Cody Pope

Cody Pope is the Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) at Vector Center and a geopolitical risk expert with a focus on water conflict and the water-food-energy nexus. At Vector Center, Mr. Pope helps global corporations, institutions, and governments predict and understand how rapidly changing water, food, and energy resources will impact stability, supply chains, sustainability, and brand.

Previously, Mr. Pope worked at Horizon Client Access as a consulting senior political risk analyst for Africa, focusing on bespoke projects in the extractives sector. He has nearly a decade of experience working on energy politics, economic policy, and security in central Africa, with a particular focus on the Great Lakes region, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Congo-Brazzaville, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. He has also lived and worked in Kenya and Mozambique.

Before joining Vector Center and Horizon, Cody worked for the World Wildlife Fund in the DRC, and had also worked on security and anti-poaching projects in Mozambique and Uganda. In Uganda, he worked as a mountain gorilla volunteer researcher for the Max-Planck Institute of Germany. He tracked and observed wild gorillas as part a long-term research team. Mr. Pope has lived and worked in various countries in the Great Lakes region on and off since 2007.

Mr. Pope holds a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where he focused on International Security Policy, as well as a dual Bachelor of Sciences in Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Sciences and Anthropology-Zoology from the University of Michigan. At Columbia, he was awarded the AC4 Fellowship, and did extensive research on Congolese mining projects.