Our team
One partner, and a bench.
METRIA is one partner and a network of specialists. That is a deliberate structure, not a stage the firm has yet to grow out of: it keeps the relationship close, keeps overheads off your fee, and means each engagement gets the person who actually knows the problem rather than whoever happens to be free.
If you do not see a particular field or sector represented below, that is by design. When an engagement calls for it, we introduce specialists from an industry-specific network with considerable breadth and depth.
Managing Partner
Goga Jakhia
Goga holds a Master of Liberal Arts in Sustainability and Environmental Management from Harvard University, completed on campus between 2014 and 2016, with graduate coursework in life cycle assessment, energy and environment, environmental toxicology and risk management, sustainable finance, international environmental governance, and global climate change — the same ground as the carbon border reporting, energy auditing and environmental risk assessment METRIA does now. His capstone project was a sustainability action plan for a First Nation in Canada — the same deliverable the firm builds for clients, produced in a setting where genuine stakeholder consultation decides whether a plan is worth anything. He also studied eco-entrepreneurship and sustainable marketing.
He came to it after more than a decade in risk and insurance in Canada — senior underwriter at Rand & Fowler Insurance in Vancouver, then partner and risk advisor at Umbrella Consulting — and holds the Accredited Advisor in Risk Management and Insurance designation from the American Institute for CPCU. That route shapes how the firm works: questions arrive here as risk questions — what is the exposure, what would it cost, and which part is worth acting on. His first degree, in international affairs and international law, is from Tbilisi State University.
Since 2021 he has also been CEO and partner at Next Energy, developing utility-scale solar and wind generation in Georgia. He is fluent in Georgian, English, Russian, and Megrelian.
The specialists we bring in
Named experts, engaged as the work requires.
These are not staff, and we do not pretend otherwise. They are people we have worked with, whose credentials we can evidence, and who join an engagement when it calls for what they do. You are told who is on your project before it starts.
Process, emissions & quality engineering
Tevfik Gemci
Tevfik holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, where his dissertation modelled the capture of fine particles from exhaust gas in wet scrubbers, accounting for heat and mass transfer. His master’s, in mechanical engineering and energy at Istanbul Technical University, applied second-law analysis to chemical reactions.
That is unusually direct preparation for two problems Georgian industry now faces. Particulate abatement in ferroalloy, cement and chemical plants is the subject of his doctoral work. And second-law — exergy — analysis is the method for finding where energy is genuinely being destroyed in a thermal process, as distinct from where it merely looks expensive.
He is a Certified Quality Engineer accredited by the American Society for Quality, and works in pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing building validation and quality management systems — QMS, quality risk management, CAPA, FMEA and IQ/OQ/PQ qualification — under cGMP conditions. His wider technical ground covers combustion, turbomachinery, thermodynamics, and heat and mass transfer, with computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis as working tools.
He has published more than twenty papers, cited over a thousand times.
Management systems & certification audit
Maia Khubua
Maia is an IRCA accredited lead auditor for ISO 9001, with more than fourteen years implementing and auditing management systems. Her work spans the standards organizations most often need to run together — quality, environmental, occupational health and safety, laboratory competence, and pharmaceutical practice — and the harder problem of integrating them into one system rather than four parallel ones.
She spent much of her career at SGS Georgia, latterly as a third-party auditor conducting certification and surveillance audits across manufacturing, oil and gas, healthcare, laboratories and hospitality, and before that heading its certification department. That perspective is the useful part: she has spent most of her career on the certifying side of the table, so she knows what an auditor will look for and where systems fail under examination.
Her implementation experience covers ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001, ISO 15189 for clinical laboratories, and EU Good Distribution and Good Manufacturing Practice in pharmaceutical warehousing and production. She has also managed supplier approval and audit programs, and organizes tendering to international financial institution requirements as regional representative for a Czech engineering firm.
She holds an MBA and a first degree in international economic law from Georgian Technical University, and speaks Georgian and Russian natively, with professional English.
Quality & food safety systems
Yana Kosukhina
Yana has extensive experience in the food and beverage industry, working for industry leaders as a quality manager: drafting and implementing food safety systems to ISO 22000, establishing and running new quality management units, monitoring quality standards across suppliers' value chains, and preparing quality compliance reports. Her earlier work covered investigating discrepancies against technology standards, analyzing reclamations, recruiting quality control personnel, budgeting the department, representing the company in quality and safety management systems, and running the internal quality service. She has drafted, implemented, and certified a range of safety and quality systems. Yana holds a graduate degree in sanitary standards for animal products, specializing in animal food processing technologies, from Kharkiv State Zoo-veterinary Academy, and an undergraduate degree with honors in milk production technologies from Kharkiv Milk Production College. She was awarded an internal auditor qualification for quality management systems under ISO 9000:2000 and ISO 19011 in Kyiv. She speaks fluent Russian and Ukrainian, intermediate English, and some Georgian.
