Ernesto is an organizational development and management consultant with over 15 years of professional experience in strategic thinking, management, leadership, and communications. Currently, he provides consulting services in organizational design, leadership, management, capacity building, and innovation for the private and public sectors in Puerto Rico, the United States, the USVI, and Latin America.

Ernesto’s thriving and diverse track record began as a Lecturer at the StateUniversity of New York at Albany, then as InternationalPublishers Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean(overseeing 33 national markets) with Williams & Wilkins, a US scientific publisher. He then led the design and development of the first Internet-based non-profit technology project to help homeless service provision in Puerto Rico by bridging service gaps, generating knowledge, and providing good data for research through a network of 30+ community-based organizations (the project received a perfect evaluation from its primary funder, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development). He was then recruited as Executive Director of the Humane Society of Puerto Rico (www.hspr.org), after which he re-established his private consulting practice in 2007 to support business decision-makers in a variety of private companies(Liberty Cable, Banco Popular, Kellogg, CEMEX), public companies (IESS– Ecuador, AEE, AAA), and municipal governments (City of Caguas), as well as non-profit organizations (Fundación Ángel Ramos, Fundación Sila Calderón, Estancia Corazón), and emerging organizations. An intermittent professor at the University of Sacred Heart, Ernesto teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Management, Program Evaluation, Entrepreneurship, and Business Planning, which allows him to engage in actual exercises. As an entrepreneur, Ernesto serves as Chief Strategist for GCP, LLC, a local research and development startup that has created a patent-pending device (TEBS - TrafficEnergy Bar System, www.tebsystem.co) to generate electric energy from moving vehicular traffic that won 3 prizes in a global hackathon to reduce the global carbon footprint (http://www.decarbonathon.org/en/challenges/decarbonathon ).

Aside from professional commitments, Ernesto has exercised leadership in the non-profit sector as co-founder of the Puerto RicoCreative Economy Initiative (www.prcei.org) and Cluster de IndustriasCreativas de Puerto Rico (www.clicpr.org), both of which aim to promote economic development based on Puerto Rico’s creative industries. He is also a founding board member and Secretary of theNational Human Services Data Consortium (www.nhsdc.org) in Washington DC; as an incorporator, Chair, and Treasurer of the Coaliciónde Apoyo Continuo a Personas Sin Hogar en San Juan (Coalition of the Continued Support of the Homeless in San Juan), the city’s preeminent homeless service network provider with over 30 service provider organizations.

He has also been an active collaborator as a consultant to the Department of Housing and Urban Development of the US, as a member of several grant evaluation committees for private non-profits, and the PR Department of Family Affairs. He is co-founder of the Internet Society- Puerto Rico Chapter (www.isocpr.org) and a past board member. In addition, Ernesto has provided comments for pending legislation to create public policy in economic development, technology, homelessness, and animal welfare.

Ernesto graduated with honors from the University of Puerto Rico, receiving a B.A. in Economics and Finance. He also holds graduate degrees from the University at Albany – State University of New York (1997), where he received a MA in Latin American & Caribbean Studies, specializing in economic development in the Caribbean, and Sacred Heart University in Puerto Rico(2006) where he received an MS in Non-Profit Management. More recently, he was certified as an executive coach by the University of Puerto Rico (2008), the first program of its nature in Puerto Rico, with accreditation from the International Coach Federation. In addition, he completed a professional training certification in project management by New Horizons, a private, professional development company.