Africa and on the continent. She has a special interest in non-traditional capital-raising vehicles and ecosystems, such as crypto-funding and blockchain regulatory regimes, and their intersection with conventional securities regulation.

Maintaining strong ties to the UCT community globally, Jeannette is committed to supporting UCT in the US, strengthening inclusion and diversity in alumni engagement and giving, and deepening the community of excellent UCT Ambassadors. As the first female chair of the UCT Fund, she aims to honour this distinction with a special focus on philanthropic initiatives addressing social exclusion and gender-based violence in the domestic law arena.

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Paul Kumleben

Paul Kumleben, Secretary and Director
Paul Kumleben

Paul is Chairman of the UCT Trust UK Board of Trustees, having joined the Board in May 2017. He has served as its Chairman since November 2020. Mr. Kumleben is currently acting as an interim Director of the UCT Fund Board of Trustees.

He was the Managing Partner of the London office of Davis Polk & Wardwell, a law firm with offices in major financial centres in the US, Europe, and Asia, for 22 years and has been Senior Counsel at the firm since 2017. Before moving to London, Paul worked in the firm’s New York and Washington offices.  In 2017 Paul spent a year as a Fellow of Stanford University’s Distinguished Careers Institute.

Paul received a BA from the University of Cape Town, his LLB from the University of Natal, a BA Honours in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar at University College, and a JD from IIT/Kent in Chicago. His non-professional interests include various nonprofit initiatives in education and media across Africa and in the U.K.

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Duncan Robertson

Duncan Robertson, Treasurer and Director
Duncan Robertson

Duncan Robertson is a Director and Treasurer of the UCT Fund. Duncan is partner and Chief Financial Officer of Bridger Holdings, LP, a private investment firm based in Palo Alto, CA. Previously, he was Chief Financial Officer of OpenTable Inc., a Nasdaq-listed provider of online restaurant reservations, which was sold to Booking.com in June 2014.

Before joining Open Table, Duncan was CFO of SnapStick Inc., a mobile application software company, and Aricent Inc., a technology services company purchased by KKR and Sequoia Capital from Flextronics in June 2005. He also worked as vice president finance and investor relations at Flextronics Inc., an electronic manufacturing services provider.

Duncan was a member of the board of directors of Care.com Inc. until IAC Inc. acquired it in December 2019 and was on the board of trustees (including board chair and chair of the investment committee) of the San Francisco Foundation for ten years. Duncan holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Cape Town and an MBA (with high honors) from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

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Roxsanne Dyssell

Roxsanne Dyssell

Roxsanne is a Director at the UCT Fund.  She is the Managing Partner at Afamba International LLC, which specializes in the regulatory, financial, and technical management for prominent satellite companies such as SpaceX, Amazon, Apple, Globalstar, and EutelSat across Africa. 

Roxsanne is responsible for strategic direction, client relations, and fostering innovation within the team bringing together diverse teams composed of engineers, legal practitioners, financial experts, and more. She ensures that they have the systems and tools they need to push the company in the right direction.

Roxsanne, who completed a Bachelor of Science in Environmental & Geographical Science, was the first and only person to get a university degree from her mother’s side of the family.  On her father’s side – they were UCT all the way: a grandmother who was in Fuller, aunts, uncles, siblings, and cousins were all at UCT and a cousin lectured at UCT.

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Valerie Mizrahi

Valerie Mizrahi

Valerie Mizrahi, FRS, is Professor Emerita, Senior Scholar and director of the Molecular Mycobacteriology Research Unit in the Department of Pathology at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where she also serves as a Research Specialist in the Office of the Vice-Chancellor, providing support for research development.

Valerie was born and raised in Zimbabwe. She obtained her BSc, BSc (Hons), and PhD degrees from UCT. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Penn State University, she worked at SmithKline & French in the USA before returning to South Africa to establish a research unit at the South African Institute of Medical Research. She served as founding co-director of the Department of Science & Innovation/ National Research Foundation Centre of Excellence for Biomedical TB Research from 2004-2023 and directed an extramural research unit of the South African Medical Research Council from 2000-2021. She was based at the University of the Witwatersrand and National Health Laboratory Service in Johannesburg for 22 years before moving to UCT in 2011 where she served the professorial director of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IDM) until 2023. She is a former International Research Scholar and Senior International Research Scholar at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (USA). As director of the IDM, Valerie led its growth and advancement to become the largest cross-Faculty postgraduate research institute at UCT and a leading centre of research excellence in Africa renowned for its research and training programmes in tuberculosis, HIV, HIV-associated tuberculosis, and other diseases prevalent in Africa.

Recognized by her peers as a global leader in TB research, Valerie has held an “A” rating from the National Research Foundation of South Africa since 2009. She has published more than 185 original research articles, reviews, commentaries, and book chapters. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, African Academy of Science and Royal Society of South Africa, Associate Fellow of The World Academy of Science, and member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. Her major awards include the 2000 Unesco-L’Oréal For Women in Science Award (Africa & Middle East), the 2013 Christophe Mérieux Prize from the Mérieux Foundation, Gold Medal of the South African Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2016), the Order of the Mapungubwe (Silver, 2007), SAMRC Platinum Award (2017), and Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship (2018). In 2023, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 

Valerie has served on numerous scientific advisory boards and reviews committees locally and abroad. She is currently a member of the Discovery Experts Group of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Board of Governors of the GSK Tres Cantos Open Lab Foundation, and the scientific/external advisory boards of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard, the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, the Seattle TB Research Advancement Centre and the Africa Microscopy Initiative. Valerie has trained more than 80 postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows, some of whom have moved into leadership positions in South Africa and abroad. Valerie has sponsored and/or mentored many other postgraduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty, and has made significant contributions to programs supporting the career development of dozens of early-career researchers from across Africa.

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David J. P. Meachin

David Meachin
David Meachin

David Meachin has served on the Board of the University Cape Town Fund, Inc. since its inception.  He is Chairman and CEO of Cross Border Enterprises, L.L.C., an internationally-oriented financial advisory and strategic consulting firm he founded in 1991 in New York, and which is now based in St. Petersburg, Florida, following 20 years as an investment banker with major Wall Street firms in New York, London and Tokyo, including 10 years as a Managing Director at Merrill Lynch & Company.

Mr. Meachin served on public company boards for 15 years – including Lyondell Chemical Company (NYSE); Millennium Chemicals, Inc. (NYSE), and The Ground Round (NASDAQ).  He was previously a director of an Indian Growth Fund and of FOCOS Innovations Corp. (IT-Healthcare), and is currently a Director of the Orthopaedic Nurses Certification Board (ONCB), and an Advisory Board Member of Structured Credit International Corp. (SCIC).    He served as a Director and past Chairman of the British American Educational Foundation (BAEF).

Mr. Meachin is a Member of The Economic Clubs of New York and Tampa, the American College of Corporate Directors (ACCD), and the Tampa Bay Area Committee on Foreign Relations.   He is a Member of The Pilgrims of the United States, a Member and former Governor of the Union Club in New York, the Harvard Clubs of New York and Tampa, a Member and former Governor of the Misquamicut Club in Watch Hill, RI, and the Oxford & Cambridge Club in London.

Mr. Meachin received his MBA with Distinction from Harvard Business School.  He has graduate qualifications from Cambridge University and the French Petroleum Institute, Paris, which he attended as the Total Oil Company Postgraduate Scholar from South Africa.  He holds a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Cape Town, where he served on the Students’ Representative Council (SRC), and BS Physical Science (First Class) from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.  He matriculated from Hilton College in KwaZulu-Natal.

David Meachin is a frequent speaker and forum participant on issues of corporate governance, private equity, and investment banking.  In 2017 he received the Marquis Who’s Who Life Time Achievement Award. 

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