Turhan Canli

Turhan Canli is an internationally renowned expert on the biology of emotion, personality, and psychopathology, using tools from psychology, neuroscience, and genomics. He is a Full Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Stony Brook University (Long Island, New York), and Founder/Director of the SCAN (Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience) Center and Founder/Director of the Mind/Brain Center on War and Humanity, which is dedicated to promoting humanity and understanding of the human condition in times of war, through clinical care, research, education, and policy applications.

In his freshman year 1985 at Tufts, Turhan joined the first EPIIC class of Sherman Teichman’s on International Terrorism, which he completed with a published thesis on the psychological profile of the German founder of the Red Army Faction, Ulrike Meinhof. Turhan continues collaborating with Sherman to this day, including organizing a research workshop on Neuroscience and National Security at Tufts in 2006, which led to a widely noted publication in the American Journal of Bioethics; a collaboration on the 2019 EuropeNow publication of the Council for European Studies Special Issue on “Forced Migration, Cultural Identity, and Trauma.”, and Sherman’s current role on the Advisory Board of the Mind/Brain Center on War and Humanity.

In addition to his Tufts undergraduate degree (1988, B.A., summa cum laude, summo cum honore in thesi), Turhan holds a Ph.D. in biopsychology from Yale University (1993), and a Certificate in Trauma Recovery from Harvard’s Program in Refugee Trauma (2017). After a postdoctoral position at Stanford University, he joined the faculty of Stony Brook University in 2001, where he is now a Full Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry. With expertise in psychology, neuroscience, and molecular genetics, Turhan focuses on three strands of research: 1) the biological basis of individual differences in political cognition, emotion, and personality; 2) the role of human endogenized retroviruses (HERVs) in mental health; 3) global mental health. The third line of research produced a 2021 report on endemic levels of post-traumatic stress disorder among Syrian civilians living in the war zones of rebel-held territories. The report is intended to guide international relief agencies plan for interventions in a post-war Syria.

Turhan’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Huffington Post, NPR, CNN, and many international newspapers and TV programs. His TEDx Stony Brook talk on depression as an infectious disease has been viewed more than 180,000 times on YouTube. He advised the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the national science funding bodies of Austria, Germany, Iceland, Israel, The Netherlands, and the UK. In 2010, he was elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. His proudest recognition remains the 2006 EPIIC Alumni Recognition Award. 

When he is not working on academic pursuits, Turhan is immersed in songwriting and music production. He has multiple #1 hits on the online music platform SoundClick as singer/songwriter “Turhan”, and under his electronic music production pseudonym “Sahel”.

Turhan holds a very special place in my heart and memory as he was among my very first student cohort at Tufts in 1985 when I presented the idea of creating a student led colloquium/symposium on international terrorism. 

 I selected him in my interview process even though he was a freshman. It was already obvious to me that he was brilliant. I remember the research paper he did for me that was on the psychology of a terrorist group in Germany, the Baader Meinhof (Interestingly enough, given what Turhan has gone on to do professionally, here is the psychological concept of “cognitive bias”, otherwise known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon).  

Turhan kept a diary from the very first day he heard that there would be a special orientation meeting.  

Thirty years later on October 3rd, 2015, as part of the commemoration of my becoming Emeritus, he gave me a volume that he edited, the Oxford Handbook of Molecular Psychology, inscribed “Forever my teacher, mentor, and friend”. 

He accompanied it with a note that reminded me that it was the 30th anniversary of when we first met and that was the first date of what became the Institute was October 3rd, 1985.

I joked with Turhan that this book is really the one volume in my library that I will never thoroughly understand. As an instance, one of its first entries is on the “Neuromodulation of social behavior in Insects”, the second “Social regulation of Gene Expression in the African Cichlid Fish”. There are happily chapters on the neurochemistry of human violence and aggression and Turhan’s own contribution on “Is depression an infectious disease”, that I have read and understand. 

Of the many programs Turhan and I did together at the Institute, this was one on September 19, 2006 was one of the most cutting edge and fun: 

The Neuroethics of Homeland Security

It was a daylong workshop exploring the ethics of the application of advances in neuroscience to the “war on terrorism.” It was convened by EPIIC alumnus Professor Turhan Canli of Stony Brook University. Participants included Susan Brandon, former Assistant Director of Social, Behavioral, and Educational Sciences in the Office of Science and Technology Policy at The White House and Major William Casebeer (USAF), Chief of Eurasian Intelligence Analysis at NATO Military Headquarters. (Institute for Global Leadership, September 2006)

Please visit the Trebuchet’s highlight of the Mind Brain Center on War and Humanity, of which I am a member of the Advisory Board, to gain more insight into Turhan’s incredible work.

Blade Kotelly

Blade the CEO of Blade Kotelly Inc., the Data-Driven Innovation Company™, an innovation and user-experience expert & Senior Lecturer at MIT on Design-Thinking and Innovation. 

Blade provides consulting service in Design-Thinking and helps top brands to innovate radically on their product and services, and teaches organizations how to create solutions that customers love. Customers include Bose, Anheuser-Busch, CPI International, VMware, Lufthansa, The D.C. Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and others. 

Blade’s work and thoughts have been featured in top publications including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and on media including TechTV, NPR, and the BBC. Blade holds a Bachelors of Science in Human-Factors Engineering from Tufts University and a Master of Science in Engineering and Management from MIT.

Prior to that, Blade led the Advanced Concept Lab at Sonos where he defined the future experience that will fill your home with music. Before joining Sonos, Blade was the VP Design & Consumer Experience at Jibo, Inc. where he was in charge of the industrial-design, human-factors, user-interface, brand, packaging, web experience supporting Jibo, the world’s first social robot for the home. Blade has also designed a variety of technologies including ones at Rapid7, an enterprise security-software company,  StorytellingMachines, a software firm enabling anyone to make high-impact movies, Endeca Technologies, a search and information access software technology company, Edify and SpeechWorks, companies that provided speech-recognition solutions to the Fortune 1000.

Blade wrote the book on speech-recognition interface design (Addison Wesley, 2003), The Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice and his work and thoughts have been featured in publications including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and on media including TechTV, NPR, and the BBC.

Since 2003, Blade has taught courses on design-thinking to thousands of students and professionals, and holds a Bachelors of Science in Human-Factors Engineering from Tufts University and a Master of Science in Engineering and Management from MIT.

Find out more at www.bladekotelly.com

John Hoberman

John Hoberman is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

A social and cultural historian he is deeply interested in European cultural and intellectual history with special concerns in Sportwissenschaft and the history of ideas about race.

He has researched and published extensively in the fields of sports studies, race studies, human enhancements, medical history, and globalization studies. His work in sports studies encompasses race relations, politics and the Olympics, and performance-enhancing drug use. His interests in medical history include the social and medical impacts of androgenic drugs (anabolic steroids) and the history of medical racism in the United States. He has lectured at many medical schools and other medical institutions on this topic.

 Prof. Hoberman is the author of Sport and Political Ideology (1984), The Olympic Crisis: Sport, Politics, and the Moral Order (1986), Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport (1992), Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race (1997), Testosterone Dreams: Rejuvenation, Aphrodisia, Doping ((2005), Black & Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism (2012), and Age of Globalization, the text of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) broadcast on the edX global platform during 2013 and 2014 and published online by the University of Texas Press in January 2014.

Prof. Hoberman has also published widely for general audiences. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The Wilson Quarterly, Society, Scientific American, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The National (Canada), and Der Spiegel (Germany). Interviews with Prof. Hoberman have appeared in Norwegian, Swedish, French and German publications. Interviews on media outlets include all of the national networks: PBS, ABC. NBC, CBS, FOX, ABC (Australia), CBC (Canada), and BBC (UK).

Leon Fuerth

Leon S. Fuerth Professor Leon Fuerth’s career in government spanned thirty years, including positions in the State Department, House and Senate staff, and the White House. His most recent government service was as Vice President Gore’s National Security Adviser for the eight years of the Clinton administration, where he served on the Principals’ Committee of the National Security Council and the National Economic Council, alongside the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the President’s own National Security Advisor. During his twelve years as a Foreign Service Officer with the State Department, Professor Fuerth served in the U.S. Consulate General in Zagreb, Yugoslavia; the office of the Counselor of the Department; the Bureau of Intelligence and Research; and in both the Bureau of Political Military Affairs and the Bureau of European Affairs in several capacities. He became a resource for strategic intelligence (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons); arms control; Soviet and Warsaw Pact affairs; and NATO.

On the Hill, Professor Fuerth worked for the late Congressman Les Aspin as staff director of the sub-committee on covert action, in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; for Al Gore during the last two years of his term as a member of the House; and for Gore during both his terms as a Senator. In the course of this twelve-year period, Professor Fuerth was the Select Committee’s expert on arms control verification, in addition to operating as its primary staff resource for monitoring covert action; he was deeply involved in the development of arms control positions by Congressman Gore; and in the Senate, he served as Gore’s staff link to both the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Committee on Science and Technology (Space sub-committee). He was responsible to Senator Gore for all aspects of national security, including international trade. In the White House, Professor Fuerth served as Vice President Gore’s National Security Adviser for both of his terms in office. During this time, he operated – by Presidential order – as a full member of the Principals and Deputies Committees in both the National Security Council and the National Economic Council, where he participated in the formation of national policy as an advisor to both the Vice President and the President. He was the senior administration staff member responsible for the operation of bi-national commissions with Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Egypt, and South Africa, as well as the U.S.-China Environmental Forum, which he personally negotiated.

For three years, he coordinated sanctions against Serbia on behalf of the U.S. government, at the request of the Principals Committee. Throughout the Clinton-Gore administration, Professor Fuerth also led efforts to develop the International Space Station with the Russians and other partners; to raise awareness and take action to prevent the spread of Copyright: Leon S. Fuerth and Sheila R. Ronis 6 HIV/AIDS in Africa; to denuclearize former Soviet states by providing alternative energy sources for the replacement of certain nuclear reactors and by providing alternative employment opportunities for nuclear scientists in Russia; to win China’s cooperation in protecting the environment and reducing pollution; and to spur foreign investment in Egypt, offering a positive example for other Arab nations involved in the Middle East peace process.

After retiring from government service at the conclusion of the Clinton Administration, Professor Fuerth came to The George Washington University to serve as the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of International Affairs from January 2001 to January 2003. He also then served simultaneously as a research professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs. In addition, from 2011-2013 he served as a Distinguished Research Fellow at the National Defense University. Lastly, he served as a Practitioner in Residence at the George Washington University’s Institute for Global and International Studies from 2013 - 2016. During this period, Professor Fuerth served as a member of the National Academy of Science Committee on Climate, Energy and National Security, and to The Alliance on Climate Change, and as a consultant to former Vice President Al Gore.

Leon Fuerth is the founder and director of the project on Forward Engagement®. The Project on Forward Engagement promotes the use of Anticipatory Governance to improve the federal policy process by incorporating: foresight as an actionable component of the policy process; networked systems to support whole-of-government responsiveness; and feedback systems to monitor performance and speed-up learning from results. The Project was funded by the MacArthur foundation, the National Defense University and the George Washington University. More information is available at www.forwardengagement.org.

Currently, Professor Fuerth serves as a co-researcher on a project on foresight and democracy funded by Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Fuerth holds a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in history from New York University, as well as a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University.

I have had the privilege of knowing Leon for three decades. I first met Leon in our 1992 EPIIC year on International Security: The Environmental Dimension where he was a powerful presence. http://tiglarchives.org.s3.amazonaws.com/programs/archive/1992/international-symposium.html 

We continued our relationship over the years. He returned to the Institute to participate in our 2006 EPIIC symposium on Global Crises/Global Governance and later in our Neuroscience: Morality and the Mind initiative with Professor Ray Jackendoff.  http://tiglarchives.org.s3.amazonaws.com/sites/default/files/archives/2007/sym07.html

Leon invited me to participate in my role as an educator, together with Professor James Rosenau, at the genesis of his Forward Engagement initiative at GWU. He had a profound impact on me, and on my students and the thematic concerns I have pursued since. 

On April 15, 2021, the New York Times published this editorial:

Why Spy Agencies Say the Future Is Bleak
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/opinion/global-trends-intelligence-report.html

“Climate change, technology, disease and financial crises will pose big challenges for the world, an intelligence report concludes.”

Meanwhile reading the last paragraphs you will see a reference to Leon. As an educator, I became a part of his Forward Engagement initiative in which we are currently mobilizing collaborative efforts.

Eva Armour

Eva Armour supports communities in conflict to imagine, practice, and build a more just and peaceful world. For nearly 20 years, she has worked with Seeds of Peace to bring together courageous leaders from the Middle East, South Asia, and United States who work in solidarity across lines of difference to build more just and inclusive societies. As the Director of Impact, she gets to explore questions about what drives transformative social change. Eva believes that building community is the foundation for social justice and collective liberation and gets the chance to practice that through her involvement in Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) in Boston, where she organizes for police and prison abolition and helps move white folks into action as part of Black-led multi-racial coalitions. She serves on the Board of Directors of Rhize, Activate Labs, and Empathy for Peace. 

Eva is a wonderful friend. She is endlessly imaginative and thoughtful. Her verve and groove are totally infectious. There is little “downtime” around her, in both meanings of any hint of sadness, or lassitude. 

We are collaborating on her initiative to enhance the impact of our communities to ultimately make Convisero searchable and interactive, and both accessible and accountable to the community. Eva has suggested that we carefully merge the many notable alumni of Seeds of Peace with my roster of alumni from the institute, now positioned as mentors in Convisero. 

I had the privilege of knowing John Wallach, the founder of Seeds of Peace, and its International Peace Camp, in Maine. I honored John, who I greatly miss with my Institute’s Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship  award. He would certainly be proud of Eva as the Seeds' director of impact. 

I helped create the first curriculum of Seeds of Peace, and was given the responsibility to host and help integrate the first cadre of the Israeli and Palestinian students, who witnessed the 1993 Oslo handshake on the White House lawn, at Tufts, in the now far distant days of promising efforts at reconciliation. I also took the adult escorts - “minders,”  of the Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian, Tunisian and Moroccan student delegations, who accompanied their young students to Washington D.C. and on to Maine, for orientation activities at  Boston Harbor's Thompson Island, in the Boston Harbor.  They were skeptical of each other, and were far more difficult to contend with than their students. It was fascinating to see their initial suspicions begin to break down over the weekend in ropes courses and other team activities. 

Jake Sherman

Jake Sherman is Senior Director for Programs at the International Peace Institute, where he oversees planning and implementation of IPI’s research program focused on revitalizing multilateral engagement, peace operations and protection of civilians, humanitarian action, and women, peace and Security.

Prior to joining IPI in November 2017, he served at the United States Mission to the United Nations, where he focused on strengthening the effectiveness of peace operations, including as a delegate to Fifth Committee of the General Assembly and the Special Committee on Peacekeeping.

He previously worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development Office of Transition Initiatives as the Regional Team Leader for Afghanistan and Pakistan, overseeing stabilization and countering violent extremism programs, and as USAID’s coordinator for the 2015 Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.

He has worked on peace and security-related policy issues for the New York University Center on International Cooperation and the International Peace Institute, served as a Political Affairs Officer for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, consulted on peacebuilding for non-governmental organizations in Cambodia, and worked for Physicians for Human Rights in the former Yugoslavia.

He has a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and a Bachelor of Arts from Tufts University.

Luke O'Neill

Luke O’Neill is currently the Chief Operating Officer at Wilderness Medical Associates International.

A graduate of Georgetown Law School, he specialized in criminal law, and practiced as both a public defender and advocate for  juvenile justice, and as a corporate lawyer. At the Harvard Business School, he was awarded HBS’ Fellowship for outstanding performance in non-profit sector and the Dean's Service Award upon graduation. 

He has led an extraordinary career specializing in nonprofit management, serving corporate, government, and non-profit groups seeking to accelerate leadership development and team building.

He has specialized in education, creating schools for disadvantaged youth,  raising millions of dollars for non-profit ventures. A  committed and passionate educator and leader he was recruited by The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation to be their Executive Director for their AMERICAN EXPLORERS, LLC, leading the effort to create a world-class youth leadership development program focusing primarily on young men and women growing up in disadvantaged communities.

For a decade he was the Chief Executive Officer, Founder & Board Member of  Shackleton Schools creating and leading a residential high school to inspire young people who experienced little success in traditional academic settings. He secured a 60-acre facility, constructed state of the art facilities. His desired metric and goal was made when  every graduate proceeded onto respected colleges including Amherst, Brown, Bucknell, Haverford, Mount Holyoke, and Northeastern most earning full or near-full four-year scholarships.  

Luke is a person of tremendous, integrity and character. Ultimately revealing, when he won the prestigious Echoing Green Fellowship Award, he donated his entire personal grant of $80,000 to support the launch of Shackleton Schools, Inc.

Luke is veteran Outward Bound Professional. Most recently  he revitalized the business plan and management of the Outward Bound Hurricane Island School.

He is also superbly skilled and seasoned as a hands-on Course Director, Facilitator, and Wilderness Instructor with expertise as a wilderness first responder, open water scuba instructor (PADI), licensed Maine guide, ocean sailing,  sea kayaking and CPR Instructor - FCC Marine Radio Operator . Luke’s extensive program areas include the Maine Coast, the Mahoosuc Mountains, San Juan Islands, Northern Cascades, Florida Keys, Croatia, and Panama's Bocas Del Toro region.

Luke leads high-impact educational programs for a wide- range of groups including corporate and community leaders, military veterans, aspiring wilderness educators, incoming MBA students, adults, and teenagers – and University programs.

It is this capacity that I first interacted with Luke and then had the chance over the years to observe and greatly appreciate  his unique inspirational amalgam of physical prowess and thoughtful, calm and decisive leadership when he directed many of our EPIIC program’s Outward Bound intensive weekends.   These weekends were pivotal moments in my ability to create the intellectual student team that would be able to fulfill the intensive requirements of the EPIIC colloquium and symposium, a demanding program that previous Tufts President and current Harvard President, Larry Bacow admiringly termed an “intellectual boot camp.”

My 2015-16 Outward Bound weekend with Luke is pictured here.

Luke was a superb facilitator of the debriefs of the physical and psychological activities we ran under his supervision. He was intellectually curious, and engaged with the academic content of the weekend’s invited guest professorial and practitioner’s talks and simulations.

We established a great rapport over the years. What particularly fascinated me was Luke’s role as the leader of Outward Bound’s  Center for Peacebuilding, serving as the leader of the 2012 and 2015 Emerging Leaders Programs involving carefully selected Israeli and Palestinian participants during a 10-day back- packing expedition in Croatia.

The Institute was considered an “Intellectual Outward Bound,” by HIOBOS. In 2015 he was asked to write this lead article for OB’s International Journal. He also inspired Jerome, whose love for the wilderness and the lure of OB, was honed by Luke’s professional example.

Luke has served The Trebuchet wonderfully as a critical and supportive adviser, as we transition to concentrate more effectively on integrating our Convisero community.  Luke epitomizes a wingman – a person you would want as your protective “six.”

Matt Bai

Matt Bai is a nationally known journalist, author and screenwriter. Starting in 2002, he covered three presidential campaigns for the New York Times, where he was the chief political writer for the Sunday magazine and a columnist for the newspaper. He then spent five years as the national political columnist for Yahoo News. In January 2020, he became a contributing columnist for the Washington Post.

Bai’s most recent book, All the Truth is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid(Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) looks back at the ruinous scandal involving the presidential candidate Gary Hart in 1987 and how it shaped the political and media culture. It was selected as one of the year’s best books by NPR and Amazon and was one of 10 books long-listed for the PEN Faulkner Award in nonfiction. 

Bai also co-wrote, with Jay Carson and Jason Reitman, the feature film adapted from the book, titled “The Front Runner.” The film, directed by Reitman and starring Hugh Jackman as Hart.

Bai is also the author of The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics (Penguin Press, 2007), which was a New York TimesNotable Book for 2007. Bai has appeared frequently on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and played himself in a recurring role on season two of the Netflix drama “House of Cards.”  

In his early twenties, Bai was a speechwriter for UNICEF, where he worked with Audrey Hepburn during the last year of her life. He began his journalism career as a city desk reporter for the Boston Globe and spent five years as a national correspondent for Newsweek. His international experience includes coverage from Iraq and Liberia. 

Bai is a graduate of Tufts and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, where the faculty awarded him the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. He has been a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Harvard, the University of Chicago and Stanford. He serves on the board of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts. 

A native of Trumbull, Connecticut, Bai lives with his wife and two children in Bethesda, Maryland. He rarely misses a Yankee game or a Timescrossword. You can follow him (occasionally) on Twitter at @mattbai. Matt enrolled in the Institute’s “Militarization of the Third World” EPIIC program in 1990 and was our symposium’s briefing book editor.

One major pedagogical approach I deployed in EPIIC was to prepare my students in the colloquium model in the standard definition of a colloquium, with its numerous guest lecturers, to expose them to a spectrum of opinions, even purposively radical different perspectives.

Matt intrinsically understood the value of colloquia and wrote this for the University’s Institute CASE statement in 1999, when as an alumnus, he had graduated Columbia University’s School of Journalism, being awarded its prestigious Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship , and was a national correspondent for Newsweek.

“Most classroom learning is, by necessity, the reflection of one professor's view, aided by a few select books and media tools that support the point. This is an effective way to teach names and dates, but it does little to encourage students to independently evaluate information. EPIIC is refreshingly different. Students have the opportunity to read a dizzying amount of material from opposite perspectives, to question personally many of the experts themselves, and to discuss their impressions with one another.

In EPIIC it's all right to be conflicted or critical, or even downright wrong now and then; what isn't acceptable is to abdicate your responsibility to think. This is the essence of intellectual leadership. It breeds confidence and wisdom in a world where too many people are simply overwhelmed by the flood of information.

A good friend for decades, his friendship, clarity, self-effacement and directness is tremendously valued and rare.

Chike Aguh

Chike Aguh is Chief Innovation Officer at the U.S. Department of Labor.

He is a Senior Principal at the McChrystal Group, a firm founded by Gen. (Ret.) Stanley McChrystal.  He serves as the firm’s subject matter expert on future of work.  As a Council of Foreign Relations (CFR)term member, member of CFR’s Future of Work Taskforce, inaugural Future of Work Fellow at the International Society for Technology in Education, and advisor to the American AI Forum, Chike writes and speaks on the future of work, particularly through the lens of  underserved communities. At the Carr Center, Chike’s research was on the impact of new technologies on the human right of economic dignity and how America can secure that right for all, regardless of race.

 Previously, he worked as an education policy official under the Mayor of New York City, a 2nd grade teacher and Teach For America corps member, a Fulbright Scholar in Thailand, a corporate strategy director at the Advisory Board Company, and CEO of a national social enterprise which helped connect 500,000 low-income Americans in 48 states to affordable internet and digital skills.

 Chike holds degrees from Tufts University (B.A.), the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Ed.M), the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (MPA), and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School (MBA). He is a 2017 Presidential Leadership Scholar, past Council on Foreign Relations term member, Washington Business Journal 40 under 40 honoree, Wharton 40 under 40 honoree, and past member of the HKS Alumni Board of Directors.  He has been featured at and in the White House, CNNMoney, Forbes, Wired Magazine, and Fast Company.  

I have known Chike for years, ever since he was a prominent member of the Tufts undergraduate community, as President of the Tufts Community Senate. I enjoyed some wonderful thoughtful conversations with him, particularly on inequality and race.

He was a close friend of one of my treasured alumni Asi-Yahola Somburu, an EPIIC veteran of our 2004 colloquium/symposium “Oil and Water.” Together they created one of the campus’ most important forums, the Emerging Black Leadership Symposium. Of its origin, Asi kindly wrote me – Furthermore, the mental seed for the Emerging Black Leadership would never have been created nor watered (in my mind or in Chike’s if not for EPIIC).

 As TCU’s President, Chike was instrumental in awarding the University’s highest alumni award, The Light on the Hill Award,” to another of our mentors, and EPIIC alumni, UNDP’s Nick Birnback.

Uwe Kitzinger

Uwe Kitzinger, CBE/Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 

A refugee from Nazi Germany, Uwe Kitzinger was educated at Balliol and New College Oxford, where he was elected President of the Oxford Union.  In 1950, he graduated with a 1st class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1951.

He was appointed the first British economist of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg in 1951. In 1956 he returned to Oxford as a Fellow of Nuffield College, where he became a prominent advocate of British adhesion to the European Community. 

He took various sabbaticals during his time at Nuffield: first in 1964/5 to the University of the West Indies as Visiting Professor of International Relations and consultant to the Rockefeller Foundation to advise on training diplomats and economists for the newly independent countries of the Caribbean.

In 1969/70 he was invited to Harvard as Visiting Professor of Government taking over the seminar on European Politics from Henry Kissinger who had been called to the White House; then in 1970-73 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris.

When Britain joined the European Union in 1973,  he was appointed Political Adviser to the first British Vice-President of the Commission, Sir Christopher Soames, who carried the chief responsibility for the Community’s external relations. In 1976 he was appointed as the Dean of the Management School INSEAD in Fontainebleau. Then in 1983, he negotiated the foundation of Templeton College, Oxford, of which he became the first President.

Uwe was active in various other spheres: in 1967-70 he founded and chaired the Committee on Atlantic Studies; from 1982 to 1987 he was founding Chairman of the Major Projects Association of leading international finance and engineering companies engaged on macro-projects like the Channel tunnel; he served on the Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) 1973-84, the National Council of the European Movement 1974-76 and the Council of Oxfam 1983-91. Kitzinger was also a member of the British University Committee of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Fondation Jean Monnet pour l’Europe in Lausanne.

He founded the Journal of Common Market Studies in 1962 and wrote many books, including German Electoral Politics 1960, The Challenge of the Common Market 1963 and Diplomacy and Persuasion 1973 and in 1998 co-edited Macro-Engineering and the Earth.

Uwe is a very close friend and adviser.  I met him in 1993 when he was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard a position he held until 2003.  He was an enthusiastic supporter the Institute’s academic initiatives, and served on the Institute’s External Advisory Board until I retired in 2016.

With his wife Sheila he founded “Lentils for Dubrovnik” in 1991, a charity to deliver essential supplies to refugees in Croatia. In 1998 he was elected President of the Federation Britannique des Alliances Françaises and now serves as Patron of Asylum Welcome and Chairman of GARIWO, a campaign for civil courage in the Balkans.

He introduced me to his remarkable courageous friends, the Yugoslavian human rights activist, Svetlana Broz, https://www.humanityinaction.org/person/svetlana-broz/ and General Jovan Divyak,  https://en.gariwo.net/righteous/the-righteous-biographies/former-yugoslavia/exemplary-figures-reported-by-gariwo/jovan-divjak-7505.html allowing us to send many of our students into Bosnia on distinctive research projects.

Uwe participated in may IGL forums, notably in a powerful Brexit panel during the last symposium of my directorship in 2016, “The Future of Europe.”

He is a fantastic raconteur, and I always envied my students who I selected to crew for him on his wooden ketch, The Anne of Cleaves, sailing the Adriatic coastline and cruising the Mediterranean

He often hosts me in London, and at his home in Standlake Manor, Oxfordshire.

David Dapice

David Dapice is an emeritus economics professor who was in the Tufts Economics Department from 1973 to 2017. He continues to work in the Vietnam and Myanmar Programs of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He has worked widely, particularly in Southeast Asia, as a development economist. His education included a BA from Williams College in political economy and a PhD from Harvard University in economics. Since 1989, when he began working with the Vietnam Program, his work has centered on Vietnam, Myanmar and Indonesia. Previously, he had focused on Indonesia, India and Thailand.

David was our formidable and caring faculty liaison for the Institute for decades. Preserving the Institute’s independence, and participating in scores of programs and advising scores of our students as their thesis, independent, or directed study, he was an indispensable ally and critic. His recommendations were eagerly sought after.

A brilliant scholar, strong-minded, creative, noted as an independent thinker, he was at times, quietly provocative, and possessed a wry rapier wit.  He is a friend of tremendous loyalty and unflinching in his criticism of herd or ideological thinking. We shared many battles and many laughs

Richard Jankowsky

Richard Jankowsky is the Chair, and Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology, in the Department of Music of Tufts University.

Through long-term fieldwork-based methods, Professor Jankowsky's research revolves around the intersection of music and power in North Africa, particularly music's capacity to give voice to underrepresented populations, to articulate religious sentiment, and to serve as a flashpoint for debates over cultural, religious, and political identities. His music analytical work explores issues of repetition, density, and transformation in contemporary trance rituals. His book Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia (University of Chicago Press, 2010) received three honorable mention awards for book prizes from academic societies in the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and North African Studies. His most recent book, Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form (University of Chicago Press, 2021) examines the important yet virtually undocumented role of women and underrepresented minorities in North African trance healing musics and theorizes the capacity of ritual musical form to make social, devotional, and therapeutic interventions. His articles appear in the journals Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Analytical Approaches to World Music, and the Journal of North African Studies. He authored the North Africa and Middle East chapter of the textbook Excursions in World Music and the Music and Ritual chapter of the reader Critical Themes in World Music. He is editor of the Middle East and North Africa volume of the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Musics of the World and is co-editor of the Brill book series Studies on Performing Arts and Literature of the Islamicate World. He is a two-time National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and a recipient of fellowships from the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Fulbright Program.

Rich was an extraordinary student in the EPIIC year on The Future of Democracy. He presented his research on jazz and democracy at a concert evening where Chick Corea and Gary Burton, the famed jazz icons performed on behalf of the Institute, to a packed audience at Cohen auditorium.

Chick that evening also sat in on the piano for a special performance of Rich’s original composition, Habibi, which he dedicated to the Institute. It was one of the most memorable moments of my 30 years at Tufts.

For Rich, my undergraduate student, to return to his alma mater, Tufts, after his Fulbright year in Tunisia, gaining his PhD at the University of Chicago, and teaching at SOAS in London, to become a tenured faculty member and Chair, is a  powerful, meaningful trajectory for me to witness. To have had a minor role in his education, the privilege to write some of his recommendations, and then to benefit from his generosity and knowledge, as he mentor subsequent generations, is profoundly gratifying.

Rachel Svetanoff

Profile

Rachel Svetanoff is a social entrepreneur, activist, and futurist with a history of supporting initiatives that align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Rachel’s enthusiasm for the SDGs is second only to the causes she cares about within the Goals’ scope and advocating for them. She has contributed to mobilizing resources for 100+ projects with 116 organizations across 37 countries.

Rachel has taken on many roles in youth advocacy on behalf of and for various institutions, most recently as a keynote panelist for the United Nations Foundation Our Future Agenda program where she was seated alongside the UN’s Youngest Climate Advisor of their time Sophia Kianni and the U.S. Youth Observer to the United Nations Ose Ehianeta Arheghan to speak at the National Vision for 2100 Intergenerational Townhall.

She is a member of the Major Group for Children and Youth for the UN Summit of the Future where she can be seen speaking to H.E. Mr. Brian Christopher Manley Wallace, Permanent Representative of Jamaica and H.E. Ms. Yoka Brandt, Permanent Representative of the Kingdom of the Netherlands on issues related to the well-being of youth and future generations. She was also invited by the Future Generations Commissioner of Wales to attend the Future Generations Forum.

Additionally, Rachel holds an appointment with the United Nations Association for the USA Global Goals Ambassador for SDG#17. She is a sought-out speaker, lecturer, and content creator, actively contributing to academic and editorial publications on matters concerning youth, sustainable development and human rights. 

In 2023, Rachel was selected as one of six finalists for the AFS Young Global Citizen Award sponsored by DHL and presented by AFS Intercultural Programs.  The AFS Award for Young Global Citizens recognizes young people for their commitment to improving the global community and whose actions contribute to a more just, peaceful, and tolerant world. The Permanent Mission of Malta to the United Nations was the lead endorser for the celebration of International Youth Day on August 11, 2023. The International Youth Day celebration took place at the UN with 800 young leaders and participants from around the world in attendance. The AFS Youth Assembly Delegates were included in the celebration of International Youth Day at the UN.  

IYD 2023

Above is a snapshop of Rachel at the UN and AFS Youth Assembly in 2023. Photo 1: Rachel at UNGA. Photo 2: Rachel with SDGs at the UN HQ. Photo 3: Rachel speaking at International Youth Day at UN HQ. Photo 4: from left to right - Julia Samson, Andrea Cuellar Medina, and Rachel. Photo 5: Rachel on UN webTV. Photo 6: Celebration of proclamation for AFS Youth Assembly Day signed by Mayor Jerome Adams of New York City. Photo 7: from left to right UNA USA Youth Obersever Ose Ehianeta Arheghan, White House Office of the First Lady Deputy Associate Director Himaja Nagireddy, Julia and Rachel. Photo 8: Rachel right before her Young Global Citizen Award presentation. Photo 9: Rachel with all award finalists. Photo 10: Rachel and Julia Samson at AFS Youth Assembly in Convene. Photo 11: Rachel recognized as Youth Ambassador. Photo 12: Rachel pointing to Global Futurist Initiative as a program partner. Photo 13 and 14. Rachel’s presentation on youth upskilling for the future. Photo 15: Youth Assembly culture festival.

In her day-job as the Foundations Partnerships Consultant for UNICEF USA, Rachel supported a $300 million portfolio by working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and UN Foundation, among others, directly to advance UNICEF’s role in mutual efforts to achieve global public health, climate action, gender equality and innovation impact for safeguarding children’s and youth rights worldwide. Seen below is Rachel’s visits to both the New York City and Washington, D.C. offices.

UUSA '22-'23

Snapshot of Rachel’s year with UUSA featuring the Foundations Partnerships Vice President Lorin Kavanaugh-Ulku (photo 2), team members Katie Beirne, Hana Sahar, Carisha Pranyoto (photo 3), Rachel and Carisha at the UN General Assembly side panel on the state of Tuberculosis with Indonesia’s Minister of Health (photo 4)

As a result of integrating herself in the UN system, Rachel has become a proud member of the United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA), working with and for the UN system. UNA-USA is an initiative of the United Nations Foundation with the mission to promote the United Nations as a global platform for advancing the SDGs.

After attending the 2023 UNA-USA Leadership Engagement Summit seen below to advocate to her state representatives in Congress about the need of continued and sustainable US leadership with the United Nations, Rachel, in collaboration with various actors, is set to start a professional chapter in Indiana as well as partner with various engagement areas to spearhead the localization of the SDGs in the country.

UNA-USA GES 2023

Above is a snapshot of the 2023 UNA-USA Leadership Engagement Summit from meeting Trebuchet mentor Julia Shufro (photo 1); photo of Rachel on the first day of the conference (photo 2); taking photos with her Indiana advocacy group (photo 3); UNA-USA’s President Rachel Bowen Pittman (photo 4); Grassroots Advocacy Manager Maria Amalla (photo 5); Senior Associate of Youth Engagement Rachel McCave (photo 6); Senior Director of Programs & Policy Farah Eck (photo 7); UNA-USA Youth Observer to the UN Himaja Nagireddy (photo 8); meeting Sen. Mike Braun’s Legislative Assistant Sydney Cox (photo 9); meeting Rep. Jim Baird’s Legislative Assistant Tanner Brown (photo 10); meeting Sen. Todd Young’s Legislative Assistant Gavin Laffoon (photo 11); meeting various UNA-USA youth leaders (photo 12-19); Rachel at UN Foundation HQ (photo 20).

In May 2023, Rachel was also selected to become a Visiting Associate at the University of Notre Dame, where she received her MS in Global Health. In this role, she is collaborating with faculty members, including Dr. Paul Perrin, at the Pulte Institute for Global Development to establish a strategy for implementing legislation that commits the United States to support the SDGs by building local capacity for data systems that measure progress towards meeting the Goals. In this work, Rachel has had the opportunity to meet with the Office of Federal and Washington Relations as well as the Washington Office of the Keough School of Global Affairs to glean insights from university staff who have worked with members of Congress to collaborate on issues that advance the university’s research portfolio as well as provide a venue on programming, teaching, and outreach in the D.C. area.

Notre Dame '23

Above is a snapshot of Rachel at the University of Notre Dame in July 2023: Rachel meeting Pulte Institute for Global Development Executive Director and USGLC State Advisory Committee member Michael Sweikar, Pulte Institute Director of Evidence & Impact Dr. Paul Perrin (photo 1); Rachel reuniting with MSGH ‘15 classmate and former roommate PhD candidate/ Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar Lupita Quintana (photo 2); Rachel and Lupita reuniting with Eck Institute for Global Health adjunct professor and former advisor Lacey Ahern (photo 3); Rachel meeting MSGH ‘16 alumni and founder of Cameroonian-based Jumbam Family Foundation Desmond Jumbam (photo 4).

Rachel, nominated by Sherman, was also selected to become a U.S. Global Leadership Coalition Next Gen Global Leader and a Foreign Policy for America NextGen Initiative delegate for their 2023 cohorts. Both programs are influential Washington DC-based networks of businesses, NGOs, national security specialists, and foreign policy experts that Rachel is leveraging for her SDG advocacy work.

As part of the US Global Leadership Coalition’s 2023 Global Impact Forum, Rachel was back on Capitol Hill just two days after her first visit on behalf of UNA-USA to support a strong commitment to maintaining the international affairs budget as a matter of national security, economic prosperity, and strong leadership on the global stage. Seen below is her involvement with the program’s biggest event of the year.

USGLC GIF 2023

Snapshot of Rachel at the USGLC 2023 Global Impact Forum including a photo of Rachel at the reception before the first day of the forum (photo 1); US State Department’s Special Envoy on Youth Issues and former Iowa Congresswoman Hon. Abby Finkenauer (photo 2); USGLC Next Gen Leader and founder of nonprofit Girls Leading Africa Giftie Umo (photo 3); USGLC Founder Liz Schrayer (photo 4); USGLC Next Generation Leaders Program Director Emily French (photo 5); USGLC Program Associate Anna Krebs (photo 6); Mohamed Abdel-Kader, Chief Innovation Officer and Executive Director for the Innovation, Technology and Research Hub, USAID (photo 7); photo of Dr. David Walton, U.S. Global Malaria Coordinator (photo 8); photos of Rachel and the Indiana delegation meeting with Legislative Assistants to Rep. Gregg Pence (photo 10), Rep. Frank Mrvan (photo 11), Rep. Andre Carson (photo 12), Sen. Todd Young (photo 13), Sen. Mike Braun (photo 14), Rep. Victoria Spartz (photo 15), and two photos of the team before and after activities (photos 15 and 16).

In her entrepreneurial pursuits, Rachel became a founding partner for Protea Consulting, LLC taking on clients such as Friends of the Global Fund Against AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria and UN award-winning fashion designer Berny Martin. She is also the Founder of the Project Energy for Life Cameroon Consortium which implements systemic solutions to end multidimensional poverty in rural Cameroon and the Co-Founder of Global Futurist Initiative™, a social enterprise that is advocating for the ratification of a new SDG for youth equity.

Rachel has held many concurrent appointments including, but not limited to, the following: AFS Intercultural Programs 28th Youth Assembly Ambassador, YOUNGA Youth Delegate, One Young World Youth Digital Delegate, Youth Delegate for the 27th Youth Assembly, young alumni advisory board member for Purdue University’s Vice Provost for Student Life, and strategic advisor to InternetBar.Org Institute.

Receiving numerous accolades, Rachel’s latest award is the 2023 Purdue Rising Professional honor, inducting her as a Distinguished Young Alumna. With this most recent recognition, she is becoming one of Purdue University’s most decorated young alumni with over 10 honors and scholarships presented to her throughout her Boilermaker journey.

Purdue RP 2023

Snapshot of Rachel’s induction ceremony and programmatic activities for the 2023 cohort of the Purdue University Rising Professionals Early Career Distinguished Young Alumni program.

Rachel’s passion for community-centered innovation became her conviction after she learned how one person’s choices can affect many lives. From overcoming the loss of a parent from substance abuse as a teenager, family violence, food insecurity, and homelessness, Rachel acquired lived experience and empathy that informs her connection to helping others live with dignity, especially the vulnerable and marginalized. Her firm belief is that resilience gives strength to keep moving forward to create the change the world wants to see.

Convisero: How does it function?

A case study of trust-building interactions for strategic impact

UNGA 2022

Above is a snapshot of Rachel’s UNGA week where she met numerous individuals from the following institutions: UNICEF USA, Concordia, Johnson & Johnson, Catou, Africa Diaspora Network, Wall Street Green Summit, New York Stock Exchange, Empow’HER, Unite for Health Foundation, Women’s World Banking, Schmidt Futures, World Benchmarking Alliance, Sustainable Finance Podcast, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Goalkeepers, among many others.

Rachel joined The Trebuchet community from working alongside Sherman as a member of the Pugwash movement. Both individuals were on the same Board at Student Pugwash USA, yet it was not until they had the opportunity to connect directly to get to know each other’s work more expansively nearly two years into Sherman’s advisory role at Student Pugwash that it was understood that there was much more overlap and alignment in efforts.

Rachel, Sherman, and Jeff, April 2022

Rachel helped operationalize many of The Trebuchet’s programmatic activities throughout 2021 (as well as occasionally in present day). Even before Rachel took on the operations role, she was introduced to many of The Trebuchet Convisero community members, most prominently Jeffrey Aresty, President and Founder of InternetBar.Org Institute (IBO). Rachel’s journey with IBO began because of her past role at Johnson & Johnson’s CaringCrowd, which Sherman thought could help IBO with fundraising. Because Rachel was also on the Board of the nonprofit J.B. Dondolo, Inc. who hosts an annual international song competition, Sherman thought there was additional overlap with the model and mission of PeaceTones (an IBO initiative). PeaceTones was an initiative that began with Sherman’s collaboration with Jeff at Tufts’ Institute for Global Leadership, which Sherman led for thirty years.

Less than a year later, Rachel became the Co-Founder of the social enterprise Global Futurist Initiative™. She brought Sherman onto the initiative’s advisory board as Global Futurist Initiative went beyond the scope of Pugwash. Upon meeting Global Futurist Initiative’s Co-Founder, Julia Samson, Sherman invited her also to be part of the Convisero mentor network. Global Futurist Initiative has recently merged with ImpactVest to become the philanthropy arm of the company, operating as a nonprofit subsidiary. In this merger, Rachel will be starting her new role in May 2023 after the completion of her consultancy for UNICEF USA.

G-Fi activities

Rachel Svetanoff and Jeffrey Aresty, March 2022

As IBO’s past Executive Director from 2021-2022, Rachel worked with Curt Rhodes who started collaborating with Jeff at Sherman’s invitation. Sherman and Questscope have a longstanding relationship; many of Sherman’s interns have intervened and become professionals at Questscope in Jordan’s Za’atari refugee camp.

Curt’s organization Questscope and IBO are partners on a Web3 project called Data as Truth & Art (DATA). Sherman introduced Sasha Chanoff, the founder of RefugePoint, to Jeff and Curt, initially because of Sasha’s connections to the Patrick McGovern Foundation for funding the DATA project. In this manner, Sherman had also connected Rachel with Sasha, whose 10-year anniversary of RefugePoint she attended. It is through this project that Sherman connected the photographer Richard Sobol to IBO and Questscope. He was interested in creating digital assets for IBO, particularly related to the PeaceTones initiative within the context of climate justice.

Diving deeper into climate justice, Sherman introduced Rachel to Peter Droege who supported her becoming a LEAP fellow at Peter’s organization, the Lichtenstein Institute for Strategic Development. Coincidentally, near the same time, Sherman’s intern Julia Shufro was working on a research project over the summer pertaining to climate justice and the feasibility of the creation of international criminal court for environmental crimes. Learning about this assignment, Sherman convened Julia Shufro, Peter Droege, Julia Samson, Boaz Wachtel, Duncan Pickard, Julian Agyman and Rachel together (all of whom are part of the mentor network) to serve on Julia Shufro’s group of advisors. This group formed a loose coalition looking to gain momentum on creating a people’s tribunal for environmental justice. Rachel and Julia remain good friends and colleagues given their work intersecting as fellow members of the UN system.

While there are strings to follow to integrate the environmental justice movement with IBO’s climate justice mission, there are additional overlaps with Rachel’s work at IBO and other human rights efforts. Because IBO’s work also focuses on civic engagement, she was introduced to Marcy Murningham, another LEAP fellow. In a similar manner, Sherman also connected Rachel with Hussainatu and Hassanatu Blake, Sherman’s former students at Tufts and now Convisero mentors. They are currently serving as external advisors to the IBO-partnered Project Energy for Life Cameroon Consortium. 

PEFL Cameroon

Snapshot of PEFL Cameroon activities including the packing and shipping of the humanitarian aid boxes, the delivery and testimonials of the boxes, the training of how to use the medical devices and solar panel kits, and the visit of Elvis Ndansi, Founder of Unite for Health Foundation at Purdue University in May 2023.

Project Energy for Life Cameroon is similar to IBO’s other current effort, Tech for Justice Ukraine which works to help meet the needs of Ukrainians by increasing access to opportunity and justice for the long-term in addition to short-term relief.

When Sherman started his colloquium at Sai University in 2021, Curt, Jeff, Julia Samson, and Rachel were invited to be the first guest panel alongside George Mathew and Amitai Abouzaglo (both mentors). George and Rachel met before the lecture since they shared programmatic activity through music. George is the Founder of Music for Life International, and Rachel as overseer of PeaceTones. George and Curt also know one another, working together in the past and again introduced by Sherman.

Cody Valdes has been an instrumental help to Sai University as its Senior Tutor for Sherman’s class and for the overall institution. Jamshed Bharucha (mentor), is the new President of the university with whom Rachel shared a brief correspondence. Two of Sherman’s newest interns, Shaheer Rahman and Ravi Patel, serve as his teaching assistants. Rachel helped interview these two students as well as his other interns Ingyin Khine, Ashleigh Mahabir, and Liz Shelbred. Ingyin and Ashleigh volunteered their time at IBO for the Spring 2022 semester. Ingyin was a project management assistant to the Project Energy for Life Cameroon consortium and Ashleigh was a social media assistant to IBO’s Ukrainian response project.  

From left to right: Rafael Reisz, Rachel Svetanoff, Jeff Aresty, and David Schleiker (2022)

Knowing that Rachel’s work with youth is integral as an intersecting point across all her efforts, Sherman acquainted her with Christopher Ghadban (mentor). She also met Ananda Paez through Sherman as well as Nithyaa Venkataramani, Ajaita Shah, Lumay Wang Murphy, Patrick Schmidt, and Talia Weiss. Due to a catch-up call between Sherman, Jeff, and Rachel, this led to the re-connection between Rafael Reisz (mentor) and Jeff who have known each other for more than 15 years when Jeff first formed IBO. Rafael, now a Professor of Management at the Hult International Business School, is currently working with Rachel on IBO’s business strategy.

There was a full-circle moment between Rafael and Jeff, and the same was true when Sherman had Rachel meet Talia Weiss (mentor). Talia was interested in learning about Rachel’s history with Pugwash when, at Sherman’s instigation and advocacy, she became an International Student/Young Pugwash representative. Rachel left Pugwash after 10 years of service also alongside mentors David Guston, Ezra Friedman, and Steve Miller who currently are in the Pugwash network, but she is always willing to pass along opportunities that come across her desk for Talia and ISYP.

Because Rachel is on call ad hoc, she finished helping Sherman support Patrick Schmidt’s 2022 Congressional campaign. She most recently assisted in the initiation of a Trebuchet operation alongside fellow mentor Eva Armour. Through this effort, she also met Sherman’s newest intern cohort Grace Spalding-Fecher, Sandenna, McMaster, and Grace Patrice.

Organically, Rachel is even meeting Convisero mentors without overtures just because her network now overlaps with Sherman’s. Most recently, she met Justin Hefter of 30 Birds Foundation to whom are in touch with one another. Rachel has also met Soshana Grossman and Sarah Arkin due to intersections and alignments in work, particularly from consulting and governmental relations standpoints, respectively.

Student Pugwash

Snapshot of Rachel’s Purdue Pugwash activities as a student from 2013-2018 including hosting Eli Lilly & Co. Vice President of Marketing, Emerging Markets Nancy Lilly (photo 1); IU School of Medicine Professor and Rachel’s Research Advisor Dr. Robert Stahelin (photo 3); Astronaut David Wolf (photo 5); and President of University of Virginia Dr. Tim Sands (photo 8).

The Trebuchet team, October 2021

I first became acquainted with Rachel while serving on the board of Student Pugwash USA. Rachel began attending Convisero webinars where she came to learn about our community and its involvement with driving progress towards a more sustainable and humane future. She now proudly serves as a mentor for aspiring leaders, shakers, and changemakers to help elevate each other and the world around us. I have rarely met somebody so young who is so accomplished in the context of extraordinary initiative and the capacity to create. Diligence, intelligence, dedication and a massive passion to embrace daunting challenges mark this woman.

For Sherman:

Complex, interconnected, and “serendipitous” (as Sherman would say): this is how the Convisero network functions. I would have never come across these many connections and opportunities if it wasn’t for this network of caring mentors. Meeting Sherman was unexpected, unannounced, and unassuming in the best way possible. Being able to meet him, Sherman’s wife Iris, and The Trebuchet interns in October 2021 was nothing short of fun and meaningful. Working with Sherman has opened my mind by teaching me more about the world than I could have ever anticipated. He has helped me amplify my voice to advocate for what I believe in through his genuine support. Lastly, he inspired me to be true to myself by demonstrating that it is okay to be just that and show others that you truly care about your work and the people who are part of it. A true role model, mentor, and nakama.“

For the readers who made it down here: (2024)

If any of you have found this golden nugget, you can count on my surprise and admiration of your loyalty. First coffee is on me! I may be the only person in this community from Indiana, and certainly the only one from the Gary/Merrillville region. Where I come from is foundational to the reason I am here because I would not be who I am today otherwise. It is also why I am addressing you, the reader, because I know what feels like to struggle between identifying with where you came from versus where you are today, wondering if anyone would accept the whole of you. Even more so, if you can accept yourself whether you stay or leave as neither choice is easy.

It has taken time to process and love both parts of myself but as a result, I realized that if I can put up those barriers, I also have the power to break them down.

It is because of Sherman and his community that those barriers started weakening, moving the scaffolding away from walls and towards building human connections. The community had started becoming a part of me to where I now refer to them as any of my own colleagues, friends, and even family. Convisero truly lives up to its mission to break down barriers and build bridges because they all — especially Sherman — have helped me do exactly that, with hard work and perseverance no less. And should you join in what I am proud to say our community, I hope you find yourself moving forward with the creation of your own bridges.

Lucas Kello

Lucas Kello is Associate Professor of International Relations and co-Director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security at Oxford University. His publications include The Virtual Weapon and International Order, “The Meaning of the Cyber Revolution: Perils to Theory and Statecraft” in International Security, and “Security” in The Oxford Companion to International Relations . His forthcoming book, Striking Back, considers how western nations can fight back to preserve the international order against relentless technological aggression occurring below the threshold of war – i.e., in the realm of what he calls “unpeace,” a term that he coined in his first book. The new book "delves into recent history to reveal the failures of the present policy in preventing and punishing cyberattacks and other forms of technological aggression. Drawing upon case studies and interviews, Kello develops a bold new solution—a coordinated retaliation strategy that justly and effectively responds to attacks and deters further antagonism. This book provides an approachable yet nuanced exploration of national security and survival in the twenty-first century."

I have known Lucas since 1995 when I helped him conceive and sponsor his research trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina in the aftermath of the Dayton Accords.  He specifically was engaged in helping to document the destruction of Bosnian cultural, architectural, and religious institutions and sites. We worked with Harvard University’s Andras Riedlmeyer, the Agha Khan bibliographer in Islamic Art and Architecture at the Fine Arts Library Foundation, and the noted war crimes expert Professor Cherif-Bassiouni who charged the Milosvic regime with "cultural genocide."

Lucas and I have collaborated and interacted closely over many years of friendship. I was one of his sponsors for his Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and Technology when he was my Institute’s INSPIRE Fellow.  He helped run and participated in several of the Institute's professional workshops, most recently during the 2016 EPIIC year on The Future of Europe.

Together that year we created a chain of acknowledgement to honor the renowned Professor Stanley Hoffmann who was Lucas' senior honors thesis advisor at Harvard College, alongside his close Oxford colleague and Stanley’s longtime friend Professor Kalypso Nicolaïdis. Stanley had been my friend and advisor for many years, starting with his Advisory role to my publication Leviathan: Middle East Politics and Culture in the late 1970's.

Lucas was the liaison for my appointment as a non-resident research associate in Oxford University’s Centre for International Studies.

Ben Paganelli

Originally from Upstate New York, Benjamin “Pags” Paganelli graduated from the United States Air Force Academy with a B.S. in International Affairs. He spent the next 22 years in operations, training, and strategic planning, during which he earned an M.S. in International Relations and eventually served as an Assistance Professor of Political Science at the Air Force Academy.

Ben’s military career centered around operations (qualified in the F-4E, RF-4C, F-111F/G, F-15E, and T-39) and leadership at the tactical level. In 2004 he completed the NATO Strategic Planning Course, and he spent the next three years as NATO’s Strategic Air Planner for the International Security Assistance Force (Afghanistan) and standing up the first NATO Response Force, before finishing his first career in the classroom.

While faculty at USAFA, Ben started the Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services (ALLIES) chapter there. ALLIES is a program initiated at the IGL, and Ben worked closely with us, and with Gregg Nakano, the first intellectual ramrod of ALLIES - to support student leaders from six universities and three military academies work and study together, conduct Joint Research Projects (JRP), and forge life-long relationships. When Ben left the Air Force, he was named an INSPIRE Fellow at the IGL, and served as the ALLIES national advisor for the next five years, which included advising and participating in the 2012 JRP to Rwanda.

As a principal and Senior Consultant for Viable International Applications Unlimited, LLC, Ben has worked with educational, government, corporate, and non-profit organizations to improve their cross-organizational and cross-cultural relationships. He adjuncts at Tacoma Community College, and has lectured or taught at a dozen or so institutions to include The Belgian War College, US Air Force Special Operations School, Technion (Israel), Boston University, the University of Colorado, Seattle University and the University of Puget Sound.

Ron Haviv

Ron Haviv is an award-winning photojournalist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker and co-founder of the photo agency VII, who has been dedicated to documenting conflict and raising awareness about human rights issues around the globe.

In the last three decades, Ron has covered more than twenty-five conflicts and worked in over one hundred countries. He has produced an unflinching record of the injustices of war and his photography has had singular impact. His work in the Balkans, which spanned over a decade of conflict, was used as evidence to indict and convict war criminals at the international tribunal in The Hague. President George H.W. Bush cited Haviv’s chilling photographs documenting paramilitary violence in Panama as one of the reasons for the 1989 American intervention. 

His work has been featured in numerous museums and galleries, including the Louvre, the United Nations, and the Council on Foreign Relations. His photographs are in the collections at The Houston Museum of Fine Arts and George Eastman House amongst others as well as numerous private collections.

His film work has appeared on PBS’s Need to Know and Frontline as well as NBC Nightly News and ABC World News Tonight. He has directed short films for ESPN, People Magazine, Doctors Without Borders, Asia Society and American Photography. Haviv’s music videos have been on the MTV Europe and Sol Musica channels in Spain.

His first photography book, Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal, was called “One of the best non-fiction books of the year,” by The Los Angeles Times and “A chilling but vastly important record of a people’s suffering,” by Newsweek. His two other monographs are Afghanistan: The Road to Kabul and Haiti: 12 January 2010.

Ron has helped create multi-platform projects for Doctors Without Borders' DR Congo: The Forgotten War and Starved for Attention, Unicef's Child Alert for Darfur and Sri Lanka and the International Committee of the Red Cross's World at War.

Ron is the central character in six documentary films, including National Geographic Explorer’s Freelance in a World of Risk, in which he speaks about the dangers of combat photography, including his numerous detentions and close calls. He has provided expert analysis and commentary on ABC World News, BBC, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, Good Morning America and The Charlie Rose Show.

Ron has been an inspiration to our students for years. As part of my last year on The Future of Europe, commemorating 10 years of VII and IGL collaboration and the 30th anniversary of the Institute for Global Leadership he joined he colleagues, the world’s leading photojournalists from the VII Photo Agency to explore their coverage of the continuing migration and merging of societies and cultures through a series of presentations and panels featuring recent work from the Syrian refugee crisis and discussion with academic experts followed by a day of hands on workshops.

For the Institute’s 20th Anniversary Ron help orchestrate and participated in:

Questions without Answers
A Photographic Prism of World Events, 1985-2010
Photographs by VII

Questions without Answers, a major exhibition co-organized by the Tufts University Art Gallery, Tufts’ Institute for Global Leadership, and VII Photo Agency, presents a wide range of photographs that portray defining moments of the post-Cold War period and their aftermaths. From the Fall of the Berlin Wall and September 11, 2001, to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Balkans and Congo, Chechnya and Gaza, among other conflict zones, this timely, landmark exhibition features 125 photographs by 16 photographers affiliated with the renowned VII Photo Agency, newly printed for the occasion, many displayed for the first time. Also included is one Oscar-nominated short docudrama by Antonin Kratochvil.

Responding to the earthquake which devastated Haiti in 2010 we organized this effort with Ron on behalf of Partners in Health who have an extraordinary history of aiding the people of Haiti.

By Kanupriya Tewari

13 January 2010. As darkness envelops Haiti’s people, a community’s songs filter through the air. Moving though the capital city, a photographer comes upon a small medical clinic tucked within the shadows. The bodies of the dead are piled outside the health care center. A number of people are trying to sleep in the building’s congested courtyard despite their evident pain—they lack medicine, food, and supplies. Drawing closer, amidst the dirt and debris, a Haitian woman wrapped in a blue bed sheet extends an outstretched hand in a desperate plea for help. Her pain touches the photographer, who immortalizes the scene.

“Great photography demands questioning,” says Sherman Teichman, Director of the Institute of Global Leadership (IGL) at Tufts University.

From the small inquiries—who is this woman? What has she suffered? —to the larger, more thought provoking questions—where are the medical supplies? What can I do to help her? How can I lift her up and onto her feet once again?

This philosophy, one that pushes people to question the causes behind images, guided collaborators from the IGL and de.Mo Design Company as they compiled photographs and words for Haiti: 12 January 2010, a striking sixteen page folio publication. More than six months after the Haitian earthquake, as media attention slowly shifts to new stories, it becomes easier for people to forget about Haiti’s suffering. This folio provides a needed reminder; it compels people to continue to think about Haiti.

Because all proceeds from folio sales are donated to Partners In Health (PIH), people who purchase the work are not only continuing to think about Haiti, they’re committing to action. Get the folio of Haiti: 12 January 2010.

Photographer Ron Haviv, a co-founder of VII Photo Agency humanizes Haiti’s tragedy through images like the woman in blue reaching out for help. “They allow you to absorb the overwhelming aspect of the disaster as well as relate on a one-on-one level,” says Haviv. “Images are potent because they are immediate and urgent, but they also require context,” Teichman adds. Simon Winchester’s introduction, “Catastrophe, Nature, God and Understanding” provides context, shaping the folio’s powerful narrative.

Though this innovative effort was initiated immediately in response to the earthquake in Haiti, the story behind the folio’s production actually precedes the disaster.

Human rights are central to the IGL’s mission. The Institute challenges students to look beyond traditional humanitarian models that focus on giving impoverished people only food, water, and shelter, and instead to explore the broader social frameworks behind poverty. With this focus on global inequities and iniquities, each year the IGL’s EPIIC (Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship) program explores one central global dilemma: a broad theme that provides the intellectual space for students to explore complex issues. In 2004-2005, EPIIC chose the theme of Oil and Water—it was in December 2004 that the earthquake in the Indian Ocean struck, triggering a tsunami that killed around 230,000 in the region. The parallelism between the theme and tragedy were evident, as were the effects of the disaster itself, leading the IGL to leap into action and produce its first collaborative folio. As the Institute was preparing for this year’s 2010 EPIIC program, Haiti was leveled by a devastating earthquake. The collaborators reacted with a similar sense of urgency.

Ron Haviv landed in Haiti less than 24 hours after the quake. The folio offers a visual testimony to Haviv’s experience; it captures the trauma of January 12 in sixteen unbound posters (36 x 54cm each). Its unique format, as designed by Giorgio Baravalle, founder of the de.Mo Design Company, allows the viewer to absorb each page individually or to hang the entire project on the wall, creating a powerful document that spotlights the earthquake’s aftermath. It is ideally suited for galleries, high schools and universities, and people with a strong appreciation for world-class photojournalism or design.

Choosing PIH as the organization to receive all of the folio’s proceeds demonstrates the collaborators’ commitment to maintaining a long-term partnership with PIH—in 2002, the IGL began this partnership by awarding its Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award to PIH co-founder Dr. Paul Farmer. Part of the award entails that the Institute continue to partner with its recipient over the coming years. “We chose PIH because we have tremendous admiration for the fact that PIH works with its sister organization, Zanmi Lasante, in Haiti in such a sustainable way, and has been committed to Haiti for so long,” Teichman adds.

Understanding that the Haitian earthquake is a long-term crisis, the collaborators want to focus their fundraising efforts on an area where less attention might be centered. Folio proceeds support PIH’s mental health and psychosocial services initiatives, which attend to the Haitian people’s inner, invisible wounds.

This unique picture essay ultimately compels us to question, and to remember January 12, even as time elapses. As Teichman says, it is “of-the-moment, yet also timeless.” 

Ron is currently photographing the war in Ukraine. We will be providing periodic updates of his work.

• March 2, 2022: “A Brief History of Ukrainian Heroes.”

Sarah Arkin

Sarah Arkin is the Policy Director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democratic staff, where she also covers the Middle East and North Africa. Previously, she was Foreign Policy Advisor to U.S. Senator Bob Menendez. Prior to that she was U.S. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz's Senior Policy Advisor, covering foreign policy and associate staff of the State and Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittee. Previously, Sarah served in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, covering a range of issues including human rights, religious freedom and women's rights. Sarah worked as a research assistant at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University and the Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University and received a Boren National Security Education Program Fellowship in Cairo in 2012 studying Arab and researching the effectiveness of civic education initiatives in post-Mubarak Egypt

Before all that, she worked as a journalist and photojournalist, winning a Virginia Press Association Breaking News Award in 2009. She has lived in Israel, Kenya, and Uganda. She has a B.A. in International Relations and Spanish from Tufts University and an M.A. in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University.

At the Institute she was a wonderful member of the Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) program: Religion, Ethnicity, and Nationalism. 

She was one of the talented founders of EXPOSURE, our Institute project for documentary studies dedicated to the advancement of human rights.

Peter Droege

Peter Droege directs the Liechtenstein Institute for Strategic Development (LISD), the global advisory and research organization for the rapid transition to regenerative communities, cities, regions and infrastructure. Professor Droege serves also as President of Eurosolar, the European Association for Renewable Energy, and as General Chairman, World Council for Renewable Energy. A recipient of the European Solar Prize in Education, Peter initiated the Chair for Sustainable Spatial Development at the University of Liechtenstein while holding a Conjoint Professorship at the Faculty of Engineering, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, University of Newcastle, Australia. An inaugural member of the Zayed Future Energy Prize jury and Expert Commissioner for Cities and Climate Change for the World Future Council he also served on the Steering Committee of the Urban Climate Change Research Network hosted at Columbia University's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and CUNY. He has taught and researched at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's School of Architecture and Planning, at Tokyo University as Endowed Chair in Urban Engineering at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, and as Lend Lease Chair of Urban Design at the University of Sydney. Professor Droege has authored or edited numerous books, including Intelligent Environments (Elsevier 1997), Urban Energy Transition, 1st Edition: From Fossil Fuels to Renewable Power (Elsevier 2008), The Renewable City (Wiley 2006), 100% Renewable - Energy Autonomy in Action (Earthscan 2009 and Routledge 2014), Climate Design (ORO Editions 2010), Regenerative Region: Lake Constance Energy and Climate Atlas (oekom verlag 2014), co-editing Regenerative Räume (oekom verlag 2017).

I have known Peter for decades, initially attracted to discourse on ideas and on martial arts (he’s a black belt in judo). We worked together in the early 1980’s in a symposium on Secrecy and Disclosure. He was the Institute’s outward bound guest and INSPIRE fellow on the EPIIC’s 20th anniversary year, on “Oil and Water.” While in residence at the institute, he wrote his first book “Renewable City: A Comprehensive Guide to an Urban Revolution” in 04’. The dedication of that book reads as follows “this guide is dedicated to all who work on a more advanced human habitat - as a means of sustaining human life fairly, without eroding this fragile earth’s natural support basis on which it is founded, but in helping nurture it back from the brink.” Peter was the first person to really help me understand the concept of sustainability of sustainability and the fragility of our ecosystem. He mentored many of our students. I joined LISD as a Senior Fellow upon becoming Emeritus, in charge of developing LEAP, the LISD Embedded Action and Practitioner Program. Together, we are engaged in developing curriculum with Harvard’s International Relations Council.  

Nick Birnback

Nick Birnback is currently the Director of Strategic Communications for United Nations Peacekeeping at the UN Headquarters in New York City  He was previously the Chief of Public Affairs for the Departments of Peacekeeping Operations and Field Support, in addition to serving as the Chief of Public information and Chief of Staff for the UN Political Office for Somalia (UNPOS).

He began his career with the UNDP as a public information officer for the United Nations observer mission in Liberia, starting a 25 year journey with UN peace operations. He has worked in a number of capacities, both in the field and at Headquarters, including as Special Assistant to the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General at the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea, an Information Officer in Liberia and Sierra Leone, a Civil Affairs Officer and Special Assistant to the Deputy Commissioner of the UN Mission’s International Police Task Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina.and an information Officer and Acting Spokesman for the United Nations Mission in East Timor. He has also worked as an External Relations Officer for the UN Department of Political Affairs’ Electoral Assistance Division. Among his areas of expertise are peacekeeping, strategic communications and military affairs. 

Nick has received a number of awards and commendations throughout his career, including the UN medal, which he was awarded in 1998 for his actions during a riot in the Hercegovci town of Drvar.   

In his typical pithy manner, Nick has characterized the Peacekeepers' jobs as "the last stop before hell," and has made it explicit that the Peacekeeper's role is not fighting wars, but rather assisting in building institutions in troubled countries and protecting the population in the transition.

Nick studied at Tufts with me as a very thoughtful, inquisitive, and challenging member of my EPIIC, Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship colloquium on “Confronting Political and Social Evil.” He was a superb student, graduating Magna Cum Laude, with Summa Cum Laude for his thesis in History and international relations which he accomplished in an unusual short amount of time. He was also a scholar-athlete. A Tufts Varsity baseball player, he was also a sabre fencer, my fencing weapon, and some of the our more delightful email exchanges often included simulated bouts of attacks, ripostes, and counter-attacks. 

But we fused over ideas. His honed his intellect, continued his formal education, earning a Masters in Public Policy from Princeton University. 

After graduation Nick was awarded a prestigious Herbert Scoville Jr Peace Fellowship providing him an opportunity to gain a Washington perspective on key issues of peace and security (His accepting this award was particularly pleasing for me. “Pete” Scoville was an ally and core participant in the MX missile citizens action forum that I created and held at MIT in 1981).

We communicated often. One day a terse email came in my in-box from East Timor,  “Pray for me. They are shooting at us” His UN headquarters in Dili, East Timor was under siege by pro-government militias. It was soon followed by a jarring email from his mother, who informed me that he had never heard of the place until he took a course with me. I ruefully remembered assigning an article by Noam Chomsky.

His mission, UNAMET, was awarded the 2000 Elie Wiesel award for Humanitarianism for Nick’s, Ian Martin’s, and other senior UN staff’s courageous intervention during the siege, refusing to be evacuated to Darwin, Australia, until all the Timorese people under their protection were airlifted out as well. Two of his emails back to New York Headquarters during the tense negotiations he shared read, “This is not Schindler’s List,” and “This is not Darwinian survival of the fittest.” Nick’s response stayed true to his typical honest, blunt, understated persona. 

I had the honor of successfully nominating Nick for the highest alumni recognition from Tufts University, the Light on the Hill Award    I also brought Nick back to Tufts as an invaluable member of our Institute’s Voices from the Field gathering in 2012, and to award him the Institute’s Distinguished Alumni Award, in the presence of General Romeo Dallaire.

He surprised me in turn, presenting me with his heavy personal distinctive Blue Helmet, lugged all the way from Somalia. Chillingly for me, his blood type is written on the back. (I will send this picture later)

Nick and I have a fun relationship and I would be remiss to post this without a sense of his singular, irreverent  verve – he wrote this about himself when I asked for his bio:

Growing up in the independent and sovereign republic of Brooklyn, Nick’s real passion is writing about food and New York, the city that sent him out into the world with a chip on his shoulder and the belief that he belongs in any room and a sense that anything is possible with the right amount of hustle.

Chief of Staff, MINURSO - Mission for the UN Referendum in Western Sahara