I work at the seam between worlds.
Most of my career has been spent in the space where things don’t quite translate — where a regulator’s framework needs to reach a village, where a research finding needs to move a minister, where a clinician’s insight needs to reach a woman in crisis, where an executive’s intent needs to land in a room that wasn’t built to hear them.
That space is where I’ve found my work.
Over two decades, I’ve moved between disciplines, sectors and continents. I began in research, at the Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, where I co-led research teams on climate, energy, and human security, and helped manage a three-year ASEAN–Canada partnership funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre. I continued that work at the Australian National University, studying faith-based environmentalism in Indonesia.
From research I moved into convening and capacity building – as Co-Director of the Young Digital Media Professionals Initiative at the East-West Center in Honolulu, where I co-designed six-week virtual institutes on environment, technology, and governance for fellows across Southeast Asia. And as Co-Founder of Hornbills: Concepts and Communications in Singapore, where we’ve worked with water tech and renewable energy companies, B2B consultancies, healthcare providers, professional bodies, and regional think tanks across Asia, the Middle East, and North America.
Today, as Editor at Welchman Keen, I help shape thought leadership and programme design across the Pacific, Asia, the Americas, and Europe — including the Economic Micro-Hub initiative in Vanuatu.
The thread running through all of it: translating complex ideas into forms that move the people who need them.
Today, my work sits across three practices:
– Thought leadership and executive voice – for leaders who need to be heard, credibly and consistently.
– Research-to-narrative – turning dense research, policy, and evaluation into work that travels across audiences and languages.
– Programme architecture – designing initiatives that hold together across very different stakeholders, from cabinet rooms to community workshops.
Underneath all three is the same craft: knowing what to say, how to say it, and which world it needs to reach.
So here’s a Singapore local that thinks and works global.
If you’re working on something that needs to move across worlds, I’d be keen to hear about it.
Sofiah Jamil 