Tom Mitro is Co-Founder of the Graduate Certificate in Global Energy, Development and Sustainability at the University of Houston. He has 49 years of experience in management, consulting and teaching all aspects of petroleum financial, commercial, and government-related activities, working and living in six countries. For the last 18 years he has been an advisor and trainer for governments, NGO’s, and national companies in Angola, Tanzania, Nigeria, Congo, Mozambique, Guyana, Vietnam, and Canada on commercial, fiscal, decision analysis, governance, and economic modeling topics. Previously, he worked for 30 years for Gulf Oil and Chevron in several senior management positions living in Nigeria, Angola, Papua New Guinea, UK, and Australia. He served as regional Chief Financial Officer for Southern Africa and for Europe with responsibility for managing taxes and fiscal terms, economic evaluations, accounting, compliance, strategic planning, local business development, joint venture management, contracting and procurement, and financing. He has led numerous commercial and government negotiations ranging from tax disputes, LNG agreements, major asset transactions, oil entitlement claims, financing arrangements and joint venture disputes to PSA interpretations and sale and purchase agreements. Since 2014 he has been assisting the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment as a Senior Fellow reviewing and writing policy documents, instructing extractive courses and co-authoring CCSI’s open fiscal model for natural gas upstream, pipeline and LNG developments. He is also co-founder of Indego Africa, an NGO that has been helping provide business management training and expanded market access for groups of women in Rwanda since 2007 and in Ghana since 2015. He holds B.S. in Business Administration and M.A. in Economics degrees from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, USA.