By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

When Mara Topping, a partner in the D.C. office of White & Case, was a young girl, she lived in five countries on three continents, moving wherever her father, a high ranking USAID official, was stationed. Her childhood abroad—and her experiences with the beauty, diversity and poverty in Africa in particular—triggered a lifelong interest in other cultures and in international development. She applies this passion to her role as the head of the fund formation practice in the D.C. office of White & Case. “Emerging markets are a good part of the focus of the work that I do in private equity fund formation. I feel very good about seeing foreign capital mobilized into emerging markets where there is tremendous economic opportunity and a great deal of need.”

But the road to fund formation was not a direct one—Topping originally pursued a career in archeology. “Between Rome and Tunisia where I lived when I was younger, there are some of the best classical Roman sites in the world. It would have been hard for me not to be an archeologist. The experience of living in different cultures and the cultural diversity and issues of international development and social and cultural change were what I grew up with. And that’s what archeology really is—looking at long term cultural change and how societies develop and why.”

She completed her undergraduate archeology degree at Cornell University and a Master’s degree at the prestigious Institute of Archeology at the University of London. Topping went on to earn a Ph.D. in archeology from the University of Chicago, using two of the three Fulbright Scholarships she’d been awarded to do her Ph.D fieldwork in the Fiji Islands. There, she excavated one of only two known large pre-historic South Pacific ocean-going vessels.

Read more