Troy Lewis

Troy Lewis is an accomplished educator, youth development specialist, professional advisory muse, and social justice advocate. As the Chief Executive Officer of Education Services of Greater Washington, LLC (ESGW), he provides program-based services in the areas of workforce development, organizational capacity building, college access and personal responsibility. Troy’s professional background includes advanced program development and management skills, talent acquisition, mentor programming, leadership development, large group facilitation, college completion, professional development, and life skills. 

Troy provides expert services to local and federal government agencies, community-based organizations, educational institutions, and corporations to empower learners to reach their optimum potential through purposeful programming, intentional exposure, and access to reliable resources. He achieves results through innovative and high impact interactive turnkey Smart workshops, network training sessions, conferences, retreats, and other comprehensive program development platforms. Notably, Troy has consulted with the DC Department of Employment Services to develop a program to address the negative impact of gentrification. His work has aided DC young adults, who are out of the education pipeline, with college enrollment and international educational experiences abroad.  

Troy tributes his professional skill to his experiences with leading youth development programs and higher education institutions. After teaching high school mathematics at an alternative charter school, Troy was a Senior Trainer at the Posse Foundation. He helped identify, recruit, and train diverse student leaders to attend top-tier colleges. Troy directly supported college students and served as a Post-secondary Advisor at KIPP DC KIPP Through College office and academic advisor at the University of Maryland at College Park. At American University, he provided high profile federal internships to American Indians, Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiians at the USDA, Social Security Administration, National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation. Troy also served as the Manager of Talent Acquisition and Campus Relations - Internships for the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF), supporting college students and graduates of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) with securing federal internships across the country.

Troy provides resources and tools to those who aspire to achieve their educational, career, and life goals with a passion for inspiring and educating youth, young adults, and professionals. His activism on local and state boards and community volunteerism reflects his dedication to impact lives in various ways.

Troy holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Florida A&M University, studied Higher Education at University of Maryland College Park, and is pursuing a Master’s in Education in Education Leadership, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship at Harvard University. 

Dwijo Goswami

Dwijo Goswami is an Engagement Manager in digital and analytics at McKinsey & Company, living in New Delhi, India. At McKinsey, he leads digital strategy and transformation projects for leading consumer-facing enterprises across various industries and geographies. Prior to working with McKinsey, he was a financial management consultant in the skills division of India’s Ministry of Rural Development. 

There Mr. Goswami designed and implemented India’s first end-to-end real-time public expenditure tracking platform, in addition to coordinating policy and technology requirements and executing national roll-out of financial systems. 

Mr. Goswami also worked for The World Bank as a Consultant in Financial Management, where he piloted multiple technology innovations to reduce fund leakage. He implemented expenditure tracking systems in over 2,000 government primary schools in Odisha as well as scaled an e-payment system Odisha village health workers.

Mr. Goswami previously was a research associate at Abdul Latin Jameel Poverty Action Lab, where he worked with Nobel laureates Professors Esther Duflo and Abhijeet Banerjee on their largest public health project, which addressed anemia and low rural household incomes in Bhojpur district. 

As a John F. Kennedy Fellow, Mr. Goswami earned a Master degree in Public Administration and International Development at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 2017. In 2011, he earned his Bachelor of Arts in Economics and International Relations at Tufts University. 

Dwijo was a stellar student in EPIIC, and participated in many of the Institute’s other initiatives and programs, including this photographic workshop of our EXPOSURE program in the summer of 2009 in Ajmer, India. He was also involved in the Empower program, in which he embarked on the study of microfinance.

Jeanette Bailey

Jeanette Bailey is the Nutrition Research and Innovation Lead at the International Rescue Committee (IRC), and an associate professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. She was the Principal Investigator on the Combined Protocol for Acute Malnutrition Study (ComPAS), a global clinical trial that tested a simplified and combined approach to treating severe and moderate acute malnutrition in children under age 5. The ComPAS protocol is now being researched in clinical and operational trials by non-governmental organizations, the United Nations, and governments in more than 12 countries. Jeanette is currently leading a research team at the IRC to design and test new interventions to improve the care and delivery of treatment to malnourished children globally.

Prior to joining the IRC, Jeanette spent nearly a decade overseas working in humanitarian programs with Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and Action Against Hunger in multiple countries in Africa, Asia and South America. She received her PhD and MSc in Nutrition from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), and her BA in International Relations from Tufts University.

Roderick Cowan

Roderick Cowan may be the most famous person you have never heard of. His work has appeared in media around the world — from the New York Times and Washington Post to the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian — and on the desks of presidents, prime ministers (one of whom wanted Cowan's head on a platter), politicians, academics, intellectuals, and corporate leaders. Yet, his name rarely appears in print, online, or on electronic media.

Cowan honed his persuasion skills disarming dangerous criminals or getting them to confess to crimes as a police officer and investigator in two of Britain's toughest districts — the east end of Glasgow and the east end of London. While on a leave of absence from London's Metropolitan Police, he discovered he had a talent for journalism, writing, and public speaking. He later added teaching to his skillset and did so from a practitioner's perspective.

Cowan prefers to remain behind the scenes, speechwriting, advising, and training. He now has over 30 years of experience writing, teaching, speaking at conferences and public events, and assisting in various government and corporate research and communications programs.

Cowan is currently the Executive Director, University of Chicago Center for Security and Threats (CPOST).

He has previously held several senior advisory roles, such as Research Fellow with the Research Network for a Secure Australia; Strategic Advisor to the Dubai-based Emirates Group Security/Edith Cowan University Centre of Aviation and Security Studies (CASS); Advisor to Macquarie University’s Centre for Policing, Intelligence and Counterterrorism (PICT), where he developed and delivered its first Media Studies and Terrorism unit for its master’s course (MPICT).

His research focuses on digital communication issues in the security, intelligence, and law enforcement context, notably illicit trade, cyber security and human factors, social media, open-source risk, and communications skills. He has conducted workshops for and consulted with law enforcement, intelligence agencies, government entities, and corporations in Australia, Middle East, UK, and the EU on how digital technology, although providing many benefits, also represents severe threats to governments, businesses, communities, and individuals.

He regularly teaches communications subjects, such as crisis media management, interviewing, and practical writing skills. His clients include international corporations, such as IAG and Emirates Airlines, and Governments, such as the Georgian Parliament, Tbilisi, and the Australian Federal Attorney-General.

A speechwriter and advisor to public and private individuals, he is a member of the American Professional Speechwriters Association and the UK Speechwriters Guild.

Cowan has written for print media, appeared on national television and radio, and has received two industry awards for excellence for reporting in the security industry.

Before his communications career, Cowan was a police officer in the UK, initially serving in Scotland and then London's Metropolitan Police.

Amir Grinstein

Amir Grinstein is Associate Professor of Marketing at Northeastern University and VU Amsterdam. He completed all his studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was a post-doctorate fellow at Harvard Business School. Amir’s research and teaching interests are focused on two core issues: (1) the interface between marketing and society/public policy, especially topics such as the enhancement of “green”, healthy or other socially-desirable behaviors, and the effectiveness of de-marketing, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and brand activism; (2) marketing strategy, including the study of strategic orientations and international marketing topics. He applies multiple methods in his research including field studies, lab and online experiments, survey research, secondary data analysis, and meta-analysis.

Amir published over 40 academic papers in leading journals such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Consumer Research among others. He is currently an Associate Editor at Journal of International Marketing and on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Marketing and International Journal of Research in Marketing. Amir’s received multiple recognitions for his work including in recent years the Thomas C. Kinnear award for outstanding article in Journal of Public Policy and Marketing on his co-authored work on food waste, the Journal of International Marketing’s outstanding Associate Editor, mostly for co-leading a special issue on Well-Being in a Global World, and a Teaching Excellence Award for the course Bridging Conflict, Creating Diversity: an Entrepreneurship and Marketing Experience.

Amir co-founded and is a board member of 50:50 Startups (www.5050startups.org), a non-profit accelerator that helps create and mentor equally owned Jewish-Arab/Israeli-Palestinian technology startups. The accelerator has engaged since 2019 about 100 participants and mentored 10 early-stage ventures.

Amir writes a weekly column for the Israeli business and economics newspaper Globes about managerial and behavioral research.  

He lives in Brookline MA, is married to Yana (a leadership development expert and executive coach) and has 3 boys.

Christopher Ghadban

Christopher Ghadban is an MBA Candidate majoring in Healthcare Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to pursuing his MBA, he is juggling several roles in the early innovation space. These include his Venture Fellowship with Alix Ventures; consulting with VC firms and startups such as Rejuvenate Bio, Third Rock Ventures, Ensoma, and GeneGuard; assisting the City of Philadelphia as they seek to build their life science ecosystem; developing an executive leadership program with Wharton and McKinsey for early-career professionals in healthcare; advising the launch of Nucleate, a national program for translating academic life science innovation out of academia; and launching a biotech startup in sustainability/clean tech.

Prior to beginning at Wharton, Chris was Senior Strategy & Innovation Associate with AstraZeneca's Emerging Innovations Unit. This role involved a combination of developing and launching innovation strategy; conducting search and evaluation of early-stage, high potential bio-innovations and establishing collaborative research projects for catalysis; and leading engagement with the global, biopharma entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Before joining AstraZeneca, Chris operated as an independent consultant for over a dozen emerging and established biotechnology and technology companies. The experience enabled broad exposure to numerous functional roles, during which Chris ensured client success by designing and implementing organic growth, business development, product development, and operational effectiveness strategies.

Chris attended Tufts University, completing degrees in MS Bioengineering (’17) and BS Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology Engineering (’14). While at Tufts, he co-founded Tufts Synthetic Biology, an independent organization that enables undergraduates to step into the roles of research project design and execution while considering the commercial, social, and ethical implications of their work. Chris continues to advise emerging life science leaders as a mentor with programs such as Nucleate, iGEM, GapSummit, MassBio, Kickstart Carolina, and the NCI’s SBIR Program.

In his spare time Chris can be found creating new recipes, exploring used bookstores, filling his sketchbook, and advising new and growing ventures.

UNDERSTANDING GLOBAL POLITICAL VIOLENCE: REVIEW OF 2021

Understanding Global Political Violence

Review of 2021

Building on the success of this year’s review of 2020, CPOST researchers and guests will presents findings and insights into political violence across the globe. Importantly, subsequent discussions will focus on practical implications, strategies, and policies.

Date: February 23 &24, 2022 

Location: Virtual event.

Agenda: 

  • Global trends in political violence — what the evidence tells us

    • Militant attacks and threat analysis

    • Pandemic effect on terrorism

  • Arabic Propaganda Analysis — what terrorists are saying and why

    • Tracking and understanding jihadist videos

    • Scriptural Reasoning as a rhetorical tool

  • American Political Violence — implications for the Middle East and beyond

    • Diminished capacity overseas

    • Reframing counter-terrorism efforts

Special Workshop 

  • Deep dive into data, processes, and findings

    • CPOST Arabic Propaganda Analysis Team (APAT) conducts two in-depth workshops: one in Arabic, the other in English.

Timing

Speakers

Prof. Robert Pape + Researchers

Prof. Paul Poast

H.E. Dr. Ali Al Nuaimi is a Member of the UAE Federal National Council for the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and Chairman of the Defense Affairs, Interior & Foreign Affairs Committee at the Council. (TBC)

Ambassador Douglas A. Silliman

President, AGSIW (TBC)


Previous event: https://vimeo.com/510360212

Marc Asnin

There are some places that are life defining. The streets of Brooklyn in the 60’s & 70’s defined Marc Asnin. He was formed in a Goodfellas world where every family had a wise guy and his was Uncle Charlie. Asnin explains odds were you either became a gangster or a cop and what they both had in common was being great storytellers. Asnin chose the middle ground and became a different kind of storyteller.

His subjects are people with broken dreams and disappointments who have the resiliency to find slivers of happiness in their oppressed existence. Asnin’s images are unapologetic yet empathetic. Asnin recognizes the central role of the written word in telling these stories. It is a collaboration of sorts: their words and Asnin’s images.

We witness this in his book Uncle Charlie, an ultra-personal diary. The book uses imagery and written word to portray a dark chronicle of misplaced hero worship and heroic survival. Asnin's photographic style is determinedly old fashioned, a fly-on-the-wall. Asnin chronicles the descent of one man into a prolonged purgatory of his own making through intense images. Wisely, he allows Uncle Charlie to recount his own tale in a series of remembrances that are often vivid and always revealing.

Asnin is still wondering who he is in Uncle Charlie's life. Did his mother give Charlie his only friend in the world? Why did Charlie choose to share his life with Asnin? Some of these questions may not have an answer. Asnin thinks the book has given his uncle the dignity to tell his own story in his own words. To be ignored in life and eventually forgotten in death is a terrible thing and this account allows Charlie to finally step up onto an imaginary stage before an anonymous audience and be heard. In exchange, the world also gets the chance to look back in through the window that Charlie sits by everyday and see what's on the other side.

Asnin's new work is a book titled Final Words. He has curated the final words of 573 prisoners executed by the state of Texas to create this publication. We see on the facing pages of the book the institution's mugshot’s representation of the condemned prisoners. These mugshots aim to turn them into a thing. The final words of the men and women that have been put to death are an eloquent, thoughtful and emotional rebuttal that proves the humanity in them.

By curating these Final Words, Asnin hopes to help open a dialogue around the death penalty and mass incarceration in the United States.

He believes these words will help to expose the cyclical history of oppression in the United States. They will help us as a people not to forget that prisoners are still human. Some prisoners are innocent, some are guilty however they are still a part of the human condition. The state calls them monsters, animals, and butchers; nonetheless these men and women are made of the same thoughts, blood, feelings and dignity as all of us.

These final words beg the questions of who is seen, who is heard, who is remembered and who is intentionally forgotten? Forgetting is never a passive consequence of time, but rather the act of forgetting is purposeful. Each conversation about capital punishment needs to reinforce that dehumanization is unacceptable.

In 2014 Sherman Teichman, director of The Institute for Global Leadership in conjunction with Professor Erin Kelly of the Department of Philosophy at Tufts University presented a symposium. The symposium was about confronting the Death Penalty. Asnin joined a distinguished panel that included Sister Helen Prejean,,Professor Erin KellyProfessor Joseph Peniel, David J. Harris,Professor Larence Ralph, John Artis, Kathy Spillman. Asnin reminded the audience that many in our society forget that prisoners are still a part of our world, and are part of humanity. Their last words express it to perfection. Stop your activity, leave your apprehension and your prejudices, and read the “monsters”words….you will be surprised.

Looking back over the past forty years Asnin has created reportage imagery that leading magazines around the world used to tell stories. These works were published throughout the world in; Stern, New York Times Sunday Magazine, Time Magazine, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, The Independent Sunday Magazine, GEO, D Magazine and Life.His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States and Europe and is in several permanent collections, including the National Museum of American Art, the International Center of Photography, the Museum of the City of New York, the Portland Museum of Art, Queensborough Community College, and the Zimmerli Art Museum. His documentary photography has received numerous awards, most notably the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography, the Mother Jones Fund for Documentary Photography Grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Asnin believes his works have always been guided by the words his grandmother instilled in him: “never forget where you come from”.

Caren Croland Yanis

 Caren is principal of Croland Consulting, a private practice that guides athletes, celebrities, high net worth families, and social institutions in building collective purpose and legacy through philanthropy. 

As President of Crown Family Philanthropies in Chicago, (2009-2016), she managed organizational redesign and growth, engaged multiple generations, and guided strategy in the U.S., the Middle East, and the developing world.

Caren built Oprah Winfrey’s philanthropies, as Executive Director (2000-2009) at the height of the Oprah Winfrey Show, a period that included Oprah’s Use Your Life Awards, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa and the Oprah Winfrey Boys and Girls Club in Kosciusko Mississippi where Oprah was born. She led disaster recovery and rebuilding in the Mid-South following Hurricane Katrina that put fourteen-hundred families back in homes. Caren was a member of Harpo’s Senior Management Team. 

Caren chairs the board of The Poetry Foundation (a well-resourced, private operating foundation) and has guided it through a series of organizational changes with a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. She is a member of the Board of Visitors at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University and at the Women in Philanthropy Institute.  

She is a frequent keynote and podcast speaker at wealth management and estate planning conferences with a focus on family offices, governance, and purpose. Recent keynotes and podcasts include: The Heart of Giving (BBB), Dentons, Family Business Magazine’s Family Wealth and Legacy Conference, Family Office World, Yale Philanthropy Conference, and FEW. 

Caren is an adjunct professor at Tulane University, the University of Chicago’s Booth School Private Wealth Management program, the Spertus Institute, and the Sports and Entertainment Impact Collective (formerly part of Johns Hopkins). 

Caren understands the social change landscape. Her engagement in the sector has spanned media (The Oprah Winfrey Show, Time Inc., WSJ, Country Living) and startups like Leading Edge, formed to build organizational capacity in nonprofits. She has developed economic and education programs in Africa in collaboration with the Nelson Mandela Foundation and through public private partnerships and worked extensively in Israel and the Middle East on cross boundary projects related to coexistence and the environment. She holds a degree in Broadcast Journalism from Emerson College, studied speech and language pathology at Mercy College, and has a certificate in Strategic Leadership for Nonprofit Organizations from Stanford University. 

In her spare time Caren hosts salons that bring bold thinkers together for meaningful conversations. She has a passion for listening deeply, navigating challenges, and guiding people who have the potential to make the world a better place.

Liz Robinson

Elizabeth (Liz) Robinson is driven by the conviction that real social change hinges on engaging high-potential, low-resource children in deep educational experiences. Most people reading this bio have likely had such experiences. Liz aims to be a champion for those who have not.

Having worked in international development and humanitarian aid in Jordan, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Liz is deeply curious about how people and systems change—but also profoundly skeptical that the aid sector in its current form is capable of delivering that change. She believes that we need to grapple with the world—and specifically education challenges—through a lens of complexity, and resist the quietly destructive temptation of simplicity. She values humility and leadership, and believes neither is given enough emphasis in the aid sector.

Liz graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University in 2015 with a BA in International Relations and Economics, and in 2022 will complete a MA in Education and International Development from University College London, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Early Grade Reading in Developing Countries from UMASS Amherst. While at Tufts, Liz was a member of the EPIIC Colloquium 2013 - 2014, which covered the future of the Middle East, as well as NIMEP (now the Middle East Research Group). She credits Sherman and the IGL with proving what young people can achieve when accompanied by mentors who believe in them, and hopes to pass on that opportunity to others.

Jim MacMillan

Jim MacMillan is the founder and director of the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting and its parent organization, the Initiative for Better Gun Violence Reporting, which he launched during his residential fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.

Previously, MacMillan was the Journalist in Residence at Swarthmore College, a Fellow with Philadelphia Social Innovations Lab at the University of Pennsylvania and a Practitioner in Residence at the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University.

He was also an Ochberg Fellow with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University and the Knight Fellow in Medicine/Health Sciences Journalism with the Knight-Wallace Fellows at the University of Michigan.

Previous faculty appointments include the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Swarthmore College, New York University’s Carter Journalism Institute and Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. He has created and taught courses in Peace Journalism, Solutions Journalism and Trauma Journalism.

During his prior photojournalism career, MacMillan spent 17 years at the Philadelphia Daily News and worked for The Associated Press in Boston and in Baghdad during the war in Iraq, after which his team was awarded The Pulitzer Prize.

Jim was a superb Institute Scholar/Practitioner in Residence INSPIRE Fellow, providing our students with superb professional insights, and thoughtful portfolio critique. He critically provided them an ethical, unpretentious role model.

While he revealed his extraordinary international experience, he also led our students in unique photographic initiatives in U.S. cities, uniquely a workshop on the impact of gun violence in his city, Philadelphia.

Jim taught them sophisticated photographic techniques, enabled them to understand the business aspect of becoming a professional photographer, the impact of the digital era, and what it would mean for a photographer to become an independent, skilled, integrated multimedia story teller.  He was humane, sensitive, and thoughtful about the unique pressures of photographing in conflict and war zones.

Ramin Arani

Ramin Arani is the Chief Financial Officer of Vice, a position he has held since November 2019. Prior to this, Ramin was a Portfolio Manager at Fidelity Investments where he had worked since graduating from Tufts University with a BA in International Relations in 1992. Most recently Ramin was Fund Manager of the Fidelity Puritan Fund from February 2008 through September 2018, where the Fund achieved top 5% performance relative to Lipper and Morningstar Balanced Fund Peers over all key performance time periods. The Fund was a 5-star rated & Silver-designated Fund, according to Morningstar, under his management. Prior to the Puritan Fund, Ramin managed the Fidelity Trend Fund for seven years, the Health Care Sector Fund in the late 90’s, and the Retail Select Fund in the mid-late 90’s.

As a Fidelity research analyst from 1992-2000, Ramin covered the Aerospace & Defense, REIT, Retail, and Pharmaceutical industries. As an investor in Private Companies for the past ten years, Ramin has served on several Company Boards such as Legendary Pictures, Vice, Moda Operandi, Rent the Runway, and Goop. Ramin has also personally been a founding partner and/or Board Member of Rumble Boxing, ED by Ellen Degeneres, and Girlgaze.

Currently, Ramin serves on the Boards of public companies Brunello Cucinelli, LiveXLive, and FAST Acquisition Corp, as well as private companies Rumble and Sakara Life. Among his philanthropic efforts, Ramin has served on the Boards of The College Foundation of the University of Virginia, The Nichols School, the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University, Opportunity Network, Devereux Cleo Wallace, and Danny & Ron’s Rescue (dog rescue). 

Ramin has three daughters, one recently graduated from the University of Virginia, one attending Clemson University, and one at American Heritage High School. Ramin is an avid snowboarder, rock climber, runner, tennis player and live music fan. 

I remember Ramin as a thoughtful, intellectually curious and adventurous student. I had full confidence in his maturity as he participated in one of our Institute’s more controversial immersive educational research experiences, traveling to Israel and the West Bank to understand accusations of alleged torture and abuse of Palestinian detainees. He was mentored by a friend, Dr. Jonathan Fine, the founder of Physicians for Human Rights. https://phr.org/our-work/resources/phr-remembers-its-founder-dr-jonathan-fine/  

I had the pleasure of appointing Ramin to my Institute’s Board.

He honors what we instilled in him by continuing to serve, in a Board chaired by two other close alumni Maria Figueroa Kupcu and Jennifer Hooper Selendy, one of Trebuchet’s co-directors.   

“As an EPIIC alumnus, I have a personal appreciation for the eye opening experiences and deeply probing research and discussions that IGL students enjoy. Serving on the BOD is a small way to give back to the IGL programs while personally continuing to learn from their robust content.”

Ramin is a wonderful friend.  We’ve have had conversations about contentious political issues, but we have bantered for decades about sports, especially about Bills/Pats football – easy for me once. We’ll see how that goes now!

Anne Josephson

Anne Josephson is a top-rated attorney practicing in the Boston, Massachusetts area. Ms. Josephson focuses her practice in employment law and litigation, representing both employers and employees. She also represents clients in a wide variety of litigation matters including civil rights, business, real estate, and health law. She has been named a “Superlawyer” (2004-2021), one of the Top Women Attorneys in Massachusetts by Boston Magazine (April 2013-2017), and as Best Lawyer’s “Lawyer of the Year” in the Boston Metropolitan Area for Employment Law-Individuals (2013, 2016, 2019), among a number of other honorable titles.

After graduating with a Bachelors of Arts in Sociology, Education, and American Studies from Smith College in 1973, Ms. Josephson earned a juris doctor degree at Boston College Law School in 1977. She was admitted to the practice of law in 1977. At Boston College, she was the Editor-in-Chief of the Boston College Industrial & Commercial Law Review, now known as the Boston College Law Review. 

Ms. Josephson served as a law clerk to the Honorable Edward F. Hennessey, Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; Assistant Attorney General in the Government Bureau of the Department of the Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; and Associate and Junior Partner at Nutter, McClennen & Fish. In addition, Ms. Josephson was a Teaching Fellow and former Adjunct Professor in Advanced Written Advocacy at Boston College Law School. Since 1988, Ms. Josephson has served as a Partner in Civil Litigation and Employment at Kotin, Crabtree & Strong. 

Ms. Josephson is a member of the Boston Bar Association, the Massachusetts Bar Association, the Women’s Bar Association. She is also a member of the Advisory Board of The Harmony Foundation,  of the Advisory Board of Wide Horizons for Children,  of the Legal Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, and of the Governing Board of Law Clerks’ Society of the Supreme Judicial Court. She is also the Co-Founder of the Amicus Group.  

Ms. Josephson frequently serves as a panelist in continuing legal education programs offered on current topics in employment law. She has also served as a facilitator in the City-Wide Dialogues on Racial and Ethnic Diversity.

Taarika Sridhar

Taarika Sridhar is a lawyer based in London. She launched her legal career at Ropes & Gray LLP in Boston, and currently works within the private equity practice group at Goodwin Procter (UK) LLP. As a finance and PE lawyer, she has worked on complex and dynamic deals, including leveraged buyouts and high yield bond offerings. When she’s not billing corporate clients, Taarika spends her time assisting The Innocence Project, the California Innocence Project, and the Loyola Project for the Innocent review cases of potential wrongful convictions in the US.

While in law school at Northeastern University, Taarika directed the school’s chapter of the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP). For two and a half years, she worked with a pair of Kurdish refugees in their journey to gain asylum, advocating on their behalf with the UNHCR and government organizations in Turkey and Canada, and eventually helping them secure asylum in Canada in 2018. Since graduating from law school, she has continued to work with immigration clinics to assess refugee and asylum seekers’ claims and help them navigate the complex immigration system.

Taarika graduated from Tufts University with a B.A. in Political Science in 2013. In her freshman year, she was a member of EPIIC’s 2009-2010 colloquium on South Asia. Together with her peer and friend Julia Evans, Taarika spent the summer after EPIIC researching the political identities of Muslim immigrants and minority populations in Assam, India, and they published some of their findings in GlobalPost.

Other IGL initiatives Taarika was involved with include the Empower program, where she worked with peers to assess social entrepreneurship initiatives, and the Poverty and Power Research Initiative (PPRI), where she researched corruption and oligarchies in Bosnia and Turkey. She also worked with the Institute and Sherman in their capacities as mentors and partners to OneWorld, a student-led initiative to raise awareness about global inequalities through an annual fair-trade crafts bazaar, and Tufts Idea Exchange (TEX), a forum for intellectual inspiration and the precursor to TEDX.

A “cosmopolitan Indian,” as Sherman describes her, Taarika grew up in Muscat, Oman, a place she still calls home, and has had the privilege to live, study and work around the world, including in Dubai, Boston and London.

David Puth

David Puth is the Treasurer of The Trebuchet, and serves as one of The Trebuchet’s Directors.

Puth is the CEO of Centre which governs the technology, policy, compliance, audit and reserve standards for USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing dollar-based digital currency in the world.

Centre was founded with the mission to connect every person, merchant, financial service and currency in the world through the power of digital currency and open public blockchain networks.

He was formerly the Executive Chairman of Kelvin Zero, a Canadian based data security company that enables businesses to safely transform information from analog to digital processes.

Mr. Puth previously served as Chairman of the Advisory Board of Whitney Strategic Services, a technology company empowering decision makers in both the public and private sectors by providing actionable intelligence in a timely manner. He was also a founding member of The Council, an advisory firm that provides advice and counsel to the executive leaders of public and private enterprises.

David is the former CEO of the CLS Group, having stepped down as of September 2018.

David was among my first cadre of Tufts students, when I taught a semester at the university in 1978, and has been a close friend ever since. Incisive, intelligent, and of the highest integrity, I hold him in the highest possible regard - when Bloomberg in their article “The Currency Ethicist: One Man’s Push to Fix a Tarnished Market” asked me to comment for their profile of David’s remarkable effort to reform the corrupt practices of the currency-trading industry, I proudly told them, “This is the right guy. He has a steely, uncompromising sensibility about what’s right and what’s wrong. This is a man who rolls up his sleeves.”

David’s career spans more than three decades in financial markets, including 19 years at J.P. Morgan where he served in a variety of senior global leadership roles with oversight of the bank’s FX, interest rate derivatives, commodities and emerging markets businesses. He also served as a member of J.P. Morgan’s Executive Committee. After leaving J.P. Morgan in 2007, he founded The Eriska Group, a New York‐based risk management consulting organization. From 2008 through 2011, David worked at State Street, where he was head of Global Markets and a member of State Street’s Executive Management Committee. His responsibilities included sales, trading and investment research across multiple asset classes, including FX, and for Currenex, the firm’s electronic FX brokerage business.

Outside of the industry, David serves on a number of boards in support of education and the arts, including the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston and the Berkshire School Endowment Committee. He is also a longstanding board member of the Robin Hood Foundation in New York, one of the country’s leading poverty fighting organizations.

David Guston

David H. Guston is Foundation Professor in Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Associate Vice Provost for Discovery, Engagement and Outcomes in ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.

Guston is widely published and cited on research and development policy, technology assessment, public participation in science and technology, and the governance of emerging technologies. His work has defined, articulated and explored such crucial concepts as boundary organizations, responsible innovation, and anticipatory governance, and his ideas about them have been incorporated into governmental and non-government organizations and research programs in many parts of the world. His sole-authored Between Politics and Science: Assuring the Integrity and Productivity of Research (Cambridge U. Press, 2000) won the 2002 Don K. Price Prize of the American Political Science Association for best book in science and technology policy. His most recent book, co-edited with ASU colleagues Ed Finn and Jason Robert, is a bicentennial edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers and Creators of All Kinds (MIT Press, 2017), which was reviewed across publications ranging from Science to The New York Review of Books, and was selected as a “one book” read at Colorado College, among other places. Creative outputs from the overall “Frankenstein Bicentennial Project” Guston led with Finn include a digital edition of the book in collaboration with MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab, the 2017 version of ASU’s Emerge: A Festival of Futures that Guston executive-produced, various musical, theatrical and film event, and a monstrous garden of cacti with cancer on permanent exhibition at ASU.

After earning his bachelor of arts, cum laude, from Yale, Guston received his PhD in political science from MIT. He was a pre- and then post-doctoral fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he worked closely with Lewis Branscomb on innovation policy and also with Bill Clark on global environmental assessments. He spent nearly eleven years on the faculty at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where he helped create and lead the master of public policy program and served as director of the public policy program for several years.

After receiving tenure at Rutgers, Guston took a sabbatical in Washington, DC, helping Dan Sarewitz launch the Center for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO), which was conceived and chaired by Columbia University’s then-executive vice provost Michael Crow. After Crow became president of ASU, the renamed Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes left Washington, DC for Arizona. Guston joined Sarewitz there, and the ambitious agenda they established led CSPO to be named among the top S&T policy think tanks in the world consistently since that time.

While at ASU, Guston has been principal investigator on nearly $15M in awards from the US National Science Foundation – including the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at ASU and the Virtual Institute for Responsible Innovation – and co-investigator on another $7M. In 2015, President Crow asked him to create a School for the Future of Innovation in Society, which he led until 2021. In 2020, he was appointed Associate Vice Provost in the recently created Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory (GFL). In this role, he is broadly responsible for the research, public engagement and impact mission of GFL in its university-wide operations, including leading a task force on designing GFL as a mission-oriented academic organization for impact and outcomes.

Guston was the North American editor of Science and Public Policy and the founding editor of the Journal of Responsible Innovation. He served on the National Academy of Engineering's Steering Committee on Engineering Ethics and Society that created the Center for Engineering Ethics and Society, and he has testified to panels of the National Academies’ Board on Life Sciences, the Board on Higher Education and Workforce, and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He served on the Regional Forum for Responsible Innovation for the region of Lombardy, Italy, and on the steering group for the creation of a Publicly Available Specification on responsible innovation (PAS 440) in conjunction with British Standards Institute in the UK. He currently serves on the advisory board to the OECD Committee on Scientific and Technological Policy’s project on “societies in times of crisis and beyond.” He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Matthew Lorin

Matt is a seasoned advocate, activist, advisor and thought leader in the social justice, social change and citizenship spaces. He has more than three-decades of local, state, national and international service; managing projects and programs, leading organizations, building alliances and earning movements.

Known as a transformative and generative thinker, Matt is an outstanding steward of strategy and staff, translating vision into reality at scale. He is an adept systems thinker with high ambiguity tolerance, rendering him an exceptionally effective navigator of complexity. He has a demonstrated track record of conceptualizing and implementing high impact grantmaking strategies, characterized by innovative partnership and civic engagement.

Currently, Matt is a principal education and engagement consultant to PBS Hawai’i, ŌLELO Community Media and the CASE Center for Student Entrepreneurship at Punahou School on digital storytelling, narrative therapy, student voice and the voices of marginalized communities. He is also consulting Executive Director of the Hawaii-based service dog training organization, Hawai’i FiDo Service Dogs. He provides strategic advisory to TrustCircle, an emerging Social Emotional Learning platform as well as to Vanta Leagues, a moderated, developmental e-sports platform for adolescents.

Before returning to the islands, Matt served for 2 years, first as Lead Consultant for youth engagement and subsequently as inaugural President of the premier education initiative of the Emerson Collective, Oakland-based, XQ Institute. Leading up to his service with Emerson, Matt was inaugural leader and administrator of two highly successful, private philanthropies (HDI, The Learning Coalition); Director on the National Security Council (NSC) – Office of Democracy, Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs; Senior consultant with the US Department of State (US Mission to the United Nations), and the United Nations Office of Project Services (UNOPS) – the UN’s humanitarian assistance logistics agency; Senior Director at the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) - the State of Hawaii’s indigenous advocacy and grantmaking agency; Director at Caspian Securities – the first emerging market-only investment bank; Student leader of a global grassroots movement in support of Tiananmen Square uprising; Founder of first student led, internet-based, global human rights network in the world -- the Student Human Rights Exchange (SHARE); and, Founding/Managing Partner of The Greenhouse, the first double bottom-line, ecosystem economics-based, high-tech incubator in Hawaii.

Over the years, his portfolio, policy and programmatic responsibilities have spanned a wide array of sectors. He has distinguished himself in recent years in the domains of public education, civic engagement and human rights with a long history in national security, multi-lateral affairs, democratic governance, international diplomacy, humanitarian assistance, civil military affairs, military psychological operations, religious freedom, and landmine eradication.

Matt holds a BA from Tufts University in Art History, a certificate in multicultural communications from the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont, and an MPA from the JFK School of Government at Harvard.

Outside of his professional pursuits, Matt participates in working groups on civil-military affairs and the delivery of humanitarian assistance in complex emergencies. He is a member of the National Policy Roundtable, sits on a handful of Hawaii-based, non-profit boards.

I met Sherman in his first Experimental College course at Tufts University, for a two-day immersive terrorism simulation where, according to Sherman, I learned I didn’t know how to be terrorist right. That’s all it took and I became a staunch Teichman advocate and eventually a loyal ambassador for EPIIC. Years later, it was Sherman’s advocacy that helped me secure my first Reebok grant to launch SHARE. To this day, I think of Sherman as my ‘hānai’ father. Can’t think of anything I wouldn’t do for him.

Darren Kew

Darren Kew (Ph.D. in International Relations, Tufts University, 2002) is Executive Director of the Center for Peace, Democracy, and Development at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and Associate Professor and former Chair of the UMass Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance. He studies the relationship between conflict resolution methods – particularly interfaith and inter-ethnic peacebuilding — and democratic development in Africa. Much of his work focuses on the role of civil society groups in this development. He has also been a consultant on democracy and peace initiatives to the United Nations, USAID, US Institute of Peace, the US State Department, and to a number of NGOs, including the Carter Center and the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated Interfaith Mediation Centre in Kaduna, Nigeria.  He monitored the last six Nigerian elections and the 2007 elections in Sierra Leone. Professor Kew is author of numerous works on Nigerian politics and conflict resolution, including the book Civil Society, Conflict Resolution, and Democracy in Nigeria (Syracuse UP, 2016), and his articles have appeared in International Negotiation, the Journal of Democracy, and Current History, among others.  Research interests include:

  • Civil society, conflict prevention, and transnational civil society development

  • Religion, Ethnicity, Race, and Conflict Resolution

  • International security and crisis intervention in Africa

  • Conflict resolution efforts as grassroots approaches to promoting democracy

  • Conflict and democracy in Africa (especially Nigeria), including elections

  • International negotiation and mediation

  • Restorative Justice

  • Nonviolence

Professor Kew has also been learning more about the peace process in Northern Ireland, and will be a visiting professor on a Fulbright award to the Senator George Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice at Queens University in Belfast in 2022.  He has been interviewed by numerous media outlets including the New York Times, the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and the Guardian of Lagos.  His work in Nigeria on Muslim-Christian dialogue in particular has caught global attention, including features by the GrouthTruth Project and a TED talk.

Professor Kew has been a visiting scholar at the Harvard Divinity School (2016-18), where he was featured in a profile story, which noted the following:

“Kew has collaborated with Nigeria’s Interfaith Mediation Center and Boston’s Essential Partners (an organization dedicated to approaching intractable conflicts through reflective, structured dialogue) to explore ways in which dialogue models can be adopted to a specifically Nigerian context…. For those interested in peacebuilding, Kew advises a balance of self-knowledge and practiced attention to the needs of others. ‘The internal struggle is such a conscious part of our field, and to be successful in this discipline, you need to be a self-reflective person who is developmentally minded, who can develop both yourself and the people around you.’  He emphasizes the importance of bringing a genuine openness to others to the peace building process. ‘Part of success in this field is being able to quiet all the voices inside your head and heart and to hear what the other person is saying to you—not only what they are saying directly, but the other things they are emanating and expressing. People who are really good at mediation and peace facilitation are able to show their own vulnerability, and are able to inspire other people to show their vulnerability.’”

A friend of decades, Darren was a valued member of the 1994 EPIIC Colloquium and Symposium program of the Institute as a graduate student at Fletcher. Its theme was Ethnicity, Religion , and Nationalism. I had the great pleasure of interacting with him over the years, especially when our Synaptic Scholars made their inaugural research trip to Lagos. See Discourse.

He advised many of our students and lectured in Institute forums. I also had the pleasure of nominating him as one of my successors as Director of the IGL.  He chose to remain as a tenured Professor at UMASS.

George Mathew

Singapore-born, Indian-American conductor George Mathew has emerged as a force in the classical music world, using symphonic music and cross-sector collaboration to highlight pressing global humanitarian issues and crises. He is the founder and Artistic Director of Music For Life International, a social enterprise based in New York, creating social impact and innovation through music throughout the world in the humanitarian, education, business, diplomacy, and leadership training sectors for more than 12 years. In recent seasons he has appeared in the US, Australia, Jordan, India, Panama, Morocco, the Netherlands, and South Africa as conductor and ambassador for transformative action through music. Mr. Mathew and Music For Life International were honored with the 2016 Robert and JoAnn Bendetson Award for Public Diplomacy by the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University for their services to global public diplomacy through music.

Mr. Mathew and Music for Life International returned to Carnegie Hall in January 2019 for their eighth global humanitarian concert, Beethoven for The Rohingya, a performance of Beethoven’s monumental Ninth Symphony dedicated to raising public consciousness and material resources for the Rohinyga refugees fleeing ethnic cleansing and genocide in their native Myanmar. MFLI’s other global humanitarian concerts have included Beethoven’s Ninth for South Asia (2006), Requiem For Darfur (2007), Mahler for the Children of AIDS (2009), Beethoven for the Indus Valley (2011), Shostakovich for the Children of Syria (2014), The Scheherazade Initiative (2015), focusing on Violence against Women, and Mahler For Vision dedicated to ending cataract blindness (2017). These concerts, presented in Carnegie Hall, have brought together distinguished musicians from over 120 leading international ensembles including the New York Philharmonic, MET Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Symphony, Israel Philharmonic, Cincinnati Symphony, San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Shanghai Symphony, the Emerson, American, Guarneri and Brentano String Quartets, and students, graduates and faculty of The Juilliard School, Curtis Institute, Royal Academy of Music, Manhattan School of Music and others. They have also raised more than US$3.4 million since their inception.

Since then program partners have included HelpMeSee, United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women, UN Women India, Acumen Fund, Doctors Without Borders, UNDP  and UNICEF (TACRO), Refugees International, Catholic Medical Mission Board, American Jewish World Service, National Council of Churches in the USA and Questscope (a relationship enabled by Sherman Teichman and the Tufts Institute for Global Leadership). 

George Mathew and these humanitarian concerts have been profiled by the global media, including BBC WORLD TV and Radio, CNN International, ZEE TV, Public Radio International, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, New York magazine, the US State Department, Radio France, Voice of America, NY1 television, National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition and Morning Edition, the Indian Express, The Hindu, the Pakistan Daily Times, DNA India, Musical America and Symphony magazine.

In December 2010, Mr. Mathew launched UBUNTU-SHRUTI, a new professional training orchestra of young empowered musicians and distinguished mentors creating inspired music and programming dedicated to immigrants, community, and education through music. The Orchestra is modeled after the Berlin Philharmonic Academy and mentored by distinguished musicians from the New York Philharmonic, MET Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic among others. In 2010, Mr. Mathew was named Artistic Director and Conductor of the New Year’s Eve Concert for Peace at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. This historic concert, held annually in the largest Cathedral in North America, was founded in 1985 by Leonard Bernstein. His first Concert for Peace there, held on December 31, 2010, was titled “MASS IN TIME OF A DRONE WAR” and featured Josef Haydn’s Mass in Time of War as well as Jewish, Christian and Muslim music. Their second New Year’s Eve Concert on December 31, 2011 featured Michael Tippett’s “A CHILD OF OUR TIME” with the Dessoff Choirs and UBUNTU-SHRUTI. These concerts marked the first public appearances of MFLI’s new professional training orchestra UBUNTU-SHRUTI.

In May 2011, Mr. Mathew made his African debut with the Johannesburg Philharmonic. Mr. Mathew made his first conducting appearance at the United Nations in October 2007. He made his India conducting debut in New Delhi with the Neemrana Opera and the Bombay Chamber Orchestra at Siri Fort Auditorium. He made his Central American debut in June 2010 at the Music Festival of Panama in Panama City and was re-engaged for the 2013 Festival. He has collaborated with composers Gunther Schuller, John Harbison, Mark Kuss, Penka Kouneva, John McDonald and David Amram; violinists Elmira Darvarova, Rachel Barton Pine, Nabih Bulos and Roman Simovic; cellists Alan Stepansky and Fred Raimi; pianists Lois Shapiro, Virginia Eskin; opera stars Susanne Mentzer, Alexandra DeShorties, Morris Robinson; sarod giant Amjad Ali Khan; actress and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Mia Farrow; and former UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson. 

 George Mathew has spoken on music and social impact around the world at such venues as TEDxWanChai (Hong Kong) and INKTalks (India). In 2011 he delivered the 4th Annual S.T. Lee Lecture on Social Justice and Public Policy at Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg. Mr. Mathew spoke at the United Nations Development Program’s 2010 ‘Capacity IS Development’ Global Event in Marrakech, Morocco, presenting the orchestral paradigm as a new leadership model for developing institutions and capacity in the twenty-first century. In December 2010, he was a featured speaker at the first INK conference held in association with TED, in Lavasa, India. He has also lectured on transformative social impact through music at Amherst College, Manhattan School of Music, Wellesley College, University of Edinburgh, Tufts University, Occidental College, the Musica Sacra Festival, Maastricht and at institutions such as Acumen Fund, IBM India, BNP Paribas, IDIOM Design, Asian Venture Philanthropy Network (Singapore), and UNDP Panama.

George Mathew has held academic positions at Manhattan School of Music, Amherst College, the University of Minnesota, Mount Holyoke College and Tufts University, where he served as Director of Orchestral Studies. He is a graduate of Amherst College, the University of Minnesota and the Manhattan School of Music. He is a Global Ambassador for ABWCI (Association of Business Women in Commerce and Industry), a virtual chamber of commerce, based in New Delhi, dedicated to women’s entrepreneurship around the globe. 

More information at www.music4lifeinternational.org