Our Faculty

Leading Experts

Bill Lawry

CEO

Bill Lawry, founder and CEO of Ascend, is a top executive coach specializing in leadership, decision-making, and performance transformation. Based in Abu Dhabi, he works globally with CEOs and senior leaders, including clients like ADNOC, Aramco, Bloomberg, and Deloitte. A senior faculty member at Duke Corporate Education, he holds degrees in psychology and management and certifications from Yale and London Business School.

Clancy Murphy

Executive Director for Building Successful Teams

With more than twenty five years’ expertise gained working in senior leadership and strategic roles across multiple sectors, including Defence Technologies, Financial Services and Manufacturing. helping to make commercial ambition a practical reality. She has strong strategic competencies, as well as organisational redesign, transformation, and team leadership skills: building and supporting compliant agendas, and challenging received thinking as a trusted adviser at board level.

Chris Neighbour

Executive Director of Programmes

Chris Neighbour is a Business Psychologist and Executive Coach with 27 years of experience in leadership development and team dynamics. He has worked globally with top firms like PwC, Amazon, and HSBC, designing leadership programs and coaching teams. An accredited coach with degrees in psychology, he also lectures at LSE and has published with the British Psychological Society.

Anjali Sudarshan

Sr. Manager – Operations & Client Experience

Anjali Sudarshan, Senior Manager – Operations and Client Experience at Ascend, oversees projects, events, and client engagements across the Middle East and globally. Based in Dubai, she holds a Master’s in Events Design and Management and brings a creative approach to execution, working with major clients like ADIA, Deloitte, Bloomberg, and PayPal.

Empowering Success with Passion, Expertise, and Collaboration

Passionate and Impactful Faculty

The faculty brings energy, passion, and a desire to help others succeed, fostering confidence and growth.

Collaborative and Client-Focused Approach

Faculty members emphasize building trust, strong relationships, and achieving results through a pragmatic and people-centric approach.

Diverse Expertise and Global Reach

Faculty members come from varied backgrounds across different sectors and geographies, ensuring the right match for each client’s needs.

Our faculty brings an energy and passion to the table that makes things happen. Driven by a genuine desire to help you succeed, we have a unique perspective that is intuitive and agile, builds confidence, and enables you to reach higher. Additionally, our people have a collaborative, pragmatic, result oriented and people centric approach. They work on developing robust relationships with clients and participants to build trust and enhance successful outcomes.

Faculty members come from a wide variety of backgrounds, bringing a diverse blend of experience that bridges all sectors, and that spans multiple geographies. We work carefully with our clients to ensure that we appropriately match the skills, experience, strengths and styles of faculty members with the context, culture and specifics of each client / client assignment.

Visit Ascend World