WASHINGTON — The Open Markets Institute is excited to announce two important additions to our team. Alexis Goldstein, a financial regulatory expert and former Wall Street professional, will be joining the staff as our new Financial Policy Director. Deepak Gupta, founder of anti-corporate law firm Gupta Wessler PLLC, will be joining our board of directors.

Barry Lynn, Executive Director of the Open Markets Institute, issued the following statement:

“The American people have a once-in-a-century opportunity to overturn the unequal distributions of power and wealth that endanger our democracy. Today we welcome to our team two of America’s most eloquent and creative fighters against concentrated power and control. We look forward to working with Alexis to bring the fights against concentrated corporate power and concentrated financial power into closer and more constructive alignment. We look forward to working with Deepak to refine our legal strategy to ensure that we are using every tool available to protect our democracy, our liberties, and our communities. Working arm-in-arm, we truly can build a far more just and inclusive nation.

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Read their full bios below:

Alexis Goldstein is a financial regulatory expert and former Wall Street professional. She previously worked on financial regulatory policy, climate finance, consumer and investor protection, and higher education for Americans for Financial Reform. Goldstein is also an advisory board member for the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School.

Prior to working in advocacy, Goldstein spent seven years working on Wall Street as a programmer at Morgan Stanley in electronic trading, and as a business analyst at Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank in equity derivatives. She acted as a product manager for the trading and risk management software used by the global equity options flow trading desks. She also worked as a co-organizer and teacher for Girl Develop It in New York, a group that conducts low-cost programming classes for women, and has written two web programming books, including co-authoring “HTML5 & CSS3 for the Real World”.

Goldstein has been published widely, including in The New York Times, is a frequent guest on cable news, including MSNBC, CNBC’s “Squawk Box”, CNN, and HBO’s Realtime with Bill Maher, and was featured in PBS Frontline’s “Money, Power, and Wall Street” documentary.

Deepak Gupta is founder of Gupta Wessler PLLC, a law firm that acts as a counterweight to the corporate dominance of the Supreme Court and appellate bar. He is a veteran advocate before the Supreme Court and has handled cases in every federal circuit, several state supreme courts, and trial courts nationwide.

Gupta’s two-decade legal career has focused on ensuring access to justice for workers, consumers, and communities injured by corporate and governmental wrongdoing. His work spans administrative law, constitutional law, class actions, consumers’ and workers’ rights, civil rights, environmental protection, the criminalization of poverty, gun violence, and public health. In addition to individual and class plaintiffs.

Gupta is “known as a skilled appellate lawyer” (New York Times) and “an all-star progressive Supreme Court litigator” (Washington Post). Before founding his firm in 2012, Gupta was Senior Counsel for Litigation at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Previously, he was an attorney at Public Citizen, clerked for Judge Lawrence K. Karlton, and worked on voting rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, prisoners’ rights at the ACLU, and religion cases at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Gupta is the first Asian-American ever to be appointed to argue by the Supreme Court. He currently teaches as a lecturer at Harvard Law.