Meet the Fellows
Franklin Fellows Alumni
Karen Allen
Ms. Allen has over 40 years of experience in directing and expanding ethnically diverse, clinical, and preventive programs in maternal and child health, mental health, domestic violence, education, global health, and social services. She has worked with international clients and government agencies, and has a strong interest in facilitating South to South exchanges. She most recently served as Director and Vice-President of Early Childhood Services at Northern Virginia Family Service (NVFS), where she oversaw all aspects of Head Start and Healthy Families programs for up to 1300 children per year in Arlington, Fairfax, Prince William and Loudoun Counties, and Alexandria, Virginia.
From 1974 to 2009, Ms Allen worked in Chicago at the Joint Commission of International and Metropolitan Family Services. Most of her career has focused on community-building and managing high quality social services in low-resource and immigrant communities. She has experience in staff and stakeholder relations, grant writing and management, budgeting, performance and compliance monitoring, and training. Ms Allen is a psychotherapist and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Stanford University, a master’s degree in Social Service Administration from the University of Chicago, and a master’s degree in Public Health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She has served two internships in India, studying and writing on HIV/AIDS and family planning behavior change communication. She comes to the Franklin Fellows program with a longstanding passion for endeavors that address gender, health, education and income equity. At J/TIP, Ms Allen looks forward to applying the knowledge and skills she has gained from domestic non-profit management to evaluating and improving international programs which are designed to prevent human trafficking, protect victims and prosecute traffickers.
In her private life, Ms Allen has developed a multi-cultural family, as an exchange student, a long-term foster parent to unaccompanied minor refugees, and a host to international students.
Dr. Irina Adamashvili
We are pleased to announce that our 71st Franklin Fellow is Dr. Irina Adamashvili, who is serving in CA/PPT’s Office of Strategic Planning and Cost Analysis (CA/PPT/SPCA), where she works on the Management Information System and other data bases.
Irina comes to us from the Louisiana University Health Sciences, School of Medicine in Shreveport, where she was an Assistant Professor of Neurology and Genetics. She has been involved in various research projects in the field of Genetics and has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals. She has delivered invited lectures at UCLA and the NIH and has served as committee chairperson of international conferences in Genetics.
In her earlier career in Georgia, Irina was affiliated with the Institute of Pediatrics in Tbilisi as head of International Affairs. In that position, she organized collaborative ventures between the Institute of Pediatrics and institutions of foreign countries. She established contacts with various medical societies from the U.S. and Europe and organized visits by them to Georgia.
Irina holds an MS in Molecular Genetics from Tbilisi State University and a PhD in Human Genetics from the Institute of Medical Genetics in Moscow. She is a past member of a number of organizations, including the American Human Histocompatibility Society; the Genetic Society of America; the New York Academy of Sciences; and the European Society of Human Genetics.
Dr. Evan Berry
Dr. Evan Berry is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at American University and is the Co-Director of the Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs Master’s Degree Program. He teaches a range of courses, but the three he enjoys the most are “Global Ethics,” “Religion and Globalization” and “The Idea of Nature.” Evan’s research examines the intersection of religion and the environment, investigating the role played by religious traditions in shaping the way that modern societies conceptualize and respond to environmental issues, and also by charting the ways that religious organizations engage politically around climate change and other sustainability issues. His book, Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism (University of California Press, 2015) takes the former approach, asserting that American debates about environmental issues have relied heavily on concepts drawn from Christian theological tradition. His more recent work examines the role of religious actors within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and pays particular attention to the religious dynamics of Latin America. He is also the principal investigator in a multiyear initiative on “Religion and Climate Change in Cross-Regional Perspective,” funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. Evan has a B.A. in Religion from Colorado College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California Santa Barbara.
For the past four years, he has also been a Global Ethics Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. His Franklin Fellowship is with the State Department’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs, where his work will build on efforts to partner with religious organizations on climate change issues and consider religious actors as they influence Western Hemisphere Affairs.
Dr. Jo Chitlik
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Dr. Jo Chitlik as the 181st Franklin Fellow! Dr. Chitlik serves in the Office of Investment Affairs (EB/OIA) as an Investment Policy Specialist. Over the course of her fellowship Mrs. Chitlik has designed, implemented, and launched an online global dispute database geared towards helping US embassies more effectively monitor and resolve investor-disputes to improve US bilateral relations and the Investment climate of US companies abroad. For this work she earned the US Department of State Meritorious Honor Award. Mrs. Chitlik also oversees U.S disputes in both the Western Hemisphere and Near Middle East, has worked on the Committee for Foreign Investments in the United States, and represented State at the United Nations General Assembly as a lead negotiator.
Mrs. Chitlik is second generation State Department. Her father served 23 years in posts abroad, which from an early age exposed her to a diversity of cultures, as well as the on the ground workings of U.S. foreign policy . Mrs. Chitlik is an attorney specializing in international investment policy & commercial arbitration. She comes with vast global experience having worked most recently in Sub-Sahara Africa as well as Eastern Europe. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at American University, School of Law. She has written numerous articles on foreign policy, social issues and international affairs.
She holds a Masters in International Law from Emory University, a Juris Doctorate from UACA with Honors, Costa Rica, a Bachelor’s Degree, Cum Laude, in Economics/ Law, Six Sigma designations from Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Business, and Series 7 NASD Security License.
Dr. Jerome E. Copulsky
Jerome E. Copulsky serves as a Franklin Fellow to the Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the U.S. Department of State (S/RGA), where he analyzes and assesses current and emerging policy issues as they relate to religion and foreign policy. His work applies theoretical approaches on religion and politics to a number of regional initiatives on immigration, refugees, and religious minorities. He also works directly with the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism to identify best practices in educational and media strategies for a variety of audiences.
Dr. Copulsky’s tenure at the U.S. Department of State is sponsored by the American Academy of Religion (AAR)-Luce Fellowship in Religion and International Affairs. The AAR-Luce Fellows Program is made possible by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.
Dr. Copulsky specializes in modern Jewish thought, political theology, and church/state issues. His scholarly work has been published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Religion, Political Theology, and Perspectives on Political Science, and he has contributed essays to the edited volumes Political Theology for a Plural Age (Oxford University Press) and Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology (Indiana University Press). His writing has also appeared in such places as The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, Washingtonian, The Jerusalem Post, The Jewish Review of Books, and Religion Dispatches.
He most recently served as Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Director of Judaic Studies at Goucher College. He has also taught at American University, Georgetown University, UMass Amherst, Virginia Tech, Indiana University, and with the Goucher Prison Education Partnership.
Dr. Copulsky holds a B.A. with honors in the College of Social Studies from Wesleyan University, an M.F.A from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
Usra Ghazi
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Ms. Usra Ghazi as its 214th Fellow! Usra Ghazi serves as a Franklin Fellow to the Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the U.S. Department of State (S/RGA), where she has the specific goal of analyzing and assessing current and emerging policy issues as they relate to religious dynamics and their impact on U.S. foreign policy.
Ms. Ghazi has worked in the nonprofit sector on interreligious engagement for over ten years. She has previously worked with HRH Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad in Amman, Jordan and developed interfaith youth initiatives in both Jordan and the U.S. As a Campus Outreach Manager with the national nonprofit Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), she managed a partnership between IFYC, the Center for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the Department of Education and the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships which focused on integrating interreligious cooperation with service-learning initiatives at hundreds of colleges and universities across the United States. She has also served as a Research Associate at the Pluralism Project at Harvard University where she worked on the On Common Ground interactive web resource and cohosted the Pluralism Podcast.
Ms. Ghazi served as a Junior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University (2013-2014) and a Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston Public Policy Fellow (2014-2015) with a placement at the Mayor’s Office of New Bostonians. While working at the Mayor’s Office, Ms. Ghazi advised on faith-based policymaking and religious community engagement and helped launch Mayor Marty Walsh’s inaugural Interfaith Advisory Taskforce.
Ms. Ghazi holds a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School in Religion and Politics (2015). Her academic work has focused on interreligious peacebuilding, religious nationalism, and the intersection of religion and immigration.
Eric Goldman
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Mr. Eric Goldman as its 211th Fellow! Mr. Goldman serves as a Franklin Fellow in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA). His specific objectives include developing a methodology and tools for assessing the immediate and long-term impact of programs carried out by Sports United, the sports diplomacy division within the Office of Citizen Exchanges, as well as one major program carried out by Citizen Exchanges’ Cultural Diplomacy division. The assessment methodology will be applied to Sports Envoys, the International Sports Programming Initiative, Sports Visitors, and the Global Sports Mentoring Program, as well as the Cultural Diplomacy division’s Arts Envoy program.
Mr. Goldman has spent most of the last eight years working with the Peace Corps. Most recently, he was the Director of Programming and Training in Lesotho, and he held the same position prior to that in Malawi. Before going overseas, Mr. Goldman was the Manager of the Peace Corps’ Master’s International program, and the Manager of the Office of Diversity and National Outreach. Additional overseas experience includes working in education development in Uganda, and Peace Corps training in Swaziland.
Prior to his work with the Peace Corps, Mr. Goldman primarily worked in education, including being a high school principal, and a lengthy tenure in civic education with a non-profit education association in the Washington area. His extensive volunteer experience includes sports coaching, teaching inmates in jail, and working with immigrants in a number of capacities.
Mr. Goldman was born and raised in South Africa, and received both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Massachusetts.
Dr. Welling Hall
Dr. Hall serves as a Franklin Fellow in the Bureau of Public Affairs United States Diplomacy Center (PA/USDC). She is helping to stand up the Department’s new museum, providing guidance on the design and development of exhibits, advising on USDC education programs, and creating educational outreach materials to better tell the story of U.S. diplomacy to the public at home and abroad.
Dr. Hall has 30 years’ experience research and teaching in the areas of international public law and organization, civic engagement, and social justice and peacebuilding. Her Ph.D. in Political Science is from The Ohio State University and B.A. from Oberlin in Ancient Greek and History. A former American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, she is Associate Academic Dean and Plowshares Professor of Peace Studies at Earlham College. Dr. Hall served as Documents Editor of the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace (2011), edited the Peace, Justice, and Security Studies Curriculum Guide (2009), and won a McKinley Award for one of the first online publications of scholarly conference proceedings with Women, Politics, and Environmental Action (1994). Her work has also appeared in journals such as International Studies Perspectives, the ISA Compendium, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, PS, POLIS, Alternatives, the Journal of Peace Research, and Political Psychology. A recipient of grants and awards from Phi Beta Kappa, Dobro Slovo, Title VI, the Ford Foundation, Arms Control Association, Academic Council for UN Studies, Fulbright, and the Great Lakes College Association, Dr. Hall has served in governance roles in the International Studies Association and with foreign policy advocacy groups and NGOs including the Friends Committee on National Legislation and the Quaker United Nations Committee. Dr. Hall enjoys singing first soprano and practices qi gong. She is a metal smith and certified precious metal clay artisan with works exhibited and auctioned in regional art shows. She has one son who is currently studying Politics at Oberlin.
Dr. Farzaneh Jebrail
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Dr. Farzaneh Jebrail as its 201st Fellow. Dr. Jebrail serves as a Franklin Fellow in the Office of Electricity and Energy Efficiency in the Bureau of Energy Resources. Dr. Jebrail comes to the Franklin Fellows Program from Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) where she spent 10 years as a Scientist and a Project Leader. She brings to the Department expertise developed over the past 25 years of research and development in science and engineering, program development, leadership, and management. Highlights from her professional career include: being the inventor and patent holder of a novel combustion technology, “Controlled Atmosphere Aluminum Melting Furnace,” commercialized by the largest American aluminum company, and serving as a Senior Scientist for NASA’s Mid-continent Technology Transfer. Dr. Jebrail left industry in 1995 as a Senior Research Engineer in a Fortune five hundred company to pursue an academic career as a member of the teaching faculty, a researcher in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the Director of Operations for the Center for Microencapsulation and Drug Delivery at Texas A&M University. She is also member of various professional societies, including the Society of Women in Engineering and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Dr. Jebrail holds a Ph.D. in Combustion from the Chemical Engineering Department at Imperial College London. She has an M.S. in Fuel Technology from Portsmouth University, and her undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering was completed at the University of Wales. Her Ph.D. work, “Combustion and Partial Oxidation in a Spouted Bed Burner for the Production of Hydrogen and Carbon Monoxide,” was commercialized by a major UK based oil company shortly after her graduation.
Kevin Johnson
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Mr. Kevin Johnson as its 210th Fellow! Kevin Johnson serves as a Franklin Fellow in the Office of Maritime Southeast Asia in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. He is a senior advisor to a new U.S. government initiative, U.S.-ASEAN Connect, announced by President Obama at the U.S.-ASEAN Summit in Sunnylands, CA. The initiative will strengthen the United States economic engagement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the ASEAN Member States in a range of areas including infrastructure development and financing, information and communications technology, trade policy, green energy, and entrepreneurship and innovation. Further details for U.S.-ASEAN Connect can be found at http://asean.usmission.gov/factsheet02172016.html.
Kevin is on sabbatical from J.P. Morgan in New York where he is an investment banker in the firm’s public finance group. In this role, he helps government and not- -for-profit clients find appropriate capital market and bank lending solutions to meet their financial needs including financing critical infrastructure. Previously, Kevin was a trader at multi-strategy hedge fund Citadel LLC. Before joining Citadel, Kevin was a fixed income trader in New York and London for Bank of America Merrill Lynch where he managed interest rate risk and provided liquidity to central banks, insurance companies, and other large institutional investors.
Kevin holds a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University with majors in economics and sociology, a M.Sc. in finance from London Business School, and a M.P.A. from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
Anthea Kamalnath
The Franklin Fellows Program welcomes Ms. Anthea Kamalnath, the 207th Franklin Fellow. She serves as a Franklin Fellow in the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in the Economic and Social Affairs Unit.
For the past seven years, as a Special Deputy Attorney General for the California Department of Justice in the Executive Office of the Attorney General, Ms. Kamalnath provided policy and legal analysis relating to criminal justice and policing reform, net neutrality, environmental protections, transnational crime, human trafficking, water policies, child migrants, and government procurement reform. She helped plan binational forums with Attorney Generals offices of neighboring states and foreign countries.
Ms. Kamalnath was the first Advocacy Chair for the U.S. National Committee for UN Women in Los Angeles. She served on the Advisory Board for Ethics in Tech, a San Francisco-based digital rights group on ethical use of technology. During the housing crisis, she clerked for litigation teams on lawsuits concerning predatory lending and wrongful foreclosure claims. Ms. Kamalnath served as “So You Think You Can Dance” salsa choreographer Alex Da Silva’s human rights liaison during his highly publicized criminal proceedings. Ms. Kamalnath outed a Downtown Los Angeles charity for landlord abuse and fraud. As a clinical intern in the UC Hastings Civil Justice Clinic, Ms. Kamalnath provided counsel to San Francisco non-profits on community economic development issues to ensure compliance with law.
Ms. Kamalnath has served on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Politics and Law and the UCL Jurisprudence Review. Her legal research in the emerging field of law and neuroeconomics, Beyond the Answer: Making Sense of Neuroprudence was published in the Journal for Advanced Research in Law and Economics. She is a previous winner of the Optimist International Oratorical Contest. Her published works are taught at the University of Massachusetts – Lowell. Ms. Kamalnath shared her love for language as a tutor for the Los Angeles Public Library’s Adult Literacy Program.
Ms. Kamalnath is a law graduate of University College London and University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She is also an alumna of the University of Cambridge, Newnham College and Choate Rosemary Hall.
Dr. Sharon Melzer
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Dr. Sharon Melzer. She is the 187th Franklin Fellow. Dr. Melzer serves in the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, Office of Anti-Crime Programs (INL/C) as a Senior Advisor for Transnational Threats and Illicit Financial Flows. She will contribute to the office’s work on combatting transnational organized crime. In addition to other topics, her work will include projects on illicit cigarettes and counterfeit products. With her background in transnational crime and policy coupled with her love for Washington, DC, the Franklin Fellows program and INL/C seemed like a natural fit.
Dr. Melzer comes to us from State University of New York (SUNY), College at Plattsburgh, where she teaches in the Department of Criminal Justice. She is the first fellow from the SUNY system. Immediately before her fellowship, she designed, directed, and implemented SUNY Plattsburgh’s first Study Abroad in Criminology program. During her academic career, she has taught courses on organized crime, white collar crime, human trafficking, terrorism, and transnational crime, research methods, criminological theory, and introduction to criminology and the criminal justice system. She has provided service to several national professional organizations, including serving as an Executive Director of the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime (IASOC). Previously, she was an adjunct professor/lecturer at American University and held a joint position as a Research, Evaluation, and Financial Analyst with the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing and Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.
Dr. Melzer’s research interests include illicit cigarettes, transnational organized crime, human trafficking, drug policy, counterfeit goods, the crime-terror nexus, and sentencing. She has published in various outlets and presented her work at national and international conferences.
She holds a PhD in Justice, Law and Society with a concentration in Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption from American University, a Masters in Public Administration from the Pennsylvania State University, A Masters of Science in Criminology from Florida State University, and Bachelors of Arts in Administration of Justice and History from the Pennsylvania State University.
Aditi Nigam
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Ms. Aditi Nigam as the 209th Franklin Fellow. Aditi Nigam serves as an Outbreak Response Officer in the Office of International Health and Biodefense under the Bureau of Oceans, Environment, and Science (OES). She coordinates interagency response to various infectious diseases (Zika virus and Yellow Fever) and contributes to the development of policy products on antimicrobial resistance. Through her fellowship, Ms Nigam has also worked with various US agencies to provide feedback on the development of the World Bank’s Pandemic Emergency Financing facility.
Ms. Nigam has been applying economics to global public health issues for over six years. Prior to her appointment with the Department of State, Ms. Nigam worked as a Senior Research Analyst with the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP) in New Delhi. At CDDEP, Ms. Nigam developed cost-effectiveness models and wrote peer reviewed publications on schizophrenia treatment and suicide prevention interventions in India. She also traveled and collected data from more than 240 public health facilities across India to determine the cost of the national routine immunization program while working closely with the Public Health Foundation of India, the Government of India, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Ms. Nigam brings diverse experiences from previous work with the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), the Financial Services Authority of the United Kingdom, an Indian microfinance organization, and a large US-based investment bank.
Ms. Nigam holds a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (2010) with a year of external study in the Master of Public Administration program at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Barnard College, Columbia University.
Mike Russell
Mr. Mike Russell serves as a Franklin Fellow in the Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues within the Office of the Secretary (S/CCI). The role of the office includes coordinating diplomatic efforts across the Department and the interagency covering the full range of international cyber policy issues and advancing U.S. interests as outlined in the U.S. International Strategy for Cyberspace.
Mr. Russell returns to the State Department where he began a distinguished Federal career as a legal intern in the Office of Legislative Affairs (H). In the U.S. Senate, he served as counsel to two Judiciary subcommittees and Deputy Chief of Staff to Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who chaired the Helsinki Commission. Mr. Russell staffed CODELs to OSCE Parliamentary Assembly meetings and congressional action on NATO enlargement, treaties, trade agreements, terrorism, international crime, foreign assistance, and expansion of the U.S. role in the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative.
In the Executive Branch, he served as the first Senior Public Safety Advisor to the Corporation for National and Community Service and Deputy Director of the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice, where he led the agency’s partnership with State to sponsor the international conference on stemming the flow of precursor chemicals and to prepare for a U.N. Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice.
Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Russell was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of Treasury for Enforcement Policy and Budget, where he provided policy guidance to the enforcement bureaus and represented Treasury in White House initiatives to establish the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Mr. Russell returned to the Hill as Staff Director of the Subcommittee on Financial Management, the Budget, and International Security of the Governmental Affairs Committee that oversaw DHS. When the House of Representatives created its Homeland Security Committee, Mr. Russell was appointed its first staff director of the management and oversight subcommittee. He served on the committee for eight years, including as its Staff Director and Chief Counsel, and staffed legislative initiatives regarding counterterrorism and cybersecurity and CODELs to Central America, Africa, Europe, and Asia.
In 2014 Mr. Russell joined the faculty of American University in its Graduate Professional Studies program, and in 2015 he was named a Senior Fellow with the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University.
Mr. Russell earned his B.A. from Gettysburg College, M.A. in Political Science from Vanderbilt University, and J.D. from Vanderbilt Law School. Mr. Russell is a member of the Bars of Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, and the Supreme Court of the United States.
Maria Sloniewsky
Maria Sloniewsky (nee Drohobycky) serves as a Franklin Fellow in the Bureau of Europe and Eurasia, Office of Eastern Europe, Special Project Unit. Her primary duty is to provide vital and timely analyses of the ramifications of the EuroMaidan Revolution and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Ms. Sloniewsky is the editor of Crimea: Dynamics, Challenges, and Prospects as well as Developments in Crimea: Challenges for Ukraine and Implications for Reginal Security, the proceedings from an international conference held in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1994. She has also published analyses in such outlets as the European edition of the Wall Street Journal and the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Bulletin, and has commented on events in Ukraine for the BBC.
Between 1997-2000 Ms. Sloniewsky worked at the U.S. Department of Energy on the Materials Protection Control and Accounting initiative, a U.S. program dedicated to preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons-grade materials in Russia. Ms. Sloniewsky served as a Policy Analyst in the Office of International Materials Protection and Emergency Cooperation.
In the mid-1990’s Ms. Sloniewsky worked as a Program Associate for the Program on Science and International Security (PSIS) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). At AAAS, she worked on programs that focused on civil-military relations, ethnic relations, and technical issues involving the dismantling of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. One topic she addressed was the situation in Crimea as an internal Ukrainian politico-economic issue, as a key factor in Ukrainian-Russian relations, and as an important element in broader regional and European security.
Ms. Sloniewsky first worked on geo-political issues and trends involving what are now the former republics of the Soviet Union as a summer intern at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 1988.
Ms. Sloniewsky received her Master’s Degree from Harvard University in Regional Studies (Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia). She is married, has three children, and five fish.
Randall Stagner
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Randall (Randy) Stagner. He is the 203rd Fellow. Randall (Randy) Stagner serves as a Franklin Fellow in the office of Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins, the Coordinator for Threat Reduction Programs (ISN/TR) in her role as the US representative to the G7 Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, in her responsibilities as the State Department lead for the Nuclear Security Summit, and with her work on the Global Health Security Agenda. He advises and assists AMB Jenkins with US government and international organization coordination in the execution of her portfolio.
With 28 years of military service, Randy Stagner retired from the US Army in 2008 at the rank of full colonel. Following tours of duty in the 25th Infantry Division, the 82nd Airborne Division and the XVIII Airborne Corps, he served as a detachment commander, company commander, battalion operations officer, and battalion commander in the US Army Special Operations Command (Airborne), Ft. Bragg, NC. After battalion command, he was assigned to the Pentagon with duty at the State Department. His major deployments include Operation Joint Endeavor (Bosnia) and Operation Iraqi Freedom. In 2009, Randy accepted an appointment to serve as a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Veterans Affairs in the Obama Administration.
In 2011, Randy was elected to the Raleigh City Council where he represented the 80,000 citizens of District A (North Raleigh). He served on the Council Committees of Law and Public Safety, Budget and Economic Development, and Comprehensive Planning.
Randy holds a MA in Russian and East European Studies from the University of Kansas and a MS in National Security Strategy from the National War College in DC.
Maureen Watkins
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Ms. Maureen Watkins. She is the 212th Franklin Fellow. Ms. Watkins serves in the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs (OES/ECW), where she is part of the team working to combat wildlife trafficking in Asia and Africa. The State Department, led by Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment Catherine Novelli (“E”), co-chairs the Presidential Task Force on Wildlife Trafficking; OES/ECW supports E in this role. OES/ECW plans to draw on Ms. Watkins’ expertise to help assess and improve the efficacy of wildlife trafficking laws in key source and transit jurisdictions.
Ms. Watkins has 25 years of international legal, academic, development, and conservation experience. Ms. Watkins comes to us from SOS Rhino, a Washington-based NGO whose focus is on Sumatran rhino and biodiversity conservation in Southeast Asia, where she served as General Counsel and Director of International Strategic Partnerships. Prior to returning to Washington, Ms. Watkins was in academia for nine years and taught in the areas of international business transactions, alternative dispute resolution, and intercultural competence for lawyers. Ms. Watkins is an expert in bicultural and multicultural negotiation and mediation as well as multilateral negotiations and public-private partnerships. Ms. Watkins is also a seasoned corporate and transactional attorney.
Having spent 23 years abroad in Europe and Asia, Ms. Watkins also served as a consultant for the United Nations Development Programme in Laos from 2004-2008 on a rule of law project to create the first officially ratified, annotated translations of all Lao laws. Additionally, she served as a faculty advisor to Chinese legal educators on a USAID program from 2010-2012, the purpose of which was to train her counterparts in experiential teaching techniques for law schools in China and to devise and publish curricular materials for teaching alternative dispute resolution in universities throughout China.
Ms. Watkins has a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics from the University of California, San Diego, a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center, and was a Rotary Scholar in Geneva during her law school studies. She is admitted to the New York Bar and is a certified mediator in Singapore and California.
Dr. Eli Adashi
Franklin Fellow Eli Adashi is the outgoing Dean of Medicine and Biological Sciences and the Frank L. Day Professor of Biology at Brown University. Dr. Adashi is a physician, scientist, educator and executive with over 25 years of experience in health care and the life sciences. Mentor to over 50 trainees, Dr. Adashi has written or co-written over 250 peer-reviewed articles, over 120 book chapters or reviews, and 13 books focusing on ovarian biology, ovarian cancer and reproductive health, as well as on freedom and human rights.
A native of Israel, Dr. Adashi earned his medical degree in 1973 at the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University. After residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Tufts University, a fellowship in reproductive endocrinology at Johns Hopkins and postdoctoral study of reproductive biology at UC San Diego, Adashi began his academic career at the University of Maryland. There he served as the director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology, the Fellowship Training Program in Reproductive Endocrinology and of the Residency Training Program (1981-1996). In 1996, he became Chair of the Department Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Utah Health Sciences Center, where he founded and led the Ovarian Cancer Program. After a sabbatical with the Quality Improvement Group at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Dr. Adashi earned his MS in Health Care Management at the Harvard School of Public Health (2005). In 2004, Dr. Adashi became Dean of Medicine at Brown University.
Dr. Adashi belongs to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the Association of American Physicians and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a member of the Global Agenda Council on Population Growth of the World Economic Forum, the Maternal and Perinatal Health Research and IMPAC groups of the World Health Organization, the Board of Directors of Physicians for Human Rights, the Advisory Board of Doctors for America, the Advisory Board of Maternova, and the Board of Governors of Tel Aviv University.
Dr. Adashi has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad, and is the recipient of numerous awards. Presently on sabbatical leave, Dr. Adashi contributes to the Washington Post, Medscape, Science Progress and provides comments for Latino Public Radio.
Matthew Witsil
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Mr. Matthew Witsil as its 199th Franklin Fellow. Mr. Witsil serves as a Franklin Fellow in the Office of Space and Advanced Technology in the Bureau of Oceans, International Environmental, and Scientific Affairs. He brings to the office expertise developed over the past 15 years as an intellectual property attorney in private practice.
Mr. Witsil is a registered patent attorney who has worked with a focus on licensing of all forms of IP, domestic and international patent prosecution, transactional matters, and dispute resolution and litigation support. As a patent attorney, Mr. Witsil assisted organizations of all sizes that perform R&D from one person start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. He has prepared and negotiated complex agreements for technology and intellectual property, including agreements related to licenses of patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, hybrid licenses, commercial transactions, technology transfer and joint development, strategic alliances, software development and use, employment, and nondisclosure of confidential information.
Prior to attending law school, for nine years Mr. Witsil was a project engineer in the environmental and water resources areas for a civil engineering consulting firm. There he primarily worked in the fields of water resources study, regulatory, design, and construction, including work related to large diameter raw water pipelines.
Mr. Witsil holds an undergraduate mechanical engineering degree from the University of Virginia and a Master of Engineering in Environmental Engineering from Old Dominion University. His law degree is from Duke Law School, and he is a member of the North Carolina Bar.
William Adler
Bill is a Counselor in EB’s Office of International Communications and Information Policy (EB/CIP), where he advises the Coordinator on policies related to international satellite regulations, national security aspects of international communications and information policy, cyber security, and cooperation with domestic and foreign law enforcement agencies.”
An attorney, Bill has specialized in U.S. and global telecommunications and wireless technology for most of his professional career. From 1996 through 2009, he served as General Counsel and a corporate officer of Globalstar, Inc., a publicly-traded company (NASDAQ: GSAT) based in Silicon Valley, California. Globalstar operates a high-technology, low-earth orbiting, global satellite communications system serving voice and data subscribers, including many federal, state and local government agencies. Bill had responsibility for a wide range of domestic and international legal and contract matters in support of the company’s business operations and regulatory affairs. Among other duties, he represented the company before a number of foreign governments and the ITU. Immediately prior to becoming a Franklin Fellow, Bill consulted with Globalstar and other clients on international regulatory and business matters.
From 1972 through 1995, Bill worked in Washington, DC, first in two government agencies, the Civil Aeronautics Board and the Federal Communications Commission, and later in the private sector. At the FCC, he held three supervisory positions in the Common Carrier Bureau – chief of the International Facilities Division (then under Ambassador Philip Verveer), chief of the Mobile Services Division and Deputy Chief of the Bureau. Bill left government service to join Pacific Telesis Group, then one of the seven “Baby Bells,” as its executive director of regulatory affairs. In that position, he was responsible for managing the company’s relationships with all federal regulatory agencies. Bill then became a partner in a small communications law firm before accepting the position with Globalstar and relocating to California.
Bill holds a J.D. from New York University School of Law and a B.A. from Dartmouth College. He is licensed to practice law in D.C. and is a member of the District of Columbia Bar, the American Bar Association and the Federal Communications Bar Association.
In his leisure time, Bill enjoys travel, reading, bicycling, hiking, golf and cultural events. In that regard, he has been a trustee of a large non-profit professional theatre in Silicon Valley for twelve years and also served as a trustee of his local alumni association for seven years.
Ya'ir Aizenman
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Mr. Ya’ir Aizenman. He is the 203rd Fellow. Mr. Aizenman serves as a Franklin Fellow in the Deputy Secretary for Management and Resources (D-MR), Office of the Special Adviser on Development, with a special focus on financing for development and data for development.
Before coming to the State Department, Ya’ir was a Project Manager in New York and Mumbai with Dalberg Global Development Advisors, a consulting firm focused on international development. At Dalberg, Ya’ir led teams working with clients such as the Gates Foundation, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI), Google, the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition, Amnesty International USA, and USAID on issues related to data, markets for global health products, and strategic planning.
Before joining Dalberg, Ya’ir was on the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Drug Access Team, where he was part of a three-person team that initiated a series of negotiations which ultimately resulted in a 30 percent price drop in the price of the pentavalent vaccine. He also was co-author on Value for Money in Malaria Programming: Issues and Opportunities, a working paper published by the Center for Global Development.
Before Dalberg, Ya’ir was a Vice President at D.E. Shaw & Co, a New York-based hedge fund. Ya’ir holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Harvard University.
Dr. Karim Altaii
Dr. Karim Altaii joins the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs as a Franklin Fellow in the Office of Iraq Provincial Reconstruction, Transition and Stabilization Staff as Foreign Affairs Officer-Expert to help in capacity building in Iraq, especially in Higher Education. He will also serve with interagency working groups on a variety of issues in support of Bureau interactions with other stakeholders in soliciting input and formulating recommendations.
Dr. Karim Altaii has been a professor with James Madison University, Energy Academic Team in Integrated Science and Technology (ISAT) department, since 2000. Prior to that, he served on the faculty at the University of Turabo School of Engineering in Puerto Rico and the City College of New York, New York. A Magna Cum Laud graduate of the University of Baghdad-School of Engineering in 1980, he holds M.E., M. Phil. and Ph.D. in Mechanical engineering from the City University of New York. He worked three summers with NASA and Sandia National Laboratories in the Wind Energy and Solar Thermal areas. His interests are in international education, engineering education, education in crises-affected countries, fluid-thermal sciences and renewable energy applications. He recently applied for two patents; one of them is related to solar energy tracking to increase the efficiency of photovoltaic cells.
Patricio Asfura-Heim
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Mr. Patricio Asfura- Heim. He is the 190th Franklin Fellow. Mr. Asfura-Heim serves in the Regional Affairs and Programs Office in the Department of State’s Bureau of Counterterrorism (CT/RAP). He is assisting the office in tailoring policies that will build the capacity of nations to deal effectively with terrorism and enhance regional cooperation in order to shrink the space in which terrorists operate.
Mr. Asfura-Heim is a defense and foreign policy specialist and has been working in conflict zones for close to a decade. As a senior political-military analyst with the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), a defense oriented think tank, his work focuses on the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. His areas of expertise include counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations, conflict assessment, governance and rule of law development, and non-state actors in war, revolution, and peacemaking.
Mr. Asfura-Heim spent a significant amount of time supporting U.S. Marine and Department of State operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. During 2006-2008 he advised coalition forces in determining capability requirements for the Iraqi Security Forces and worked alongside U.S. Marines to bolster governance and the rule of law in Al Anbar Province. During 2009-2010 he worked with the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, to promote good governance by facilitating dialogue between influential tribal and religious leaders and local district officials. In addition to warzone deployments, Mr. Asfura-Heim has conducted fieldwork throughout South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
He is a prolific writer and has published several articles on bottom up governance and community-based security solutions. He has been published by Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy Magazine, United States Institute of Peace, Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, Small Wars Journal, Stability Operations Magazine, and Politico. He is a member of the Washington D.C. Bar.
Lauren E. Baer
Lauren E. Baer is joining the Office of Policy Planning as a Franklin Fellow, where she will oversee the democracy, human rights, and labor portfolio.
Prior to commencing her fellowship, she was a senior associate in the Litigation/Controversy Department at the New York office of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP. Ms. Baer’s practice focused on representation of institutional and individual clients in complex civil litigation, criminal investigations, and arbitral proceedings, with an emphasis on international disputes, compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and federal appellate and Supreme Court matters. Ms. Baer also had an active pro bono practice, which included representing clients in immigration proceedings and successfully defending the constitutionality of the “soft money” provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in the recently decided RNC v. FEC.
Before joining WilmerHale, Ms. Baer clerked for the Honorable Robert D. Sack on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and was a policy consultant to The Albright Group LLC, the global strategy firm headed by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Ms. Baer is a 2007 graduate of Yale Law School, where she was the editor-in-chief of the Yale Journal of International Law and a director of the Immigration Legal Services Clinic. In 2004 she earned an MPhil in Development Studies from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall Scholar. Ms. Baer earned her B.A. from Harvard University, magna cum laude, in 2002.
Ms. Baer is the Director of Programs and a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Marshall Scholars, an avid marathoner and triathlete, and an enthusiastic chef.
Dr. Vanessa Beary
Dr. Vanessa Beary serves in the Global Entrepreneurship Program (CBA/EB) office as the Senior Advisor on Youth Entrepreneurship and Partnerships. Over the course of her fellowship, Dr. Beary will work with partners to design, implement, and evaluate entrepreneurship education programs for disadvantaged youths living in challenging and under-resourced environments.
Dr. Beary comes to us from Harvard University where she received a Doctor of Education. During her time at Harvard she was a Harvard Presidential Scholar, Kauffman Dissertation Fellow, and Fulbright Fellow. She conducted her dissertation fieldwork in Khujand, Tajikistan.
This is not her first time working for the State Department: In 2008 she served on a Temporary Appointment as a Public Diplomacy Officer on the Wasit Provincial Reconstruction Team in Iraq and received the Outstanding Civilian Service Award from the U.S. Department of the Army for her work.
She holds a Doctor of Education from Harvard University, a Master of Education from Harvard University, a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge, and a Bachelors of Arts with honors from Brown University.
Stephen Bell
We are pleased that our 86th Franklin Fellow, Stephen R. Bell, began his service on June 15. Stephen is working with Ambassador Philip Verveer in EEB’s Office of the U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy (EEB/CIP), where he advises on a variety of data protection and telecommunications matters.
For over 35 years, Stephen has counseled telecommunications service providers, value-added service providers, major users of communications service, investors, investment bankers, regulators and foreign governments on a wide variety of domestic and international laws and regulations affecting financing, commercial activities and regulatory obligations in the field of telecommunications. In the last 10 years, his practice has centered on issues arising from the recently-enacted and -implemented legislation (in the U.S. and foreign jurisdictions) relating to data protection, privacy, data security and data breach, with a particular emphasis on the impact such rules have on the operation of trans-border enterprises providing communications, financial, information and other Internet services.
Stephen has advised satellite service providers and satellite manufacturers on a wide range of regulatory and commercial matters. In addition, he has advised on the regulatory and commercial issues involved in the construction, operation and provision of undersea cable facilities and related terrestrial services in the North and South Atlantic Oceans, the Pacific Ocean and the Mediterranean and Black Seas.
Stephen led the legal teams advising the Governments of the Russian Federation, Hungary, Moldova and the Republic of the Congo on the creation of tele-communications regulatory regimes and on the privatization of the national telephone companies, and he has provided advice on telecommunications regulations to the Governments of Jordon and the Ukraine.
Stephen also served as a Senior Counsel for the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban affairs where he coordinated the provision of pro bono legal services to the NGOs assisting in Haitian relief and recovery.
Born and raised in Wisconsin, Stephen received an AB degree from Georgetown University and a JD degree from the University of Wisconsin, where he served as Note Editor of the Law Review. He is a member of the ABA; DC Bar Association; Wisconsin Bar Association; Federal Communications Bar Association; ITechLaw Association, and the International Association of Privacy Professionals.
Stephen served on active duty in the Navy JAGC for four years and enjoys sailing on the Chesapeake Bay.
We are delighted to welcome Stephen to the burgeoning Franklin Fellows family and are proud that the Department and EEB will have the benefit of a professional of his caliber. With his tremendous depth of experience, Stephen most certainly will make important contributions to USG telecommunications policy. We thank Ambassador Verveer for hosting Stephen and EEB for its continuing support to the FF Program.
Dr. Steven Berbeco
The Franklin Fellows Program is delighted to welcome Dr. Steven Berbeco who is our 132nd Franklin Fellow. Dr. Berbeco serves in FSI’s School of Language Studies (FSI/SLS) as the Senior Adviser for Language Teaching Methodology. He works with the SLS Director for Curriculum and Staff Development, the Division Directors and the Dean’s Office to conduct research and formulate recommendations on teaching methodologies.
Dr. Berbeco comes from Boston University, where he was a Visiting Scholar in the School of Education. He has graduate degrees in education from Boston University and linguistics from Harvard University and Indiana University. He holds a Massachusetts teaching license for English and Arabic and has taught in diverse environments including a detention center for adolescent boys and a refugee camp in Hungary. Dr. Berbeco has taught in an inner-city school for seven years, directed an intensive summer language program for urban students and an intensive teacher training program for aspiring high school Arabic teachers. He is the author of the “Marhaba” curriculum for high school Arabic.
Dr. Berbeco has been an active voice in education policy. In 2008-2009, he served as a Teaching Ambassador Fellow for the U.S. Department of Education, and since then he has initiated and supported regional and municipal efforts to promote change in public education.
Dr. Berbeco recently visited Liberia, South Korea and Egypt. He is a native of Massachusetts and has been living in Cambridge and in Boston’s historic North End neighborhood for the past fifteen years.
Tracy Bernstein
Tracy Bernstein is the 38th Franklin Fellow. She is serving in the Office of the Chief of Protocol (S/CPR) as Senior Advisor- identifying artists, vendors and production teams to assist the Gifts Unit with the selection and presentation of official gifts. In addition, she is assisting with the Program for Diplomatic Partnerships’ ”Experience America” program.
Tracy comes to us from the position of a consultant in several areas. As an advisor to the President of Blissliving Home, she worked to provide business opportunities for artisans in developing countries. In her position working with News Distribution Network, she connected this internet start-up company with established media organizations looking to bring aggregated video content to media websites. In her work with non-profits, she performed public outreach, event planning and fundraising.
Tracy worked on the 2008 Presidential campaign, serving on the National Leadership Board for Hillary Clinton for President and the Board for Maxed out Women. She later served with Obama National Women’s Leadership. Tracy worked in the field during the primaries in Iowa, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.
Tracy’s career with non-profits includes serving as a Board member of Sasha Bruce Youthworks, which provides services to “at-risk” youth in D.C. She has been one of the co-chairs for the Vital Voices Gala for the past two years and works with the developing artisans program. Tracy belongs to the Trustees Council at the University of Pennsylvania, served on the campaign board for Sidwell Friends School and on the advisory board for the Jewish Foundation for Group Homes. She began her career in the fashion industry with the May Company and later ran “Private Lines,” a fashion consulting business.
Tracy received a degree in Communications and Marketing from the University of Pennsylvania. She volunteers for “Autism Speaks” and enjoys travel, reading and golf while raising four children.
Dr. Annie Bird
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Dr. Annie Bird. She is the 156th Franklin Fellow. Annie serves in the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO) as a Policy Advisor, covering atrocities prevention, transitional justice, and supporting the bureau’s policy analysis and formulation, strategy development and engagement design.
Her PhD examined US foreign policy on transitional justice with case studies on Cambodia, Liberia and Colombia, and will be published by Oxford University Press. Annie has taught courses on foreign policy analysis at the London School of Economics and
international organizations at UC Berkeley, presented at numerous international conferences, and published her research on state responsibility for human rights violations and on international law and the classification of conflicts. She was also a Visiting Researcher at Georgetown University.
Outside academia, Annie has worked with governments, the UN and NGOs in West Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America on issues related to transitional justice, development and conflict. For example, she led work on children at the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York, and continued this work as consultant for UNICEF, preparing the initial text for the first handbook of best practices on children and truth commissions. She conducted an impact assessment of the Liberian truth commission for Benetech and the State Department, monitored war crimes trials for the Judicial System Monitoring Programme in East Timor and worked with microfinance NGOs in Argentina and Senegal. Her interest in these issues stems in part from an early opportunity to attend the UN Commission and Subcommission for Human Rights in Geneva, and as an intern in the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Annie is a recipient of the Marshall Scholarship, John Gardner Fellowship for Public Service and Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics, LLM in International Human Rights Law from the University of Essex and a BA in Peace and Conflict Studies from UC Berkeley.
Dr. Bidisha Biswas
It is our great pleasure to welcome our 130th Franklin Fellow, Dr. Bidisha Biswas. Bidisha is assigned to DRL’s Office of South and Central Asian Affairs, where she advises on South Asia policy issues.
Bidisha is Associate Professor of Political Science at Western Washington University, located near Seattle. She has past affiliations with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (South Asia Program) and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She has also served as the Seattle Chapter Head of Women in International Security (WIIS). Much of Bidisha’s work has been supported by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), with which she has been affiliated since 2006.
Bidisha’ s expertise lies in the intersections between security issues, counterterrorism, and democratic reforms. Her regional focus has been South Asia. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and has also served as a speaker at several public forums on topics related to civil conflict, counterinsurgency, and democratic quality. She recently wrote an award-winning paper on Sri Lanka’s war with the LTTE for the United States Institute of Peace. Bidisha is currently completing a book manuscript, under contract with Georgetown University Press, on India’s experiences with terrorism and counterterrorism. The book examines the ways in which political violence in India has impacted the country’s democratic processes.
Bidisha, her husband, Nirav, and three year-old daughter, Samara, are enjoying their new surroundings in DC’s Eastern Market neighborhood. Bidisha loves to cook and is always on the look-out for new recipes and cookbooks.
Bidisha received her BA from the University of Delhi and her Master’s from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi. She was a resident of Washington, DC while pursuing her doctorate at the University of Maryland, College Park and is excited to be back in the city she still considers home.
Thomas Burns
Tom Burns comes to the Franklin Fellows program from Novozymes, a leading biotechnology company headquartered in Denmark. Having held a variety of positions during his 16 years with the company, Tom most recently was a technical manager in the biofuels division, supervising a team of chemists and engineers focusing on the grain-to-ethanol conversion process.
Previously, Tom was based at the Novozymes subsidiary in Brazil, and along with an earlier career as a secondary-school science teacher he has over 11 years’ experience living in Latin America. He is a 1981 graduate of SUNY Brockport.
As a Franklin Fellow, Tom will lend his expertise in the areas of alternative and renewable energy to the DOS Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, where he is supporting projects in three offices – Science and Technology Cooperation, Global Change, and Space and Advanced Technology.
Brian Campbell
We are pleased to welcome Brian J. Campbell, of Los Angeles, California, as our 56th Franklin Fellow. Brian is a member of the Vice Presidential Advance Team and travels nationally and internationally to assist with site preparation and logistical support for Vice President Biden’s events. Brian also recently completed three projects in Missouri and Virginia for the Department of Commerce in connection with the 2010 Decennial Census.
Brian brings a well rounded private sector business background to his current position as Foreign Affairs Officer (consultant) in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, Passport, Office of Inte-grity and Internal Controls. As a licensed real estate AGENT, principal, developer and own-er/operator, Brian has developed a number of commercial real estate projects, and recently com-pleted his second resort development project in Southern California. Brian served as senior vice president for Beitler Commercial Realty in Sherman Oaks, California, where he specialized in multi-family, retail and commercial real estate investments. Prior to his commercial real estate career, Brian was Division Agency Manager for Farmers Insurance Group, where he was respon-sible for the supervision of the operations of 258 independent insurance agencies in West Los Angeles and Long Beach, California. Brian served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of “The Groundlings” Theatre, during which he represented the famous improvisational comedy group in the purchase of their landmark theatre building on Melrose Boulevard in West Los An-geles.
Brian graduated from Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri, receiving a Ba-chelor of Science degree in business administration, with an emphasis in organizational commu-nications. While at Truman State, he was awarded the President’s Honorary Scholarship as well as an athletic scholarship for tennis, twice earning NCAA All-American honors in singles and doubles. He was inducted into the Truman State University Athletic Hall of Fame in 1998. Brian has continued his interest in competitive tennis, achieving more than a dozen USTA Na-tional Rankings in the past two decades and was ranked as high as no. 3 in the United States in men’s doubles. Brian was awarded a “bronze ball” at the 2005 USPTA National Indoor Cham-pionships in Park City, Utah, and won his first international doubles title in Isenhagen, Germany, in 2008.
Brian’s grandfather, Lucio Villegas, was a Chilean tennis champion and served as Chilean Consul General, with missions in Japan and the United States. Brian has traveled extensively in Europe, Asia, and South and Central America, and intends to continue his family’s legacy by pursuing his interest in foreign service upon completion of his Franklin Fellowship Program.
James Carden
We are delighted to announce that we have reached an important milestone in the growth of the Franklin Fellows Program, the arrival of our 100th Franklin Fellow. James Carden comes to us three and a half years after our very first Fellow, Paul Scott, began his service. James, who reported on October 12, is serving in EUR’s Office of Russian Affairs (EUR/RUS), where he works as an advisor to the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission.
James joins the program, most recently having worked at the foreign exchange desk at JP Morgan Chase in New York. There, as a member of the FX Hedge Fund Marketing Team, he executed spot and forward FX trades on behalf of the bank’s institutional clients. James has several years of foreign exchange experience, having served not only at JP Morgan but also Deutsche Bank.
He is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) where he was a Russia/Eurasia concentrator. His coursework covered a broad range of issues, including political economy, energy policy and economics.
Upon graduation from SAIS, James took part in a pilot graduate-level exchange program between SAIS and the Moscow State University Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) in Moscow. While there, he took courses in contemporary Russian politics, Russian language and Russian foreign policy issues. He also traveled widely in Russia and Eastern Europe.
James called Brooklyn Heights, NY home for the past ten years. His hobbies include running and skydiving.
We are pleased to welcome James to the Franklin Fellows family and are proud that we can support EUR with a professional of his caliber. We thank EUR for continuing to host our Franklin Fellows and for its interest in the FFP.
Dr. Anne-Marie Carstens
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Dr. Anne-Marie Carstens; Dr. Carstens is the 172nd Franklin Fellow. She recently completed a DPhil in Law (Public International Law) at Oxford University. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on public international law, cultural property law, and international intellectual property law, often with a reliance on archives and other historic sources to elucidate issues in contemporary international law.
Dr. Carstens’ recent research has explored the centuries-long evolution of international law governing the protection of cultural property during armed conflict. Based on extensive research in public and private archives in the United States and Europe, as well as in museum and manuscript collections, her study compared the development of cultural property protection with other developments in the law of armed conflict (particularly civilian protection). Historic sources included armistice agreements between Napoleon and papal authorities for the transfer of Vatican art treasures during the French Revolutionary Wars, a stenographic report of a German-led international conference for protecting monuments during the First World War, and extensive government and private files related to the activities of the Allied specialist art protection officers (or ‘Monuments Men’) who served during the Second World War. In her capacity as a Franklin Fellow in the Office of the Historian, Dr. Carstens will conduct further archival research in order to explore the continued relevance of historic, transformative events in public international law.
She has taught law courses for Georgetown University and for the Comparative and International Law Center, and her academic articles and reviews have been published in a variety of journals, including the British Year Book of International Law (forthcoming 2013), Transnational Dispute Management (forthcoming 2013), the American Journal of Legal History, Art Antiquity and Law, the Minnesota Law Review, and the Georgetown Law Journal. She also holds a law degree from Georgetown University and master’s and bachelor’s degrees from the University of Virginia. She served as judicial law clerk to the
Honorable Diana Gribbon Motz of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Anna Cave
Anna Cave served as a Franklin Fellow in the Secretary’s Office of War Crimes Issues (S/WCI) in 2009. In 2010, she joined the office as a Special Advisor to the Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues and as a War Crimes Specialist in the Civilian Response Corps. In her tenure as a Franklin Fellow and as a Special Advisor, Ms. Cave advised on a variety of issues relating to international humanitarian law and war crimes tribunals, the ICC and positive complementarity, transitional justice and justice sector-reform, witness protection and domestic accountability mechanisms, and atrocity prevention. She focused on developing accountability mechanisms for war crimes in Africa.
Ms. Cave is a graduate of Columbia Law School (J.D.), where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and a recipient of a Skadden Law Student Fellowship, and Duke University (B.A.). Ms. Cave clerked for Judge Lawrence McKenna in the Southern District of New York and is a member of the N.Y. State Bar. She previously practiced in the litigation department of the international law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell, where she initiated the firm’s international human rights pro bono practice and collaborated with grassroots and international NGOs and academic human rights institutions, including HRW, PILPG, ICTJ, Timap for Justice, the Salvation Centre Cambodia, and Fordham Law School’s Leitner Center for International Law & Justice. Ms. Cave is a co-author of publications on grassroots efforts to eradicate FGM in Sierra Leone and land rights and forced eviction in Cambodia.
Ann Mei Chang
The Franklin Fellows Program is very pleased to announce that our 104th Fellow is Ann Mei Chang of Google. Ann Mei is assigned to the Secretary’s Office on Global Women’s Issues, where she is the office’s technology expert. Among other projects, Ann Mei is looking at opportunities to leverage technology to improve the lives of women and girls around the world.
Prior to becoming a Franklin Fellow, Ann Mei was the Senior Engineering Director for Emerging Markets at Google, leading a global team to bring relevant internet services to the half of the world’s population which is not yet connected. Previously, Ann Mei led engineering for the software company’s mobile applications and services worldwide. She oversaw 20x growth of Google’s mobile business in just three years, delivering over $1B in annualized revenues.
Ann Mei has more than twenty years of engineering and leadership experience in diverse sectors of the software industry. Prior to Google, she served as the VP of Engineering at There, a high-tech startup building an online virtual world. She has also held leadership roles at several other leading Silicon Valley companies, including Intuit, SGI and a few startups.
Ann Mei is a member of the 2011 class of Henry Crown Fellows at the Aspen Institute, the GSMA Women Working Group, the International Steering Committee on the Mobile programme at the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, and the Global Telecom Women’s Network International Steering Committee. She holds a BS degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Julie Chen
Julie is Special Advisor to Special Representative Reta Jo Lewis in the Office of Global Intergovernmental Affairs at the Department of State. She facilitates state and local government contacts with their foreign counterparts. Prior to joining the Department of State, Julie was an attorney in private practice. Among her many roles, she has served as in-house counsel for Verizon Communications and the Smithsonian Institution. Julie was also the Chief Legal Officer for the United States Tennis Association, where she was responsible for providing legal and business counsel for the organization and its activities, including the U.S. Open Tennis Championships and as a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee. Julie was also a partner of a major international firm, litigating cases in the areas of employment, securities, antitrust, and breach of contract, among others.
Julie has served on a number of civic and professional organizations, including as a member of the Steering Committee of the DC Bar Section on Arts, Entertainment, Media and Sports Law and of the Anne Arundel County Board of the Central Maryland Chapter of the American Red Cross. She received her J.D. from the University of Michigan where she was a Yee Scholar and holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Irvine. Julie is admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia and in the states of New York, California and Illinois.
Ahmet Cisse
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Cheikh Ahmet Cisse. He is the 168th Franklin Fellow. Mr. Cisse serves in the International Organizations Bureau’s Office of the Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (IO/OIC) as a Foreign Affairs Officer advising in international partnerships in the areas of humanitarian affairs, education, cultural affairs and health. He helps deepen and expand partnerships with the OIC and OIC countries in the manner that President Obama outlined in his June 4th, 2009 Cairo address. Mr. Cisse also serves as a liaison with relevant elements of the USG community on these issues.
Mr. Cisse comes from the Department of Defense where he served in the Human Terrain System program as a social scientist deployed to Afghanistan advising brigade and squadron commanders on cultural, political, economic, and development issues during counterinsurgency and stabilization operations. He also conducted operationally relevant socio-cultural research and analysis to support decision-making and enhance operational effectiveness.
Mr. Cisse’s professional interests lie in international relations and development. He is a specialist on West Africa and fluent in French, Spanish and Wolof.
He holds a Master’s degree in Applied Sociology from the University of Indianapolis.
Vincent Curotto
Vincent Curotto is honored to serve as a Foreign Affairs Officer in the Office of the U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan and South Sudan. In this role, he focuses on economic and financial development, including debt relief and sanctions, sectors such as extractive industries and agriculture, and the two countries’ relations with international financial institutions. Mr. Curotto’s professional experience working with distressed economies and banking systems, with particular interest in post-conflict regions, spans over nine years.
Before joining the State Department, Mr. Curotto worked in the financial services industry – most recently as a Research Analyst at a New York-based, multi-strategy hedge fund specializing in distressed, turnaround situations. There, he initiated and oversaw investments in sovereign debt and banking sectors. His work included analyses of economies throughout Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Latin America.
Prior to his hedge fund work, Mr. Curotto was a Senior Research Associate at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co, a global investment research firm, where he covered the global banking and financial services industry. There, he monitored developments across the global capital markets landscape, including debt and equity capital markets activity, and advised institutional clients, senior management teams and government officials on business strategies, corporate finance decisions and regulatory policies. While at Bernstein, Mr. Curotto advised the U.S. Treasury on the allocation and ongoing management of its TARP program.
Mr. Curotto was the senior member of a team consistently recognized by Institutional Investor and Greenwich Associates, and whose work was regularly cited in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNBC and Bloomberg News. Mr. Curotto holds a BA in History, cum laude, from Amherst College.
Patricia DeGennaro
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Patricia (Tricia) DeGennaro. She serves in USAID’s Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance – Office of Civilian and Military Cooperation (DCHA/CMC) as a Policy Advisor to support the Office and an Agency-wide Civilian-Military Cooperation Steering Committee in an extensive revision to the Agency’s Civilian-Military Cooperation Policy.
Ms. DeGennaro comes to USAID from New York University’s Department of Politics where she teaches a course on international security. In addition to her work as a professor, she is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute and a subject matter expert for the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.
DeGennaro capitalizes on over twenty years of experience in a writer, independent political risk analyst and consultant in international relations and economic development. She has studied first hand the transition from military to civil authority in Iraq and spent much of the last five years working in Afghanistan on provincial governance and capacity building, parliamentary reform, public policy development in the Office of the President of Afghanistan and joint interagency, intergovernmental and multinational coordination.
During her tenure, she has consulted with the Asia Foundation, Director of National Intelligence Office, Department of Homeland Security, The Conference Board, Fred Friendly Seminars, World Bank, Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee chaired by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and several organizations that support the Middle East Peace Process. She also spent four years in Albania, initially as a Small and Medium Enterprise Consultant with the Peace Corps followed by a contract with the US Agency for International Development on Agra-business development. Regionally, DeGennaro continues to focus on the Balkans, the Middle East and South Asia where she travels often.
She was recently chosen by Women’s Media Center as one of 33 participants for the Progressive Women’s Voices program which provides media and spokesperson training to connect media professionals with smart, media-savvy women experts.
DeGennaro has published several articles on US foreign policy and national security topics. Her focus is to encourage an integrated international policy that looks beyond war and the use of force. She is often an expert commentator for CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, Fox News, BBC and various nationally and internationally syndicated radio programs.
DeGennaro holds an MBA in International Trade and Finance from George Washington University and an MPA in International Security and Conflict Resolution from Harvard University.
Miguel Diaz
We are pleased to welcome that our 91st Franklin Fellow, Miguel Diaz, serving in DRL’s Office of Western Hemisphere Affairs, where he is responsible for the Bureau’s Central America portfolio.
Miguel has a long and distinguished career as a Latin Americanist. Most recently, he worked for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence as a Professional Staff Member responsible for providing oversight of U.S. intelligence activities in Latin America and of DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis. He has also served as the Director of the South America Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as a Senior Latin America Economist for Nikko Research Center, and as a Central America Analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. He also was an instructor on the Southern Cone at FSI and a briefer for departing ambassadors to Central America.
Miguel has an M.A. in Latin American Studies and International Finance from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He holds a BA from Hobart College in upstate New York, where he majored in Political Science and Religious Studies.
Jennifer Donofrio
Jennifer joins OES’ Office of International Health and Biodefense, where she serves as the action officer on maternal and child health. Her portfolio includes Global Health Governance and health issues that may accompany G8/ G20 agendas. She also covers trade and investment policies and their interactions with international public health and the environment.
Jennifer has a health and legal background and has been affiliated with various organizations, including the legal clinic at Universidad Centroamericana in Managua, Nicaragua, and the International Institute for Sustainable Development in Geneva, Switzerland. Further, she has conducted HIV/ AIDS education courses in rural Tanzania and provided neuro-rehabilitation training to physicians and nurses in Turkey.
Jennifer holds a JD from Seattle University School of Law, an MA in Speech-Language Pathology from the University of Maryland and a BS with that same major from Old Dominion University. In 2010, she was named a Duke University Fellow in Global Policy and Governance in Geneva. She is a member of the American Society for International Law and the American-Speech Language and Hearing Association.
Jennifer has resided in a variety of locales, from the Pacific Northwest to Southern California to New Mexico’s Navajo reservation. Her personal interests include traveling, hiking and reading. She speaks Spanish and French and loves homemade vanilla cupcakes with chocolate frosting.
Randall Doyle
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Randall Doyle is our 82nd Franklin Fellow. Randall, who began his fellowship on May 19, is serving in DRL’s Office of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, where he is researching press freedom in South Asia.
Randall has taught, studied or lived in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America during his academic career. Prior to becoming a Franklin Fellow, he taught East Asian History, Pacific Rim History, Modern China and American Diplomatic History at Central Michigan University from 2005 to 2011. Earlier, he was a Visiting Professor at North China University of Technology in Beijing; Ocean University (Qingdao, China); and Aichi University (Nagoya, Japan). At these institutions, he taught courses on American foreign policy, U.S. politics and China’s law and politics.
Randall also was selected to be a Visiting Scholar at the International Center for Chinese Studies (Nagoya, Japan); International Christian University (Tokyo); the Institute of Japanese Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Beijing); and at the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Research Centre at the University of South Australia (Adelaide).
Randall will publish his fifth book this fall (co-authored with Chinese scholar Dr. Zhang Boshu), Modern China and the New World: The Reemergence of the Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century. His fourth book, The Roots of War in the 21st Century: Geography, Hegemony, and Politics in Asia-Pacific, was nominated and considered for the renowned Lionel Gelber Book Prize associated with the University of Toronto. This specific book award is for outstanding academic and literary works concerning international affairs.
In 2010 and 2011, Randall was a selected as a finalist for Professor of the Year and for a Creative and Innovative Teaching commendation at Central Michigan University in the College of Humanities and Social Behavioral Sciences.
We are delighted and proud to welcome such a distinguished scholar to the burgeoning Franklin Fellows family. Randall is well-placed to make an important contribution to DRL’s work on the EAP region. We remain most grateful to DRL for welcoming our Fellows and for being a great partner with the Franklin Fellows Program.
Erin Duggins
We are pleased to announce Erin Duggins as our 116th Franklin Fellow. Erin is serving in the Office of USAID’s Chief Operating Officer, where she is a Senior Advisor and will help USAID establish and institutionalize a new Internal Communications and Engagement Team. In that capacity, Erin will develop a multi-faceted, multi channel communications strategy that establishes a unified platform by which USAID can reach out to 9000 staff, plus PSCs and institutional contractors, located in 80 countries and 3 DC offices with then information needed to achieve results, keep people connected, build community and retain staff that is more than 50% new hires (within past three years).
Erin is an executive with thirteen years of experience in strategy and human capital management consulting, both in the federal government and with private sector development institutions, such as FINCA International. In those thirteen years, Erin led strategy and organizational change teams in support of large organizational transformation and technology modernization initiatives for federal government agencies, such as Veterans Affairs, Food and Drug Administration, National Archives and Records Administration and the U.S. Navy. During her management consulting career, Erin earned a reputation as a respected advisor to government and private sector executives in the areas of strategic planning, organization design and organizational change.
Erin is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated, which is a public service sorority with over 1,000 chapters and 250,000 members across the globe. In Delta Sigma Theta, she is the Chair of the Eastern Region Program Planning Committee, where she assists 143 chapters in nine states, the District of Columbia, Germany and the U.S. Virgin Islands increase their impact in local communities by providing guidance, tools and training that improve local chapters’ abilities to plan, implement and evaluate their public service programs.
Erin was a 2009-2010 Organizational Sciences Fellow at The George Washington University, where she earned her M.A. in Organizational Management. She also earned a Masters of Public Policy (M.P.P.) from the University of Chicago in 1999.
Erin is a native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but has called the Washington metropolitan area home for the past 12 years. Her personal interests include community service, singing and blogging on strategy and leadership.
Jennie Duran
The Franklin Fellows Program is very pleased to announce our 94th Fellow, Jennie Duran. Jennie is serving in the Office of Civil Rights (S/OCR), where she is working on diversity issues, EEO investigations and other legal issues regarding EEO and employment.
A Mexican/Apache from Flagstaff, Arizona, Jennie has focused her career on EEO law. She is a graduate of SUNY Buffalo Law School and is certified in Diversity Management from Cornell University. She holds a BA from Northern Arizona University.
Jennie has worked in Los Angeles with homeless individuals on Skid Row and on worker’s rights issues with migrant farm workers. She also has practiced tribal law for the Hualapai and Havasupai tribes in Arizona. Jennie taught Chicano Studies at Northern Arizona University and was an integral member of the University’s Office of Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity, ensuring that NAU met its commitment to diversity.
Jennie was Director of the Peace of Mind Program at the Los Angeles Public Council Law Center. There, she oversaw a project to ensure care for children whose parents died of AIDS or cancer. She also served as Guardian Ad Litem for children who were victims of abuse by foster parents. Her commitment to human rights extended to translating legal documents into Spanish, helping Hondurans and Nicaraguans apply for temporary work permits in Los Angeles and traveling to migrant worker camps in Colorado to educate workers on wage claims and taxation laws.
Matthew Durham
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Mr. Matthew Durham as the 157th Franklin Fellow. Mr. Durham is currently serving in the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance (AVC). As a Technical, Policy and Foreign Affairs Officer Mr. Durham supports several programs in the Office of Verification and Transparency Technologies. (VTT).
Mr. Durham comes from California Polytechnic State University, where he studied Arms Control Policy, Foreign Policy, Leadership, Management, Political Science and Public Policy.
Mr. Durham is familiar with the D.C. area as he began his military career at Fort Myer, VA as a member of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment known as the “The Old Guard”, the oldest active-duty Infantry Regiment in the Army, and the Army’s official ceremonial unit and escort to the President. While assigned to The Old Guard, Mr. Durham participated in various ceremonies in support of dignitaries, fallen soldiers, the military and Presidential support missions. During the September 11th, 2001 Pentagon terrorist attack, Mr. Durham assisted in the recovery operations at the Pentagon while assigned to his unit and throughout Operation Noble Eagle.
During his post-military career, Mr. Durham supervised the CubeSat program which organizes and develops the Poly-PicoSatellite Orbital Deployer (P-POD). The P-POD is a secondary launch vehicle interface for a small-class of satellites known as CubeSats. Working with industry, education, government and foreign organizations, Mr. Durham assisted several organizations with the development of their CubeSat programs. Mr. Durham further supervised the development of the organization’s 5th generation CubeSat known as CP5.
Mr. Durham most recently served as an advisor to a Squadron Commander at the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center. He assisted in the transition of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Enterprise from Air Force Space Command to Global Strike Command and during this process earned several awards during the inspections that were crucial to the transition.
Dr. Marlese Durr
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to announce the arrival of our 75th Franklin Fellow, Dr. Marlese Durr of Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Marlese, who began her service on February 9, is assigned to IO’s Office of UNESCO Affairs, where she is the Office’s primary advisor on social and human sciences.
Marlese is Professor of Sociology at Wright State, has served as the Director of Women’s Studies at Wright State and has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Nebraska. She holds a Ph.D. and MA in Sociology from SUNY Albany, as well as an MA in African and Afro-American Studies and a BS in Liberal Studies from Albany.
Marlese is the author of several articles and two edited books entitled Race, Work, and Family in the Lives of African American Men and Women (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) with Shirley A. Hill and The New Politics of Race: From Du Bois to The 21st Century (Praeger Press 2002). Her most recent works are entitled “Keep Your “N” In Check: African American Women and The Interactive Effects of Etiquette and Emotional Labor” (forthcoming in a 2011 Special Issue of Critical Sociology) with Adia Harvey Wingfield; “Inner-City African-American Women’s Adolescence as Stressful Life Events: Understanding Substance Abusing Behavior” ( Journal of African American Studies, Vol. 14. No.3, pp. 202-219) with LaFleur Small, and Eloise Dunlap (2010); and “Small Town Life: A Study in Race Relations.” Ethnography, Vol. 11(1): 127–143.
Marlese has served as President of Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS); Publications Chair of Gender & Society; and as a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Black Sociologists. Additionally, she has served as an Editorial Board Member for American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Social Forces, and Gender & Society. Within the American Sociological Association, Marlese has held various positions, including member of the Committee on Nominations, Organizations, Occupations, and Work Election Committee; Chair of the Community and Urban Sociology Section Student Award Committee; and as Section Chair for Race, Gender, and Class. She currently serves as the Division Chair of Racial and Ethnic Minorities, for the Society for the Study of Social Problems and is a member of the American Sociological Association Committee on Professional Ethics (COPE).
Elizabeth Edelstein
We are pleased to announce that our 83rd Franklin Fellow is Ms. Elizabeth M. Edelstein. Elizabeth, who began her fellowship on May 23rd, is serving USUN’s Political Section, where she focuses on women, peace and security. She will also cover some aspects of the African and Eastern European portfolios.
Elizabeth has a Juris Doctor from Emory University, where she received both the Dean’s Award in International Human Rights and the Founder’s Award. She holds a Masters of International Affairs from Columbia, where she was given an Earth Institute Award. Her BA is magna cum laude from Cornell.
A published author and attorney, Elizabeth has past affiliations at South Brooklyn Legal Services, Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP, and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, and has received five professional honors and awards. More recently, she has worked with various United Nations entities and affiliates, including UNICEF, UNDP, UN OIOS, UNA-USA, and UN peacekeeping missions in Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire.
Her experience with national governments includes both the UK House of Commons and the US Judiciary, where she worked for United States Judge Richard M. Berman in the Southern District of New York. In addition, Elizabeth has served on the Board of For One World, an organization that sponsors American students to teach over the summer in Techiman, Ghana, and the Human Rights Watch New York Network. She is also a member of the American Society of International Law, the American Bar Association and the New York State Bar.
The daughter of two history professors, Elizabeth has been traveling since she was 22 months old. She has been to approximately 40 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Central and South America and speaks English and French, as well as some Italian, Swahili, and Twi.
We are delighted to welcome Elizabeth to the burgeoning Franklin Fellows family. She is a superb fit for USUN/POL and will, we are confident, make important contributions on women’s and other issues. We thank USUN for its strong and continuing support to our Fellows and to the larger Franklin Fellows Program.
Jessica El-Hosni Pedersen
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Jessica El-Hosni Pedersen. She is the 171st Franklin Fellow. Jessica serves in the Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor- Policy Planning and Public Diplomacy (DRL/PPD) Bureau. As a Foreign Affairs Officer, Jessica is developing the Bureau’s objectives, milestones, and long range strategic plan
to measure the effectiveness of major DRL initiatives.
Prior to joining the State Department as a Franklin Fellow, Jessica was the Operations and Finance Manager for the international line of business for Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions (IS&GS), responsible for managing the new business allocation funding for international pursuits. Jessica has worked on international
opportunities focusing on UK MoD, NATO, Australian DoD, and Middle Eastern customers. Jessica was also a due
diligence business development team lead for an international mergers and acquisition candidate. Prior to this
position, Jessica worked in IS&GS Strategy focusing on Strategic and Long Range Planning activities at the IS&GS level, $10B 2010 Sales. She participated in TechAmerica Foundation Government Technology Opportunity in the 21st Century (GTO21), a report which provided actionable recommendations to OMB, Federal agencies, and industry to improve the procurement and development of major IT systems.
Jessica has recently been accepted to the 2013-2014 Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) Future Leaders Program. She currently is a member of Women in Foreign Policy Group and volunteers for the United Nations Foundation Girl Up campaign. Jessica holds a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Maryland-College Park focusing on international business and received her bachelor’s degree in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan.
Dr. Mark E. Emblidge
Franklin Fellow, Professor Mark E. Emblidge is Director of the Literacy Institute at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. His research and work has focused on literacy for at-risk populations; workforce education; school reform; integrated student services; and post secondary transitions.
Dr. Emblidge will serve in the Office of the U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan, where he will work with General Gration in designing education programs for Sudan.
In 1995, President Clinton appointed Dr. Emblidge to the Board of the National Institute for Literacy, where he served as chair from 1998 to 2002. As Affiliate Professor and Director of The Literacy Institute at VCU, Dr. Emblidge works with policy makers on the issues of illiteracy and how to address them. He has most recently worked on a series of federal literacy grants focused on children and adults in poverty.
Twice appointed to the Virginia Board of Education, Dr. Emblidge served as Board President until January 2010. Virginia’s Board sets standards for curricula, teachers, and accreditation; sets graduation requirements and approves state testing programs; and recommends how much to fund public education. Governors Warner and Kaine also appointed Dr. Emblidge to the Southern Regional Education Board. He is currently vice-chairman of this regional organization devoted to helping southern states improve and share resources in higher education.
Dr. Emblidge is Director of and founded both the Virginia Literacy Foundation and Communities in Schools of Virginia, which he started with U.S. Senator Mark Warner and former U.S. Senator George Allen.
Dr. Emblidge was a member of the first elected school board in Richmond, Virginia. Beginning in 1994, he served four terms and was elected as its chair three times.
Dr. Emblidge consulted for Prime Minister Thatcher’s government on Communities in Schools and integrated student service, has written columns for the Richmond Times-Dispatch and has advanced the cause of education at all levels through his service on numerous bodies in Virginia and the surrounding region.
Active in state and national politics, Dr. Emblidge has served on gubernatorial and presidential campaigns and transition teams. He holds a PhD and an MA in Education from the University of Virginia and a BA in Political Science from Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts. He and his wife, Robbie Banning, have two daughters, Catherine and Caroline.
Margi English
Margi English joins the Franklin Fellows Programs, working in the Secretary’s Global Partnership Initiative office. Margi is serving as S/GPI’s Communications Advisor, where she will be building presence and exposure for the office, both internally (in the form of a usable knowledge database) and externally (print collateral, website revision, talking points, article placements and broadcast opportunities).
Most recently, Margi was the Executive Director of Development and Communications at Santa Clara University’s Jesuit School of Theology. Before going to Santa Clara, Margi founded Lumina Pictures, which develops and produces feature films, by raising investment capital from Wall Street investors. She established her own line of home furnishings, designing and marketing products, including a commemorative city scarf for the Office of the Mayor of San Francisco. She also is an appointed member of the Asthma Task Force of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
In 2009, Margi earned an FAA private pilot license and enjoys seeing the world from 3000 feet. She has studied at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University and the Sorbonne. She speaks French and Spanish.
Dr. Erin Evans-Walker
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Dr. Erin Evans-Walker. She is the 179th Franklin Fellow. Dr. Erin Evans serves in the staff office of the Presidentially-appointed J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board (FFSB), Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA). She serves as a Foreign Affairs Officer (Expert) to support the office’s work on the administration of the Fulbright educational exchange programs.
Dr. Erin Evans-Walker is the third Franklin Fellow nominated and sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), a New York-based, private, non-profit federation of 70 national scholarly organizations. Dr. Evans-Walker comes to us from Edinburgh University, where she completed her Master’s degree and doctorate in Religious Studies. Her thesis examined certain 3rd Century Coptic Gnostic texts – the Books of Jeu and the Pistis Sophia – and the cultural and religious influences that were blended into their contents, as well as how they were utilized in practice by the group that produced them. Dr. Evans-Walker’s research was supported by a New College Studentship and an Overseas Research Student Award through the University of Edinburgh. She has presented at conferences and contributed articles to a number of books and journals in the fields of religion and history, including a volume on the use of history and historical
simulations in video games.
Prior to pursuing postgraduate studies, Dr. Evans-Walker was heavily involved in international programs and exchanges. During her Bachelor’s program in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, she studied abroad in Nagoya, Japan, and upon graduation came to work for UIUC’s Study Abroad Office as Coordinator of International Projects in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2000, Dr. Evans-Walker participated in a semester-long international high school exchange in Ashikaga, Japan, cementing her passion for international education as a means of cultural exchange and student development early on.
Anna Fader
We are delighted to announce that our 90th Franklin Fellow is Anna M. Fader, who began her fellowship on July 5. Anna is an Agricultural Trade Specialist in the Biology and Textile Trade Division of EEB’s Office of Bilateral Trade Affairs (EEB/TPP/ABT), where she manages bilateral agricultural biotechnology objectives for the South and Central Asia regions.
Anna is an internationally trained lawyer and business woman specializing in international trade and government affairs. Having lived and trained in China, Hong Kong, Australia and the United States, she has problem-solved across various languages, legal systems, cultures and customs. She is a Master Level Mediator and President of her own mediation firm. She was one of ten mediators selected worldwide to participate in a Ford Foundation-sponsored forum in Berlin on international mediation.
Known for her creative problem solving, Anna is a highly sought-after mediator for her ability to quickly identify underlying issues and instinctively bring quick resolution to difficult and complex cases. She has served on numerous mediation/arbitration panels, including for the SEC, AAA and the District of Columbia Superior Court.
Anna co-founded and became the first Board chairperson of the Minnesota Affirmative Action Association. She was the first woman in Minnesota to negotiate major labor agreements and, as an entrepreneur, also became the first woman in Minnesota history to own a pharmacy in her own right. Her pharmacy was the first licensed by the state of Minnesota to a non-pharmacist and an independently owned enterprise.
Between 1999 and 2006, Anna and her family lived in Singapore, China, Hong Kong and Australia, where she pursued her law degree and Masters in International Trade at the prestigious University of Technology, Sydney. She also continued to work internationally as a mediator and arbitrator. Anna relocated to Washington, D.C. in 2006 to pursue the interest in government which, fortunately for us, led her to the Franklin Fellows Program.
We are pleased to welcome Anna to the burgeoning Franklin Fellows family. Her extensive international experience as a lawyer, businesswoman and mediator will enable her to make important contributions to the work of EEB. We again thank the Bureau for hosting Anna and several other Franklin Fellows. EEB has been a consistent and strong supporter of the Franklin Fellows Program, for which we are grateful.
Amanda Fazzone
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Amanda Fazzone as our 81st Franklin Fellow. Amanda is a Foreign Affairs Officer assigned to DRL’s Office of International Religious Freedom (DRL/IRF), where she focuses on NEA issues.
Since 2004, Amanda has worked on Middle Eastern issues, with a focus on democracy and labor. Most recently, she served as Director of U.S. Government Relations for the OneVoice Movement, an international grassroots movement that works with Israeli and Palestinian young political leaders to build consensus for a two-state peace agreement to end the conflict. In this capacity, she briefed senior U.S. government officials and foreign diplomats, connecting them with OneVoice’s Israeli and Palestinian Youth Leaders, and spoke at multiple diplomatic events.
Previously, Amanda was the Jordan and Palestine Country Director at the Education For Employment Foundation, a nonprofit that provides training and job-placement services to unemployed youth in the Middle East and North Africa through academic, corporate, and governmental partnerships. She also served as Chief Operating Officer of a nonprofit established to support microfinance initiatives in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as in Israel (between joint groups of Arab and Jewish entrepreneurs). Amanda has attended economics conferences such as Sanabel: The Microfinance Network of Arab Countries, the Palestine Investment Conference, and the Civil Society Policy Forum of the World Bank-IMF Spring Meetings.
Before pursuing a career in international development, Amanda was a journalist. She was Assistant Managing Editor at The New Republic magazine, where her articles were covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio. She was Senior Editor and Writing Fellow at Media Matters for America and Programming Coordinator at the SILVERDOCS: AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival. She has written for numerous media outlets, including Slate.com, SPIN, and the Washington City Paper, and has edited four nonfiction books.
In 1997, Amanda graduated magna cum laude from Boston College, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Theater. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
Todd Fein
We are pleased to announce that our 95th Franklin Fellow is Todd Fein, President of Green Diamond LLC. Todd, who began his fellowship on September 28, is serving in the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, where he is helping to draft a 2010 Sustainability Report.
Todd joins the Franklin Fellows Program with 15 years of experience in management and technology consulting. He founded Green Diamond in 2009 to organize, plan, design and implement automated reporting and other solutions for integrating environmental, social, and financial performance.
Prior to Green Diamond, Todd founded CadenceQuest, a consulting firm which specialized in reporting automation and performance management. While launching it, he assisted the Chief Technology Officer of the State of New Jersey on special projects, ranging from e-Government services to inter-departmental collaboration. He subsequently oversaw reporting projects for many of the country’s largest companies, including Wal-Mart, Bank of America and CVS, as well as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education.. In addition, he provided similar services to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Before that, Todd helped launch and served as Director of Operations and Corporate Development for Cvent, an online, on-demand event, marketing and data analysis software company. He was responsible for cementing operations through the company’s initial period of growth, including by helping define its mission, values and vision, its go-to-market strategy and its product management and other organizational structures.
Todd began his career as a manager at American Management Systems, a global management and technology consultancy. There, he helped develop an environmental systems group and co-invented Tools for Environmental Management and Protection Organizations, a patented, enterprise-wide management system used by numerous regulatory agencies and thousands of companies and people who with interact with them.
Todd holds a Systems Science Engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, with a concentration in environment and materials, and an Economics degree from the Wharton Business School, with a concentration in finance.
He was born and raised in Cleveland, OH, where his parents and brother still live. He was a long-time soccer player, and his personal interests include travel and food and such outdoor activities as biking and SCUBA.
We are delighted to welcome Todd to the burgeoning Franklin Fellows family. Todd’s timing is impeccable, given the critical importance and surge of worldwide activity on sustainability, and we have every confidence that his extensive experience will make a valuable contribution to Department efforts on sustainability. We are grateful also to OBO for hosting Todd as the first of what we hope will be many Franklin Fellows.
Jason Flippen
The Franklin Fellows Program warmly welcomes our 76th Franklin Fellow, Jason Flippen. Jason is serving a split tour as Innovation Advisor in the Secretary’s Office of Innovation (S/SAIT) and the WHA’s Office of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (WHA/PDA). His portfolio includes projects where the mission of the Secretary’s Office of Innovation – to determine how technology can be leveraged to help achieve our diplomatic and development goals – intersects with the policy issues of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs.
Prior to joining the Department, Jason spent nearly fifteen years working in the publishing industry, holding a variety of management positions. Most recently, he launched the electronic media marketing program at W.W. Norton & Company, where he worked with authors, editors and technologists to bring innovative new media products to market. While waiting for his security and ethics clearances, he consulted for the Council on Foreign Relations, leading a business review and discovery process to uncover opportunities for improvement and to guide their digital strategy.
Jason holds a B.A. in English from the University of Oregon and studied at the Universidad Autónoma de Queretáro in Mexico. He recently moved to Washington from Portland, Oregon with his wife, who is a Foreign Service Environment Officer with USAID. They served for many years as volunteer Naturalists for the Nature Conservancy of Oregon.
Tim Ford
Tim Ford serves as a Franklin Fellow in the Office of Japan Affairs, in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
Prior to joining the State Department as a Franklin Fellow, Tim worked in Corporate Strategy and Business Development at Lockheed Martin’s Corporate Headquarters in Bethesda, MD supporting the development of strategy initiatives, analyzing strategic conditions, and assessing the corporation’s overall strategic direction.
Tim joined Lockheed Martin in 2005 as a financial analyst on the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Program in Orlando, FL at Lockheed Martin Simulation, Training & Support (LM STS). In 2007, he moved to the financial planning and analysis team focusing on developing and reporting the financial metrics and long range plan for LM STS.
Tim is a graduate of the Financial Leadership Development Program (FLDP) of Lockheed Martin, a three year program for entry-level professionals to develop leadership skills in the finance discipline through rotational assignments and technical curriculum. He was a catcher on the baseball team at the University of Central Florida where he received both his bachelor’s degree in accounting and his MBA. He is currently sitting for the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) exam and resides in Rockville, MD.
Dr. Robert Forsythe
We are pleased to inform you that our 131st Franklin Fellow is Dr. Robert Forsythe of the University of South Florida. Dr. Forsythe is assigned to the Bureau of the Comptroller and Financial Services and is our first-ever Fellow in Charleston. He serves as a senior financial analyst in the Office of Global Financial Operations (CGFS/F) and will be working on special projects throughout the year.
Dr. Forsythe is the former Dean of the College of Business at University of South Florida, having stepped down on July 1. He continues to serve as a Professor of Finance at USF. Prior to that, he was a member of the economics faculty and the administrative team (Senior Associate Dean) of the College of Business Administration at the University of Iowa. He also had past affiliations with the California Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr. Forsythe holds a PhD in Economics from Carnegie Mellon, as well as two Master’s degrees (Economics and Statistics) from the same university. His BS degree from Penn State was in Quantitative Business Analysis.
Dr. Forsythe is the author of over fifty peer-reviewed publications appearing in top-tier journals in accounting, economics and finance. He is listed in Who’s Who in Economics as one of the most frequently cited economists. While at the University of Iowa, he was a co-founder of the Iowa Electronic Markets, where future contracts based on political and economic events are traded over the Internet. Begun in 1988, it was the first Internet-based electronic financial market. He has also directed numerous projects for the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education and Nasdaq.
Dr. Forsythe serves on the Board of the USF Research Foundation and the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce, among other organizations, and is a former Board member of the University Area Community Development Corporation and Junior Achievement. He also is a member of the CEO Council of Tampa Bay.
Dr. Forsythe is the recipient of many awards, including the State of Iowa Board of Regents’ Award for Faculty Excellence and being named to the Leonard A. Hadley Chair in Leadership at the University of Iowa. He is the subject of numerous citations in Who’s Who in the World; Who’s Who in America; Who’s Who in Finance and Industry; and Who’s Who in American Education.
Tracey Friedlander
Tracey K. Friedlander is an attorney who works in the Office War Crimes Issues. Tracey is the second Franklin Fellow to serve in S/WCI, who focuses on war crimes issues relating to the DROC and Rwanda.
Tracey Friedlander is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dickinson College and has a JD from Washington College of Law. She honed her international negotiating abilities advising Timothy Shriver in planning for the 2007 Special Olympics in Shanghai, China. Previously, she successfully negotiated the privatization of state-owned enterprises with the governments of Argentina, Turkey, Venezuela and Panama. She drafted immigration policy for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and human rights reviews for the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights. She helped provide legal assistance to the disadvantaged with the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless and with Ayuda, bringing her fluency in Spanish to bear. She contributed to redefining the mission of the River School, a private elementary school here in Washington, D.C. She also organized three political seminars for U.S. presidential candidates, including Vernon Jordan, Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke, among the speakers.
Shaun Galloway
Shaun is our first-ever Fellow in the Bureau of Counterterrorism (CT). Serving in the Counterterrorism Finance Office (CT/CTF), he works on the development and implementation of anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing training courses and monitors international implementation of anti-money laundering and counterterrorism finance action plans.
Lisa J. Gambone
Lisa J. Gambone will be working with the Office of International Organizations/Human Rights, Humanitarian and Social Affairs. She will be working on topics brought before the UN Human Rights Council, the General Assembly debates, and also on women’s issues.
Before becoming a Franklin Fellow, Gambone worked as an attorney at an international US law firm in London. She has also worked with the Prosecution for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, specifically in the Karemera proceedings and researching the prosecution of sexual violence under international criminal law; she observed the Caprivi treason trials in Namibia on behalf of Lawyers without Borders; she prepared reports on atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo with regard to prosecutions before the International Criminal Court; and she worked on cases before the European Court of Human Rights involving corporal punishment in UK schools and the expulsion of Roma (“gypsies”) from Italy. Gambone also worked with British and Northern Irish organizations on transitional justice issues in the devolution process.
Ms. Gambone holds a J.D. with a specialization in international law from Columbia University, an M.A. in International Economics and European Studies from Johns Hopkins (SAIS), a Masters in Political Science from Stockholm University, and a BA in International Relations – Security and Diplomacy Studies from Brown University.
Clinton Gardiner
Clint Gardiner has been a member of the United Technologies Corporation legal department for more than 16 years. In his most recent position as Vice President, Government Business Controls, he has been responsible for leading an effort focused on government contracts risk management issues.
Gardiner has held senior level executive positions in the United Technologies legal department for the last 10 years, including Vice President and General Counsel of Hamilton Sundstrand Corporation and Deputy General Counsel of Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, both wholly-owned subsidiaries of United Technologies. While at Hamilton Sundstrand and Sikorsky he became increasingly involved in supporting international business objectives and experienced first hand the challenge of enforcing and protecting intellectual property both in the United States and abroad.
Before joining United Technologies, Gardiner was an associate with Crowell & Moring, a Washington law firm, where he began his professional career as a lawyer. During his eight years there he focused primarily on government contracts and business crime matters.
Clint received his undergraduate degree from Yale University and his law degree from Rutgers-Camden School of Law.
Dr. Nisha Jain Garg
Dr. Nisha Jain Garg joins the Franklin Fellows Program from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, TX where she serves as the Professor of the Departments of Microbiology & Immunology and Pathology. She also serves as a member of the PTHE study section at the National Institutes of Health and Associate editor of the American Journal of Pathology.
As Franklin Fellow at the US Department of State/US Agency for International Development (USAID), she will serve as Senior Technical Advisor for Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). She will be USAID’s primary representative at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), and other organizations financing country programs to address selected Neglected Tropical Diseases throughout the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region. She will work closely with USAID’s Bureau for Global Health, Office of Health, Infectious Diseases and Nutrition, the team planning and implementing the Neglected Tropical Diseases program for President Obama’s $63 billion Global Health Initiative (GHI). Additionally, she will assist in the development of policy and practice to meet President Obama’s GHI goal to eliminate onchoceriasis from the Americas by 2014.
Dr. Garg holds a PhD and MS in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Haryana Agricultural University, India, and a BS in Biology from the Kurukshetra University, India. She has developed a strong and successful research program in the field of tropical infectious cardiomyopathy. Her research efforts on pathogenesis of and vaccine development against Chagas disease, funded extramurally, have produced 45 peer-reviewed journal articles and built international collaboration with Chagas researchers in Argentina, Mexico and Brazil.
Carrie Mae George
Carrie Mae George is serving in DRL’s Office of International Labor and Corporate Social Responsibility. In DRL/IL, she will be responsible for the EAP and Supply Chain Portfolios.
Carrie joins us from STR Responsible Sourcing where she developed training and verification programs to improve working conditions in supply chains. While with STR, she also established an oversight body of international labor rights auditors – the Global Monitoring Institute – and was a temporary social compliance manager for a leading apparel brand.
Previous to STR, she analyzed the social and environmental risk of various business sectors, worked on a participatory rural development project in India, and developed the business model of a small development project in South Africa.
She holds a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Cornell and a Bachelor’s degree in International Development and Composite Dance from Brigham Young.
Debbie Ghamkhar
The Franklin Fellow Program cordially welcomes Ms. Debbie Ghamkhar, the 142nd Franklin Fellow. Debbie is assigned to the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs/Office of Regional Economic Policy where she serves as Outreach Coordinator advising on initiatives that include women’s entrepreneurial start-ups, small and medium-sized business development, energy sustainability, education and social protection in the Americas.
Debbie’s impressive experience speaks for itself:
- Having started her career with the multicultural magazine COLORS co-founded by Benetton, she helped develop Benetton’s global advertising campaigns. Debbie went on to Newsweek, assigned to the foreign department researching and reporting on Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia and the Middle East.
- From print, Debbie transitioned to television where she worked as an Associate Producer with CBS News on the documentary series “Under Fire”, focusing on international conflicts. Topics included the first Gulf war, ‘racine’ or roots music in Haiti, and dissident writers with original interviews with American author Arthur Miller, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, British playwright Harold Pinter and Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya.
- After CBS, Debbie turned her attention to domestic news, serving as Associate Producer for two PBS FRONTLINE documentaries: “Washington’s Other Scandal” with Bill Moyers which focused on U.S. campaign finance and received the Peabody Award in Journalism for investigative reporting. This production was followed by “The Crash” which looked at the 1997-98 global economic crisis and included interviews with George Soros, Paul Krugman, Stanley Fischer and Jeffrey Sachs. “The Crash” received the Edward R. Murrow Award in Journalism.
- Debbie continued in television as a Producer with ABC News on the overnight news broadcast World News Now with Anderson Cooper and Good Morning, America. She also worked on a special Millennium edition of The New York Times.
Debbie received her B.A. and M.A. from New York University in Near Eastern Studies. She also received her J.D. degree from Syracuse University College of Law.
In addition to practicing law in the DC metropolitan area in recent years, Debbie has advised educational and cultural non-profits and embassies on strategic communications and public outreach engagement. She served on the Board of Adventure Theatre, the oldest children’s theater in the Mid-Atlantic region, cultivating new artistic collaborations and endorsements with such personalities as actor and environmental activist Pierce Brosnan and performer Cedella Marley of Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers. Debbie is a strong advocate of the arts and its role in early childhood education. She lives in Maryland with her husband, their six-year-old daughter and their Maltese Ringo.
Dr. Wendy Gilpin
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Dr. Wendy Gilpin. She is the 186th Franklin Fellow. Dr. Gilpin serves in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, Office of Regional Security and Arms Transfers. As a Franklin Fellow, she will engage in a review of existing laws, regulations, and policies governing U.S. arms transfers. She will develop recommendations for enhanced State engagement in these areas, particularly how to partner with the Department of Defense to build foreign partner capacity on a bilateral and regional basis in support of U.S. interests.
Prior to joining the U.S. Department of State, Dr. Gilpin was at Penn State University, where she led a major education unit and served as principal investigator for more than $6 million in research and curriculum development projects. She has executed many successful initiatives, led strategic planning for a 900-person research laboratory, and directed the conveyance of a Navy R&D Navigation Center. Most recently, she led an integrated data management program for a major Department of Defense weapon program.
Dr. Gilpin’s project work includes sponsors such as the Office of Naval Research, Army Night Vision Laboratory, Academy of Applied Sciences, and the National Science Foundation. She has served on many Navy and NSF advisory boards and has been awarded grants for STEM outreach projects. She has also directed the National Ocean Science Bowl and the annual Junior Science and Humanities Symposium during her tenure at Penn State.
She has traveled extensively, loves to hike and is an advocate for animal rescue.
Dr. Gilpin earned undergraduate degrees in business administration and management information systems and a Ph.D. in education, all from Penn State.
Dr. James E. Girard
Professor James E. Girard will serve in the Bureau of Oceans, Environmental and Scientific Affairs (OES), Office of Environmental Policy. He will serve as the senior technical advisor on preparations for the 2009-2010 UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) and will lead an interagency process to prepare the United States National report on sustainable development of transportation, mining, chemicals and waste management, as well as sustainable consumption and production, all of which are being addressed by the UN CSD in this cycle. The UN CSD is the intergovernmental process established by the UN to follow-up on the “Rio Earth Summit” on Environment and Development in 1992 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002.
Professor Girard is Chairman of the Chemistry Department at American University. Since he has been at American University, he has supervised over 45 theses and Ph.D. dissertations and received more than 3 million dollars in external grants. He is also the author of two textbooks. The first book, Principles of Environmental Chemistry, was first published in 2004 and a second edition has been released in the summer of 2009. The second book, Criminalistics: Forensic Science and Crime, was first published in 2007. The manuscript for a second edition is being written now for a spring 2010 release.
Professor Girard is a specialist in analytical chemistry. He has published over 70 articles on the methods and techniques used to separate and identify complex mixtures. He has directed research projects that developed methods for the analysis of environmental pollutants in soil and water. Additionally his students have perfected chromatographic techniques to determine the amount of neurotransmitter present in humans and animals.
James E. Girard received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University. He has also taught chemistry at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts and worked as an industrial chemist. Prior to coming to American University, he was employed by General Electric’s Corporate Research and Development Laboratory.
Dr. John L. Graham
Dr. John L. Graham joins the Franklin Fellows Program from Delaware State University (DSU) in Dover DE, where he serves as Assistant Vice President for International Affairs. He was also Associate Dean in the College of Agriculture and Related Sciences. Prior to joining the University, John was Country Representative for Africare, Inc. in Kampala, Uganda where he served for three years implementing food security initiatives and related development assistance programming in cooperation with USAID. He is primarily responsible for advancing the University’s international engagement strategy, which includes coordinating study abroad programs and facilitating international service learning and development experiences for students and faculty. He has led efforts that resulted in the establishment of forty faculty-driven institutional partnerships in Africa, Asia, Europe, Caribbean and the Americas.
John holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Extension Education with a concentration in international and community development from Michigan State University and an MA in the same field, as well as a BS in Business Administration from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore in Princess Anne, MD.
As a Franklin Fellow, John will join the Bureau of African Affairs’ Office of Economic and Policy Staff as Foreign Affairs Officer-Expert to help in the analysis of local policies on food security in Sub-Saharan Africa. He will also serve on interagency working groups and Policy Coordination subcommittees on a variety of other issues and will support Bureau interactions with other stakeholders in soliciting input and formulating recommendations.
Carol Grose
The Franklin Fellows Program is delighted to have Carol Grose as our 79th Fellow. She is serving in the Office of the Chief of Protocol (S/CPR), where she is the Outreach Advisor responsible for the planning, coordination and execution of special outreach program projects and large official functions hosted by the Chief of Protocol.
Carol began her financial career in New York on the fixed income trading floor at Salomon Brothers. She then moved to Smith Barney and Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, where she managed fixed income portfolios and strategies for municipalities, pension funds, banks and money managers. After leaving Wall Street, Carol worked at Asset Strategies, supervising a large staff that identified and liquidated troubled assets. She has also been a financial consultant, as well as developing and teaching training seminars on fixed income and derivatives for various corporations.
Carol has an active interest in education, first as an after-school tutor and then by working with a group of writers to facilitate a creative writing and advanced literacy program in the Manhattan Correctional Institute’s Women’s Prison. She served on the Founding Committee and as a Trustee at the inception of CityYear London, which is modeled on and affiliated with the service model established by CityYear in the US.
While living in London, UK with her family, Carol became active in Democrats Abroad, UK, serving on the Executive Committee during a period of ten-fold membership growth. During this time, she helped found and served as Global Vice Chair and Co-Chair of the Democratic Expat Leadership Council, which organized major donor fundraising for the Democratic National Committee from overseas Americans.
She holds a BA in History from Mary Baldwin College and an MFA from New York University. Her personal interests include occasionally producing and co-producing theater, both on and off Broadway.
Debra Gulick
We are pleased to announce that our 115th Franklin Fellow is Debra Gulick. Debra, who began her fellowship on April 4th, serves in ISN’s Office of the Coordinator for Threat Reduction Programs, where her duties include assisting and advising Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins in her role as Chair of the Global Partnership Working Group (GPWG) in 2012 and as the U.S. representative to the GPWG in 2013. She will be working closely with the National Security Staff and their efforts in leading the Biosecurity Working Group of the Global Partnership. She will also be serving as liaison for ISN/TR with U.S. departments and agencies for activities related to the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit.
Debra graduated from Michigan Technological University with a Bachelors of Science degree in Medical Technology with an emphasis in microbiology. This led her to work in several clinical laboratories, where she specialized in microbiology/immunology. From there, she branched out into environmental microbiology and gained knowledge in mycology and quality assurance. She is a member of several professional organizations, including the American Society of Microbiology (ASM) and the American Society of Clinical Pathologists (ASCP).
The events of 9/11 and the Amerithrax incident sparked Debra’s desire to pursue a Masters of Science degree in Biodefense at George Mason University, where she intends to graduate this spring. She recently attended the ASM Biodefense conference in Washington, DC.
Debra has resided in Springfield, Virginia for the last twenty years, raising two boys and involving herself with volunteer positions surrounding their activities. These included PTA, Boy Scouts of America, Band Parent and Soccer Parent. Now, she intends to nurture her own interests by joining a hiking club and enjoying new restaurants.
Lorraine Hawley
Lorraine is served as a Franklin Fellow in the Office of Economic Policy in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Lorraine’s portfolio included a broad range of issue areas related to the Asia Pacific, Africa, and EU as well as the international trade and investment portfolio. Lorraine supported a wide range of international clients and monitored developments in international and domestic energy, trade, investment and fiscal policies, as well as political trends which impact the energy industry and Chevron’s international operations and investments. Lorraine joined Chevron in 1999 and has served in International Affairs since 2005.
Lorraine’s academic background includes an undergraduate degree in Journalism from the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications. Lorraine has also studied Political Science and History at Oxford University in Oxford, England and Energy and Environment in Developing Countries at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
Dr. Lauren Hinthorne
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Dr. Lauren Leigh Hinthorne. She is the 180th Franklin Fellow. Dr. Hinthorne serves in the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization’s Office of Learning and Training (CSO/OLT). She will contribute to the office’s work toward measuring impact and capturing best practice related to CSO’s conflict prevention and response activities.
Dr. Hinthorne is the fourth Franklin Fellow nominated and sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), a New York-based, private, non-profit federation of 70 national scholarly organizations. She was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Communication and Social Change at the University of Queensland, where she focused on the theory and practice of participatory visual research methods. She also has a strong interest in data visualization, including info graphics.
Before moving to Australia, Dr. Hinthorne spent several years in the UK where she earned a Master’s degree in Conflict, Governance and Development and a Ph.D. in Politics, both from the University of York. Her doctoral research investigated the nexus of international democracy assistance objectives and non-elite perceptions of democracy in eastern Madagascar. She has presented papers at numerous national and international conferences, and her work has appeared in journals including Democratization, Qualitative Research and Field Methods. She is also an Associate Scholar of the Center for Local Strategies Research. Dr. Hinthorne loves to travel and has conducted fieldwork in Madagascar, Timor-Leste and Papua New Guinea.
Dr. Hinthorne worked at an artisan bakery and still enjoys baking sourdough bread and layer cakes.
Jimmy Hock
Prior to becoming a Franklin Fellow, Jimmy spent four years at Hewlett-Packard as a Program Manager focusing on Merger & Acquisition technology integrations. Some of his more recent M&A integrations included the HP acquisitions of Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and 3Com Corporation. Jimmy also has served at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, where he worked on business development and new media, and at Time Warner working on data communications infrastructure.
Jimmy received a Bachelor’s of Business Administration from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and his MBA from American University’s Kogod School of Business here in Washington, DC. He currently is a graduate student at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, where he is working on a Master’s degree in Security Policy Studies.
International travel has also played a role in his decision to enter into the public sector and pursue a career in foreign service. Jimmy has traveled to 17 countries and had the opportunity to live abroad in London, England and Beijing, China. His private sector experience also allowed him to work on international projects in India, Brazil, Australia, China and Canada. Some of his stronger interests lie in international relations & economics, foreign policy, weapons proliferation and homeland security.
Jeff Holiday
Jeff is serving in the Office of the Senior Advisor to the Secretary for Civil Society and Emerging Democracies (S/SACSED). He will be working to create and implement new initiatives to strengthen civil society and support emerging democracies.
Prior to becoming a Franklin Fellow, Jeff was a vice president at Goldman Sachs Japan Co., Ltd. in Tokyo, where he served in the investment banking division. His role was advising corporate and private equity clients on divestitures, acquisitions and equity offerings. Previously, Jeff was an executive director at Goldman Sachs International in London, where he advised private equity clients on merger-related transactions. He began his career in New York as an associate at Goldman, Sachs & Co. and an analyst at Morgan Stanley & Co.
Jeff earned a bachelor of science degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
Corey Holmes
Mr. Corey Holmes, the Department’s 144th Franklin Fellow, serves in IRM’s Office of eDiplomacy. Among the projects Mr. Holmes will advance is the Virtual Student Foreign Service (VSFS) Program, with a goal to recruit more diverse undergraduate and graduate students to participate.
Mr. Holmes possesses a range of unique skills and knowledge he has already begun to apply to the VSFS Program. His background includes work in international corporations and start-ups, as well as with international entrepreneurs. He spent 2009 in South Africa providing support to small businesses in the lead up to the World Cup there. His assignment with Enablis Entrepreneurial Network, a nonprofit that supports entrepreneurship in the developing world, helped facilitate sustainable growth, expansion, or joint ventures throughout South Africa. Following the Enablis assignment, Mr. Holmes served as a management consultant to the Randburg Chamber of Commerce and Industry to implement strategic initiatives, including expanding its membership base. He accompanied South African President Zuma to India to deepen commercial ties between South Africa and India.
Following his return from South Africa, among other activities, Mr. Holmes served as a SCORE counselor supporting business development in Detroit. He is passionate about foreign affairs, politics, international business, social responsibility, and community engagement. The list of Mr. Holmes’s active volunteerism goes well beyond the above-enumerated projects.
Mr. Holmes received an MBA in Global Management from the University of Phoenix and a BA in Business Administration/Accounting from Clark Atlanta University.
Emily Hsu
Emily Hsu is serving as a Franklin Fellow Writer/Adviser at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, Press and Public Diplomacy section.
Before joining the Franklin Fellowship Program, Emily spent several years in Washington, DC, both as a reporter and a program/policy specialist. At the U.S. Institute of Peace’s Center for Post-Conflict Peace and Stability Operations, she studied security, governance and development issues related to the stabilization of conflict-affected countries. She also published several reports/articles on peace building topics, including NGO-military relationships and the development of media in post-conflict zones. In 2009, she co-wrote the Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction, the first-ever doctrinal manual written for civilians operating in these environments.
Before joining the Institute, Emily worked as a journalist for a defense trade publication, covering Pentagon policy, weapons procurement, and budgetary and legislative affairs, with a focus on the U.S. Army. She also worked as a research consultant for the Social Science Research Council, studying the impacts of post-9/11 U.S. homeland security policies on Muslim and Arab American communities in the United States.
Emily has an MA in International Security from Georgetown University (School of Foreign Service) and a BS in Journalism from Northwestern University (Medill School of Journalism).
Christopher Hucke
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to introduce the 141st Franklin Fellow, Mr. Christopher Hucke, now serving in the Bureau of Counterterrorism’s Office of Terrorist Designations and Sanctions (CT/HSMA/D). He brings to his position unique field and technical experience in the Islamic world and in counterterrorism. In fact, Chris joins the Department after completing a 15 month deployment to Kabul where he served as a management consultant on a key NATO Afghan National Security Force Training Mission there. Immediately before deploying to Afghanistan, Chris conducted strategic communications analysis on terrorist and insurgent propaganda, with an emphasis on Iraqi terrorists. The goal of his reporting at the time was to highlight important themes in terrorist/insurgent thinking and practices in order to develop communication plans that would counter terrorist propaganda.
Chris also served as a research assistant at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. His research focused on the links between extremist funding and recruitment and radicalization in Western Europe and Southeast Asia.
Chris holds a BA in Political Science from Denison University and a MA in International Policy/Terrorism Studies from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, as well as a certificate in project management from Georgetown University. He speaks Arabic, basic Dari and some German. While at university, Chris served as an intern in the Office of Senator Richard Lugar.
Ludmilla Huntsman
Ludmilla Huntsman serves as a business adviser in the Office of Public-Private Partnerships in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs / Policy and Evaluation. She is a consultant on effective mechanisms, models and frameworks for public-private partnerships. She is using her private-sector background and international development expertise to advise on new models of partnerships with multinational companies, foundations and non-governmental organizations. Her primary focus is coordinating analytical research and analysis of business strategies, trends and models for educational and cultural partnerships in four major areas – innovation and technology, entrepreneurship, civil society, and English education alliance. In this capacity, Ludmilla contributes to shaping strategies and policies for interaction between business and foreign policy issues, and the wider political and economic context.
Prior to becoming a Franklin Fellow, Ludmilla worked as CFO of Equilibrium Networks, a research and development startup that delivered innovative technologies for the Department of Defense. At Equilibrium, she was nominated for the Northern Virginia Technology Council’s “Best CFO Award” for her successful management of a multi-million dollar budget. Earlier, Ludmilla served as Director of International Development at Charity Network Inc. (Abolish Child Trafficking (ACT) Now Inc.), a DC-area NGO dedicated to combating child trafficking worldwide. In both of these positions, Ludmilla spearheaded international partnership initiatives and forged relationships with international partners.
Ludmilla’s core know-how includes executive management, financial planning, investment management, linguistics, regional expertise in the political, economic and cultural context of the post-Soviet space and significant international expertise. As a consultant for the private sector development program at the International Finance Corporation (a member of the World Bank Group) in Kyiv, Ukraine, she lived and worked in a transitional democracy with a capital-starved economy. Later, she gained significant international development experience through her consulting work with global corporations, Fortune 50 companies, and dozens of congressionally sponsored international exchange programs including Open World, Community Connections, and International Visitor Leadership.
Ludmilla earned a MBA from Waynesburg University under a full scholarship award from the U.S. Entrepreneurship Support Fund. She also holds bachelor and master degrees in linguistics from Cherkasy National University (Ukraine). Ludmilla has native proficiency in Russian and Ukrainian, and has a working knowledge of German. Her extensive travels throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia have instilled in her a firm belief in the importance of investing in education and fostering mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.
Dr. Alan Hurd
Alan joins the Office of the Science and Technology Adviser to the Secretary (E/STAS), where his portfolio includes critical elements and the return on investment for federally funded research.
Alan is on leave from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico where he was until recently the Director of the Lujan Neutron Scattering Center at LANSCE for over a decade. As a materials physicist, Alan is personally interested in the techniques of scattering neutrons and x rays to determine where atoms reside in a material and how atoms move. This information is needed to connect structure, composition and performance of any material and illuminates the path toward advanced materials.
In recent months, Alan spent a short sabbatical at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) where he studied critical materials supply risk factors. A co-author of the acclaimed 2011 report on energy critical elements by the American Physical Society and the Materials Research Society, Alan applies the methods of complexity science blazed by SFI to critical materials issues.
Alan has a Bachelor’s degree in physics from the Colorado School of Mines and both Master’s and PhD degrees in physics from the University of Colorado, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow. After a two-year postdoc and one teaching year at Brandeis University, Alan worked for 16 years at Sandia National Laboratories doing basic materials science and managing fundamental materials research. He moved to Los Alamos in 2001. In 2007, Alan was President of the Materials Research Society, which continues to be his major professional society, along with the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In his spare time in New Mexico, Alan enjoys playing trumpet with the Los Alamos Symphony Orchestra and several community groups, skiing and cooking with his fiancée, Michelle.
Dr. Roger Ingram
Roger serves in the Secretary’s Global Health Initiative (S/GHI), where focuses on creating strategic partnerships resulting in health and well-being in our interconnected world.
Roger notes that he could have continued a life in Hawaii but chose instead to come to Washington, DC. Many people have asked him why. In response, he explains it is to use his background in organizational effectiveness and international psychology to be of service to our country and, potentially, to create an encore career here in Washington. His assignment as a Franklin Fellow will use his background as a PhD psychologist with experience in international organizational effectiveness, leadership training and management consulting.
Roger’s education shows his passion for an international perspective, beginning with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and interest in international cooperation at the University of California at Irvine to the PhD level and beyond to a Post-Doctorate at the University of Southern California in organizational change and psychotherapy.
Roger’s career followed the path of his education. He was a management and psychology professor for the U.S. Navy in Alaska and elsewhere. He has also served as a consultant on organizational development for Native Alaskan Corporations with goals of education improvement, participative leadership and economic improvements. In the same way, his passion for international relations led him to serve as a consultant to the Cabinet of the Presidency of Mexico on development projects through coordination of federal agencies.
In all of his geographical and complex organizational efforts, his extensive career, yet to be completed, has aimed at creating a strategy for results, both for-profit and non-profit organizations.
Yet, there is still time in his career for pursuit of other interests. These include but, in his words, are not necessarily limited to, tennis, swimming, cooking, reading, gardening, architecture, interior design and enjoyment of life with his partner and with his son, a jazz pianist in NYC.
Jed Ipsen
Jed Ipsen recently joined the State Department as a Franklin Fellow in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs where he handles issues involving economic development and terrorism.
Jed is currently the associate director of the Caux Round Table in Washington, DC. Previously, he served on the professional staff as a special advisor on terrorism with the U.S. Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee through a fellowship with the Brookings Institution. He also served as a research associate with the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy and International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Dr. Robert Ivker
Franklin Fellow Dr. Robert Ivker is working at the US Mission to the United Nations in New York (USUN/PD). Before becoming a Franklin Fellow, Dr. Robert Ivker graduated from the George Washington University where he received his BA in political science. He went on to receive his medical degree from the University of Des Moines. While working as a board certified radiation oncologist for the past twelve years, Robert has also pursued his interest in international affairs. He became a credentialed journalist at the United Nations, and has published dozens of articles in national and international publications.
Dr. Nancy Jackson
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Dr. Nancy Jackson. She is the 174th Franklin Fellow. Nancy Jackson comes to the Franklin Fellows Program from Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM, where she was manager of the International Chemical Threat Reduction Department. Her group was an implementer for the Chemical Security Engagement Program (CSP) at DOS and she was CSP’s first implementer and helped start CSP seven years ago. Before that she was Deputy Director of the International Security Center at Sandia and was also an energy researcher for many years prior to her moving to nonproliferation issues.
Dr. Jackson was president of the American Chemical Society, the largest scientific society in the world, in 2011 which was the United Nation’s International Year of Chemistry. The ACS presidency is a three-year commitment (president-elect in 2010 and immediate past president in 2012) over which time period she helped the ACS expand their international collaborations. During those three years she travelled to over 20 countries and met with chemists and chemical engineers in five continents.
Dr. Jackson is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She won the 2013 AAAS award for Diplomacy and Science.
Dr. Jackson is active in diversity in STEM and is a member of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society and is Seneca, one of the six tribes of the Iroquois Nation. She has worked with a number of tribal colleges in the sciences and won the Professional of the Year Award from AISES in 2005.
She has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from George Washington University and a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Texas, Austin.
Sharon Jackson
The Franklin Fellows Program welcomes Ms. Sharon P. Jackson. She enters the Oceans, International Environment and Science Bureau’s Office of International Health and Biodefense (OES/IBH) as an expert advisor for policy. OES/IHB’s many goals include strengthening biodefense and enhancing global health security and systems.
Ms. Jackson could not come more prepared for these responsibilities: She comes to the Department with over thirty years of experience in political/military affairs, national security, and public health. In addition to serving as a research leader and senior analyst at Battelle Memorial Institute and SAIC, respectively, Ms. Jackson has served with a number of critical national security agencies. These include the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security where she worked in both analytic and policy positions on a variety of national security/public health intersections. She is an expert in the areas of infectious disease epidemiology and WMD.
Ms. Jackson earned a Master of Public Health degree focusing on Infectious Disease Epidemiology and a graduate certificate in Environmental Health from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and a Master of Arts degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in East Asian Studies and International Economics. For her Bachelor’s degree, she pursued a double major in International Relations and Economics at The Catholic University.
Martin Jacobson
Our newest Fellow, Martin Jacobson, was a partner in the law firm Simpson Thatcher & Bartlett LLP from 1984 through 2008. He focused on financing projects, infrastructure and transportation equipment, using a wide variety of financing methods. Jacobson has been recognized as a leading business lawyer by several publications, including the International Who’s Who of Business Lawyers and the Who’s Who of Aviation lawyers.
He has worked as a representative of the New York City bar association with the United States Delegation the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law. His work there contributed to the development and adoption by the United Nations of the Legislative Guide on Privately Financed Infrastructure Projects. He was appointed by the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Market Transactions Advisory Committee, which analyzed and suggested changes following the 1987 market crash. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and is a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.
Jacobson served as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy where he headed a department on a destroyer and also served as administrative assistant to a Navy admiral. Jacobson received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, an MBA from New York University and was graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Jacobson is a competitive sailor, and in his sailboat has won numerous regattas and races, including the Marion to Bermuda Ocean Race in 2009.
Mariam Kaldas
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Mrs. Mariam Kaldas as the 194th Franklin Fellow! Mrs. Kaldas serves as a Foreign Affairs Officer to the Office of Faith-Based Community Initiatives in the U.S. Department of State (S/FBCI), with the specific goal of external engagement with religious leaders, academic scholars, and faith-based organizations.
Mrs. Kaldas, a first-generation Egyptian-American, grew up in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. She is passionate about international service and engaging religious leaders, and has worked for over 10 years with students, volunteers, and faith-based organizations. Most recently, she has been the Associate Director of Franciscan Mission Service (FMS), a nonprofit organization that prepares and supports lay Catholics for international, domestic, and short-term service opportunities in solidarity with impoverished and marginalized communities across the globe. In her at role at FMS, Mrs. Kaldas led short-term global awareness trips to South Africa and Bolivia. Prior to FMS, she volunteered in Lusaka, Zambia where she served as the Public Relations Manager for the Coptic Orthodox Church Mission.
Mrs. Kaldas obtained a Masters of Education degree from University of Maryland’s (UMD) Higher Education, Student Affairs, and International Education Policy program, with a concentration in International Education in 2006. She then went on to help design and establish a university at sea program called The Scholar Ship. She was instrumental in the formation of the program, and sailed on the inaugural voyage. She also holds a Bachelors of Arts degree from The University of Virginia in Religious Studies and Sociology, with a minor in African-American and African Studies.
Throughout her travel and residence in over 40 countries, Mrs. Kaldas has developed a keen interest in involving religious leaders and faith-based leaders in policy initiatives. She is excited to be serving as a Franklin Fellow in the Office of Faith-based Community Initiatives, and believes her experience will help to advance the mission and vision of the U.S. Department of State.
Albana Karakushi
We are pleased to announce that our 98th Franklin Fellow is Albana Karakushi. Albana, who began her fellowship on October 5, is serving in DRL’s Office of European Affairs, where she is responsible for preparing aid programs to sustain and build democracy and for editing the Department’s Human Rights Reports. Her portfolio includes Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Turkey, the Balkans, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
Albana recently graduated from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs with a Master’s Degree in International Affairs. Her focus at SIPA was on contemporary political, economic and social development in post-Soviet countries. At Columbia, she performed extensive research on the Balkans and their specific geostrategic importance. Her BA is from City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Before attending Columbia, Albana worked at a not-for-profit NGO based in Fortaleza, Brazil. The NGO aimed to combat poverty and increase access to services in underdeveloped parts of the country by, among other things, teaching Brazilian youth English and other foreign languages. The NGO also provided computer classes and courses in hotel management and tourism development to increase students’ chances of employment in Brazil’s growing tourism industry.
Albana has also served as a research assistant at the United Nations University, War & Peace Foundation, and as an Assistant to the Second Secretary for the Albanian Mission to the United Nations.
A native of Albania, Albana witnessed firsthand the oppressive regime of Enver Hoxha. She was inspired to join the Franklin Fellows Program as a chance to work with people who fight for liberty and human rights.
We are delighted to have Albana as a member of the ever-growing Franklin Fellows family and are glad to be able to provide another excellent Fellow to contribute to DRL’s vital work. Again, we thank DRL for continuing to host Franklin Fellows and for its strong support to the FFP.
Dr. Jeffrey Kealing
We are pleased to announce that our 102nd Franklin Fellow is Dr. Jeffrey Kealing. Jeffrey is serving in the ECA’s Office of Private Sector Exchange, where he is helping to coordinate Department public-private partnerships in education and technology sectors.
Jeffrey is a faculty member at the University of Southern California, Rossier School of Education, in the Master’s in Teaching (MAT) program. He is a PhD graduate of the USC Rossier School of Education with a concentration in international and intercultural education and has taught at USC for many years for both online and on-campus cohorts. In the online program, he regularly teaches courses on learning theories, teaching methods and a specialized course entitled “Teaching in an International and Intercultural Context.”
Jeffrey has considerable experience on international development programs and research projects. He recently served as Country Coordinator for State’s English Language Fellows project in Indonesia. He also has conducted large-scale projects and done international outreach work in Thailand, Japan, Vanuatu and Romania.
His current research interests include empowered adult education approaches, English as an instrument for international development and public-private collaborative models in education.
Dr. Scott Kemp
Franklin Fellow R. Scott Kemp serves as the Physical Scientist in the Office of the Special Advisor for Nonproliferation and Arms Control (S/SANAC). The Special Advisor reports to and provides advice and support to the Secretary, the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security and other Department Officials on nonproliferation and arms control issues. The Special Advisor also helps develop and implement Administration policies and diplomatic strategies in those areas.
Scott provides advice to the Special Advisor on a wide range of technical issues regarding nonproliferation and arms control, develops policy positions and prepares technical analyses of the complex issues involved. He also serves as liaison with relevant parts of the USG community on those issues.
Prior to joining the program, Scott was at Princeton University, where he was a member of the research staff at the Program on Science and Global Security. He was a Science and Technology Consultant for the Proliferation Pathways project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. He was the Executive Director of the Journal for Youth Investigators and also served as a member of the Board of Directors and Trustee of the Foundation.
Scott has many publications on Gas Centrifuges, Nuclear-Weapon Proliferation and Detection of Clandestine Fissile Material. He received a B.A. in Physics from the University of California at Santa Barbara; a Ph. D. on Nonproliferation in the Centrifuge Age from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, and studied at the International Policy Institute of London’s King’s College on a Fulbright Scholarship.
Haeyoung Kim
The Franklin Fellows Program welcomes Haeyoung Kim, who has joined the Korea Desk to serve as its Science and Technology officer. As a policy analyst and researcher, Haeyoung Kim has worked with the California State Assembly, the Korea Policy Institute, the Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice in Seoul, Republic of Korea, the International Forum on Globalization, and the Center for International Policy’s Asia Program in Washington, DC. Her work for the California Assembly included drafting California’s Iran Contracting Act of 2010 while serving as liaison to Assemblyman Mike Feuer’s district.
Ms. Kim received her undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago, and her Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government where she was Co-Chair of the National Asian Pacific American Conference on Law & Public Policy and Senior Editor of the Asian American Policy Review. She speaks Korean and Italian, and is learning Chinese and Spanish.
David Kligerman
The Franklin Fellows Program proudly welcomes David Kligerman, who serves as an attorney-adviser in both the Office of African and Near Eastern Affairs (L/AN) and the Office of Legislation and Foreign Assistance (L/LFA). While with L/LFA and L/AN, David will provide advice on U.S. foreign assistance (including for antiterrorism programs, and for Afghanistan and Pakistan); oil and gas infrastructure protection; various domestic and international legal issues relevant to the Near East or Africa; and certain Appellate Briefs and Amicus submissions.
Before becoming a Franklin Fellow, David worked as a senior analyst for the Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute (HSI), a Congressionally-established think-tank for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. At HSI, he provided expertise on DHS law enforcement operations and authorities, border security, radicalization and immigration and emergency management, among other legal areas.
David is not new to the Department. He previously served as a Program Officer in EUR’s Office for U.S. Assistance to Europe and Eurasia (EUR/ACE).
David holds a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, where he was a Fiske Fellow. He has a Master’s Degree in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He was an Anna Sobel Levy Fellow at the Hebrew University and received a B.A. from Amherst College in Political Science.
Hannah Koenig
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Hannah Koenig. She is the 185th Franklin Fellow. Hannah serves as the first Designer-in-Residence at the Collaboratory in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA). At the Collaboratory, she will work to integrate design thinking and user-centered design into the Department’s cultural and educational exchanges.
Hannah is a recent graduate of the Brown|RISD Dual Degree Program, where she earned a degree in International Relations from Brown University and a degree in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She first experienced design for the public interest when collaborating to design a visual glossary of healthcare terms, as well as designing posters for Brown University Health Services to educate young Americans, during a RISD course on communicating healthcare reform. She has also collaborated on redesigning the voter’s experience at the polling place in Rhode Island and worked with state government officials to rebrand elections in Rhode Island.
Initially motivated by an interest in banknote design, Hannah’s career in federal government began at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where she interned in the Mutilated Currency Division and Office of Engraving. She is keenly interested in exploring how design thinking and visual problem solving can improve the public policy process. Her experience as a Franklin Fellow is supported by the RISD Maharam STEAM Fellowship and Young Government Leaders.
Steven R. Koltai
Franklin Fellow Steven R. Koltai, as Senior Advisor for Commercial Affairs, forms United States policy on business, including U.S. Government advocacy for business, in the Office of Commercial and Business Affairs.
Mr. Koltai is an executive with over 25 years of experience in international finance, strategic planning and entrepreneurship gained in the banking, entertainment and Internet industries. He was Corporate Senior Vice President for Strategy and Business Development at Warner Bros Inc; Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Event411.com; Co-founder of Europe’s largest private television satellite company, SES/Astra, and has served in various capacities at the Export-import Bank of the United States, McKinsey & Company, Salomon Bros. and Bankers Trust. Steven was an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in 1985.
Mr. Koltai received a BA from Tufts University, an MA from Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and was a Fulbright scholar at University Libre de Bruxelles.
Stephen Kopanos
Stephen Kopanos serves in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor with the Office of East Asia and the Pacific and the Western Hemisphere(DRL/AWH) where he works on issues of democracy promotion.
Most recently Stephen was the Vice President of Public Policy and Systems Advocacy for Mental Health America of Colorado, working on health policy, reform, access to care, and ensuring fair, quality treatment for people with mental health conditions. Stephen served as the regional coordinator on policy for Colorado, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota.
Prior to Joining Mental Health America of Colorado, Stephen worked as a Program Manager and Clinical Director with the State of Colorado, Department of Human Services in the Division of Youth Corrections. Stephen is a Licensed Professional Counselor and has served on the board of Directors for the Colorado Child and Adolescent Mental Health Coalition.
Stephen has a Masters degree in Counseling, and Bachelors degrees in Youth Ministry and Biblical Studies.
Dr. Georgianna A. Land
Our 61st Fellow, Dr. Georgianna A. Land, joins us from the New York City Department of Education. She will serve with the Special Representative for Global Intergovernmental Affairs, where she will facilitate deepening relationships of state and local governments in the United States with their foreign counterparts.
During her career in the New York City school system, Dr. Land, managed a district personnel department, and served as assistant director of the citywide employment program, designed the curricula for two new Gifted and Talented Schools, coached teachers and managed their professional development. She served on sabbatical as Vice President for Administration at AME University in Liberia, taught education at Stony Brook University and Medgar Evers College. As Executive Director with the BICNET Foundation, Dr. Land designed a comprehensive telecommunications project for a consortium of institutions. She has served as Executive Director of the Congressional Caucus on Science and Technology and as Program Director for the American Public Transit Association.
Dr. Land holds a PhD. from the University of Maryland, a Master’s degree from Pace University in New York and a Bachelor’s degree from Allen University. She has received numerous awards during her career in education and written articles in her field.
Leonid Lantsman
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Leonid Lantsman. He is the 148th Franklin Fellow. He serves in the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, Office of Criminal Justice Assistance and Partnership (INL/CAP) office as a Foreign Affairs Officer (Expert) to contribute to the office’s work on transnational criminal issues, measuring effectiveness of program operations, and research and development for ongoing and future police, corrections and rule of law programs. In addition, he is assisting the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (J/TIP) in program design, analysis, and evaluation.
Mr. Lantsman comes to us from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he is currently a fourth year doctoral student. Previously, he worked as a journalist for a Nigerian news magazine, TheNEWS, covering human rights and local NGO issues before beginning the doctoral program at the Graduate Center-City University of New York (GC-CUNY), housed at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Over the past two years he worked concurrently with the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor to identify and analyze organized criminal groups at the Port of New York and New Jersey. In addition, he completed a summer research program at Stevens Institute of Technology focused on small vessel security in the harbor of New York.
Mr. Lantsman’s research interests focus on developing a framework of seaport vulnerability to organized crime, by examining seaport’s physical, logistical and administrative conditions that create vulnerability to criminal network usage. His articles on organized crime and maritime transportation have appeared in numerous prestigious journals, such as Jane’s Intelligence Review and Crime, Law and Social Change.
He holds two master’s degrees from GC-CUNY and John Jay College, and an undergraduate degree from Cornell University.
Marshall Lilly
Marshall Lilly recently joined the State Department as a Franklin Fellow in the Office of Iranian Affairs, located in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA). He currently assists in covering nuclear non-proliferation issues, as well as negotiations with the UN and IAEA.
He holds an A.S. in Applied Science, a Bachelor of Specialized Studies in Political Media, and an M.A. in Political Science from Ohio University. He recently completed coursework for a second M.A. in History. He also studied Arabic through the University of Wisconsin’s Arabic/Persian Immersion Program during the summer of 2007. Between the M.A. programs, Marshall also taught Political Science courses at Ohio University covering American Government, International Relations Theory, and Middle Eastern Politics. At age 23, he was the youngest person in the department with full teaching responsibilities.
Marshall’s research for the past seven years has been almost exclusively focused on the Middle East, particularly Iraq and Iran. He has presented research on Iraqi democratization, and the effects of Sunni/Shi’a tensions on the region to both the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association.
Dee Loftis
As a Franklin Fellow, Dee works with the Office of the Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance (F), which provides leadership, strategic planning and coordination for United States Government Foreign Assistance. Dee supports initiatives and issues in U.S. foreign assistance. She is also completing a review for F’s Office of Global-Functional Issues to improve the Standardized Program Structure and Definitions, a tool used by the Department and USAID to account for foreign assistance resources. This tool, an F innovation, provides common terms and definitions as an improved platform for program and budget efficiency and analysis that also increases transparency.
Before joining the Franklin program, Dee pursued a career as a social worker, psychotherapist and program manager with experience in the public, private and non-profit sectors. She managed adoption, foster care and federal funding programs, served as a statewide program auditor, developed and managed quality assurance and mediation programs, provided legislative analysis, trained staff and community partners for state government. Dee works collaboratively with communities identifying service needs, building partnerships and developing community-based programs including hot meal programs for homeless persons; free and low cost community and school-based counseling programs for children and families; and inner city medical camps for persons of low income. As a therapist, Dee works with children, adults, families, couples and groups with specialized interest and training in best practice methods for treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Trauma.
Dee volunteers with the American Red Cross as a disaster responder, disaster mental health responder, repatriation mental health volunteer and emergency shelter co-manager. Dee worked with the American Red Cross on the Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort, serving as a Manager of Mental Health Services; leading teams of disaster volunteers through a hurricane; planning emergency evacuations for disaster shelters; developing and leading multi-disciplinary search and rescue teams; writing disaster operations plans; supervising disaster mental health programs and volunteers, and working collaboratively with communities and organizations to develop, manage and rebuild post-disaster emergency mental health services and infrastructure for the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.
Merida Lopez
The Franklin Fellows Program proudly welcomes our 52nd Fellow is Merida Lopez, who is working with Rusty Graham and company in USUN’s Office of Host Country Affairs (USUN/HC). Merida is the first Franklin Fellow to serve in USUN/HC. In her work there, Merida helps to carry out U.S. obligations as host country to the United Nations, including accreditation for diplomats and their families among the 40,000 people with the UN.
Merida joins USUN from the Brooklyn Legal Aid Society, where she provided representation on matters of family law and domestic violence. In addition, Merida has performed extensive research on the value of affirmative action on legal employment in the public interest sector. She has also worked for the Kings Country District Attorney’s office, focusing on domestic violence and services to victims, and with private law firms in New York.
Merida is a graduate of the City University of New York (CUNY) Law School and holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from Lafayette College, Pennsylvania. She is a member of the New York State bar and the American Bar Association.
Ahmad Maaty
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Mr. Ahmad Maaty. He is the 158th Franklin Fellow. Mr. Maaty serves as an Analyst for Economic Growth (Foreign Affairs Officer/ Expert) in the Policy Analysis unit of the Office of U.S. Foreign Assistance Resources (F/PA) to contribute to the office’s work on planning, budgeting, execution and assessment of State and USAID foreign assistance, ensuring strategic allocation and effective use in support of U.S. foreign policy priorities.
He returns to the State Department nearly ten years after first joining as an intern with the U.S. Mission to the United Nations (USUN), assisting the Political Section’s Middle East docket before the UN Security Council for Ambassador John D. Negroponte and senior Mission staff.
Mr. Maaty has considerable experience in analysis and implementation of human development programs, specifically as applied within Asia, Africa and the Middle East. He has been working for the past six years with the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, first with Middle East and North Africa Country Operations and later with the IsDB’s Poverty Fund. This included socio-economic research and operational fieldwork engaging with many of IsDB’s member country governments and communities toward the design of poverty reduction projects, technical assistance and capacity building.
Previously, Mr. Maaty has worked with the World Bank’s Operations Evaluations Department and UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Arab States in evaluating development programs and monitoring portfolio progress.
Mr. Maaty holds a Masters of Public Administration from Cornell University, concentrating in International Development and Fiscal Policy, and a Bachelors in Business Administration from George Washington University. Mr. Maaty has fieldwork experience in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Chad, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Kenya, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mauritania, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Tajikistan. He is fluent in Arabic.
Yadira Maldonado
Please join the Franklin Fellows Program in welcoming Yadira Maldonado, our 134th Franklin Fellow. At USAID, Yadira serves as an Advisor for Financial Management Policy and Implementation in the Financial Policy & Support (FPS) Division of the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) in the Bureau for Management. As part of the FPS policy team, Yadira reviews existing financial management policy directives and revises and coauthors the Automated Directive Systems (ADS) Financial Management series. Yadira updates policies related to financial management principles and standards, accounts receivable, and debt collection to promote OCFO’s mission to maintain “world-class” financial management practices on a worldwide basis, advancing USAID’s mission, goals and objectives.
Yadira is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and a Chartered Global Management Accountant (CGMA) with more than 10 years of experience. She started her career as an external auditor for a public accounting firm, and later transitioned to the private sector, directing the Internal Audit and Finance Departments for a healthcare system, and managing the accounting function of a child welfare agency in Florida.
Yadira earned a Master’s of Business Administration with a Specialization in International Business from Florida International University’s Executive MBA Program, and a Bachelor’s in Business Administration with a Major in Accounting from the University of Puerto Rico. Yadira also pursued international business research at Alma Graduate School in Bologna, Italy with a focus on European economies, and business cluster models in Northern Italy.
Yadira is a member of the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, and the Puerto Rico Society of CPAs. Yadira’s personal interests include: culture and nature-based tourism, outdoor activities, research, reading, and writing.
Dr. Peter Mandaville
We are pleased to announce that our 73rd Franklin Fellow is Dr. Peter Mandaville of George Mason University. Peter, who began his fellowship on January 31, is serving in Policy Planning, where he is the Department’s expert on political Islam. He also will cover Middle East policy and some aspects of the portfolios of counterterrorism/countering violent extremism and broader Muslim engagement.
Peter is Founding Director of GMU’s Center for Global Studies and is Associate Professor of Government & Islamic Studies there. He has past affiliations at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and at the University of Kent at Canterbury in the UK. He was a member of the Steering Roundtable of the U.S. Global Citizen Diplomacy Initiative and of the “NATO in Afghanistan” Expert Advisory Group. Also, Peter served on the National Board of Advisors at the Center for the Study of Congress and the Presidency; the Board of Directors at the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy; and the Committee for Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association.
Peter is the author of two books, Global Political Islam (2007) and Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma (2001), and has also co-edited four volumes of essays in the fields of international relations and Islamic Studies. In addition, he has testified before the U.S. Congress on political Islam and has consulted widely for the media and various government agencies. He has directed research projects for the National Bureau for Asian Research and conducted research with the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Pew Research Center.
David Mandel-Anthony
The Franklin Fellows Program is very pleased to announce that our 114th Franklin Fellow is David Mandel-Anthony. David, who began his fellowship on March 14, joins the Office of Global Criminal Justice (formerly the Office of War Crimes Issues). His portfolio in J/GCJ includes accountability and transitional justice issues in Sudan, South Sudan, and Kenya and ongoing legal and policy planning in regards to international criminal tribunals.
David’s background in international criminal law, transitional justice and human rights includes experience with various organizations: the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia; the Open Society Justice Initiative; Human Rights Watch–International Justice Program; the International Center for Transitional Justice; the Center for Constitutional Rights; Humanity in Action;, and the Public International Law & Policy Group. David has also served as a federal criminal defense lawyer in New York; consulted on post-conflict constitution drafting and land rights initiatives in Liberia and Nepal; and completed an ethnographic academic thesis on trans-national racial formation and labor rights among Guatemalan immigrants in Mississippi, for which he received top honors.
Most recently, David spent 13 months in Kampala, Uganda, advising the justice-sector authorities of the Ugandan Government on transitional justice and war crimes policy, specifically on the establishment and operation of a domestic war crimes tribunal to prosecute members of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The first trial of the International Crimes Division of the High Court of Uganda, against LRA Commander Thomas Kwoyelo, began in July 2011.
David holds a JD from Fordham University School of Law, a BA from the University of Texas at Austin (Plan II Program). He was named a 2010-2011 James E. Tolan Fellow and a 2008-2010 Crowley Fellow at the Leitner Center for International Law & Justice at Fordham Law.
David enjoys reading literary fiction, historical non-fiction and political theory; travelling; cooking; exploring new cities; eating Tex-Mex; and ethnomusicology.
Frank Manfredi
Frank Manfredi entered the Franklin Fellows Program from Plan International USA (Plan USA), where he served as Disaster Management Coordinator and Program Development Officer for Asia.
Prior to working at Plan USA, Frank served for two years with the International Rescue Committee’s Joint Voluntary Agency in Thailand, where he worked in refugee processing.
As a Franklin Fellow, Frank worked in the Office of the Director of US Foreign Assistance from April 2008 to April 2009, focusing on Humanitarian Assistance as a member of the Global Functional unit. Upon leaving the Program, Frank returned to Plan USA.
Frank holds a BA in Government from Harvard College and an MA in Political Science (International Relations and Comparative Politics, with a concentration in Southeast Asia Studies) from Northern Illinois University.
Dr. Jeffrey Mankoff
Jeff is sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and will serve in EUR’s Office of Russian Affairs, where he will focus on strategic planning, policy coordination and policy implementation related to Russia’s security relationship with the United States and Europe.
Most recently, Jeff was an Adjunct Fellow for Russia Studies at the CFR and concurrently the Associate Director for International Security Studies at Yale. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in International Security Studies at Yale, a National Security Fellow at Harvard and a Guest Fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. He also was an intern at Embassy Moscow and in EUR. He is a member of the CFR and has held Boren and other similar fellowships.
Jeff has a Ph.D. in History with concentration in Security Studies and an MA in Political Science from Yale and a BA summa cum laude from the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of numerous publications, including a 2009 book titled Russian Foreign Policy: The Return of Great Power Politics, and articles in Foreign Policy, The Washington Quarterly, numerous CFR publications and many others.
Dr. Alison T. Mann
Alison serves as the Assistant Media Relations Officer in PA’s Washington Foreign Press Center (PA/WFPC). She will focus on Western Europe, will advise State bureaus, embassies and other USG entities on media relations with Western European journalists and will assist the WFPC Director in assessing the effectiveness of FPC programs.
Alison has taught Modern U.S. History at the University of New Hampshire and Civil War and Reconstruction at other institutions. She holds Ph.D. and Master’s degrees in history from New Hampshire and a BA from Rutgers. She was a Fellow for the United States Capitol Historical Society, was nominated for UNH’s Graduate School Teaching Assistant Award and is a member of numerous professional organizations, including the American Historical Association, the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Historical Society of Washington.
Jennifer Margulies
The
Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Jenny Margulies. She is the 184th
Franklin Fellow. Jenny serves in the Office for Holocaust Issues (EUR/SEHI) and
contributes to the office’s work on developing, formulating and coordinating
recommendations and strategies on Holocaust related issues. She will help
ensure that the U.S. positions on Holocaust retribution are well received at
home and abroad.
Jenny
comes to us from the Board of Veterans Appeals where she was General Counsel
and wrote administrative decisions regarding Veterans’ compensation and
benefits. During her time with the VA she was selected for a five month
tour of duty in Japan, where she taught overseas American Service Members about
Military benefits available to them upon separation from service.
For
the past three years Jenny has also volunteered at the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
She holds a B.A. from Barnard College at
Columbia University and a J.D. from University of Maryland Law School.
Frederick W. Marrazzo
Frederick W. Marrazzo became a Franklin Fellow in September 2009 and served in the Bureau of International Information Programs, Office of East Asia-Pacific Affairs. He was a Policy Analyst on issues affecting new media and public diplomacy toward China. Frederick came to the State Department from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he produced his own public access television program. In 2006 he produced and directed a small documentary video called “Forgotten Voices: Italian Americans in the Santa Clara Valley,” which included interviews with local Italian Americans describing their experience and memories of growing up in the Santa Clara Valley. In 2007, Frederick completed a book project on the local Italian community in the Santa Clara Valley.
Frederick majored in East Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Maryland and received his MBA degree at the Thunderbird School of Global Management.
Randa Masri
Randa Masri, A Franklin Fellow at the Bureau of Economic
& Business Affairs, office of Commerce and Business Affairs (EB/CBA).
Randa Masri is the founder & CEO of ConnectME, a social
enterprise established to create economic opportunities for youth and women in
Palestine & Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region, as means of promoting
fair and equal societies that integrate all groups into the region’s social,
economic and political fabrics.
As an Arab American-owned and founded enterprise, ConnectME
worked to expand regional and international economic initiatives and
partnerships, increasing the participation of all citizens in the region,
closing the gender gap and encouraging entrepreneurs to present business
solutions for local challenges impacting their local communit.
Prior to establishing ConnectME,
Randa worked in Washington as an independent consultant to projects focused on
the development of a private sector that is capable of fostering job creation
and innovation by engaging partners in the private and public sectors, such as
the U.S. State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, in that space, Randa previously worked on PITI project – Palestinian information Technology Initiative – in collaboration with the U.S State Department. It was the valuable support and insight that she gained while working on PITI, what inspired her to serve as a Franklin Fellow.
Julie McCarthy
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome our 43rd Fellow, Julie McCarthy, who reported to USUN on June 29. Serving in the ECOSOC section, Julie will focus on peacebuilding, development assistance and financing for development. Specifically she will assist Ambassador Barton in engaging the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC), including advancing and supporting an assessment mission to Liberia and representing the USUN at various PBC sessions and relevant meetings on development assistance and other topics.
Julie was a co-founder of the Revenue Watch Institute (RWI), where she oversaw strategic planning and program development, as well as establishing RWI capacity-building partnerships with the World Bank, the Norwegian Government and other institutions. Prior to that work, Julie oversaw the Open Society Institute’s Revenue Watch Program, ran an OSI monitoring program on post-conflict Iraq, and was the global coordinator for the Soros Foundation Network on the Millennium Challenge Account. Julie also looked at energy policy for the Institute for Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore, was a Founding Research Associate for the Vital Voices Global Partnership and served as a White House intern with the Office of Political Affairs during the Clinton Administration.
Julie is a cum laude graduate of Cornell University and is finishing her MA from Yale, where she concentrates on governance in fragile states. She also studied at the London School of Economics.
Paul McCulloch-Otero
The Franklin Fellows program proudly welcomes our 57th Fellow, Paul McCulloch-Otero, who will serve as Special Advisor to Reta Jo Lewis, the Special Representative for Global Intergovernmental Affairs in the Office of the Secretary (S/SRGIA). He will bridge between state and local elected leaders in the U.S. and their counterparts abroad by reaching out to domestic and foreign leaders, engaging state and local officials, and coordinating peer-to-peer opportunities for sub-national dialogue.
Most recently, Paul worked at the World Bank as the Senior Analyst to the High Level Commission on the Modernization of World Bank Group Governance. After working as an attorney for the New York City Commission on Human Rights, he studied at the University of London, where he received an LL.M. in International Law with a concentration on International Finance and Development. While in London, he worked for the General Counsel at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), supporting project finance initiatives and providing legal technical assistance to EBRD countries of operations.
Paul attended Temple University Law School where he received his J.D. with a focus on International Law. He graduated with a B.A. in Political Science and Spanish Literature from Emory University, having studied abroad in Oxford and Havana. While an undergraduate, Paul worked for the Latin America and Caribbean Program at the Carter Center. After college, he studied Russian language and culture in St. Petersburg, and then worked briefly at the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department.
Paul is admitted to the New York State Bar, and is a member of the American Society for International Law, the American Bar Association, and the New York County Lawyers Association. Paul is fluent in Spanish and proficient in Russian.
Jeff McLean
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Mr. Jeffrey A. McLean. He is the 147th Franklin Fellow. Mr. McLean serves in the Bureau of East Asian Pacific Affairs; Economic Policy office as a Foreign Affairs Officer. Mr. McLean is assisting the State Department’s overall objective in harnessing Asia’s growth and dynamism stands central to American economic and strategic interests. The United States central focus on the Asia-Pacific region reflects a profound recognition that the future security and prosperity of our nation will be largely defined by events and developments in the region.
Mr. McLean joins the Franklin Fellows Program after accumulating thirty years of business experience leading both U.S. and global commercial teams. He brings a wealth of experience in leadership, strategy development, emerging markets and a broad spectrum of commercial expertise. Mr. McLean is currently pursuing his PHD at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and recently authored his first book. In addition to his engagement with the State Department, Mr. McLean is a guest lecturer at Sacramento State University; sits on two non-profit Boards and will be an Advisor to Frontier Strategy Group as well as consulting for CooperVision Incorporated on their emerging market strategy.
Mr. McLean holds a master’s degree in Strategic Leadership from New England College and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland.
Marsha McLean
Marsha has joined the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Office of Public Diplomacy as a Franklin Fellow. She is self-funded through her own consultancy business, McLean & George Ltd. which specializes in facilitating cultural change in organizations.
Marsha has been working in the field of organization change and development for over 30 years and as such brings a wealth of experience with her from both the public and private sectors. She received her Master’s Degree from Case Western Reserve University, Weatherhead School of Management while she was a Director of a retail conglomerate based in Cleveland.
Subsequently Marsha travelled to the UK to pursue her PhD at the University of Bath where she founded, along with colleagues, her own consultancy. Her consulting has spanned both sides of the Atlantic plus SE Asia and Australia. Along with her husband, Adrian, she has pioneered methods to help organizations understand their culture(s) and to support them through periods of change. She always looks to discover and build on the natural strengths already present within her client systems using collaborative methods of inquiry, dialogue and the adoption of an “appreciative eye”.
She is a successful businesswoman having established two start up businesses. She has found way of combining her passion for organization change with professional education and development as a co-founder of the first Master’s Program in Organization Consulting at a prominent business school in England. She is also the co-founder of Appreciative Inquiry Consulting, an international network focusing on strength- based approaches to change.
She hopes to bring her experience with the private sector to the State Department by helping to establish private/public partnerships; coaching leaders in new approaches to management; and designing and facilitating events which encourage generative dialogue and high participation.
Dr. Quinn Mecham
Dr. Quinn Mecham is a Franklin Fellow on the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. Department of State, where he leads policy planning for Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states. He is also charged with helping to direct and coordinate policy related to political Islam across the globe. He comes to the Policy Planning Staff from Middlebury College, where he is an Assistant Professor of Political Science.
Dr. Mecham is a scholar of civil conflict and political Islam, focusing primarily on the Middle East and North Africa. He has written extensively on Islamist movements and political parties in Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, and Senegal. He has traveled throughout the Middle East and Africa, and has done ethnographic research in many countries of the region. He teaches political science and Middle Eastern studies at Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, and is also a Research Associate at George Washington University. He was recently in residence at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and has also worked as a management and organizational consultant with McKinsey & Company. He previously worked in the political Islam section at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and at the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration at the U.S. Department of State. He received MA and PhD degrees in Political Science from Stanford University.
Eric Medoff
We are pleased to announce that our 101st Franklin Fellow is Eric Medoff. Eric is serving in IO’s Office of Peacekeeping, Sanctions and Counter-Terrorism (IO/PSC), where he is the Bureau’s point of contact on issues related to North Korea, Sudan, Liberia, and Cote d’Ivoire Sanctions, as well as conflict minerals issues.
Eric joins IO after having served several years as a lawyer and legal consultant. Most recently, Eric worked as a litigation attorney in Miami-Dade County, Florida, where he represented clients in issues such as criminal and immigration law. He also served as a privacy consultant in a business development firm in Florida.
As a law student, Eric served as an intern in USUN’s Legal Section. In USUN/L, he was responsible for coordinating U.S. activity regarding the UN’s Legal Committee, which included debates on the rule of law and administration of justice. He also served in Japan as a reporting officer to the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the United Nations, where he analyzed the Overseas Development Assistance Workshop.
Eric holds a BA in International Law and Asian Studies from The University of Redlands. He earned his JD from Saint Thomas University School and an LLM in National Security & US Foreign Relations Law from The George Washington University Law School. He is a member of the Florida and DC Bars.
Stephen Merrill
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Mr. Stephen Merrill as the 195th Franklin Fellow! Mr. Merrill serves in the Office of the Undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment where he is tasked with reviewing the Department’s science and technology and innovation initiatives for opportunities to identify technologies from abroad and apply them in the United States. He also serves part-time as executive director of the Duke University Center for Innovation Policy.
Merrill founded the National Academies’ program on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy (STEP) in 1991 and as director led its development until March 2014. With the sponsorship of numerous federal government agencies, foundations, multinational corporations, international institutions and individual contributors, the STEP program became an important discussion forum and authoritative voice on innovation, competitiveness, intellectual property, human resources, tax, standards, research and development, and related policies. At the same time Dr. Merrill directed many STEP projects and publications, including A Patent System for the 21st Century (2004), Innovation Inducement Prizes (2007), Innovation in Global Industries (2008), The Dragon and the Elephant: The Development of Innovation Capacity in China and India (2010), Copyright in the Digital Era (2013), and Effects of US Tax Policy on Greenhouse Gas Emissions (2013). For his work on the 2004 study that initiated discussion of patent reforms eventually incorporated in the America Invents Act of 2011 he was named one of the 50 most influential people worldwide in the intellectual property field by Managing Intellectual Property magazine and earned the Academies’ 2005 Distinguished Service Award. He has been a member of the World Economic Forum Global Council on the Intellectual Property System.
Previously, Dr. Merrill was a Fellow in International Business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where he specialized in technology trade issues. He served on various congressional staffs including the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, where he organized the first congressional hearings on international competition in the semiconductor and biotechnology industries and contributed to the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act of 1980 and other legislation.
Dr. Merrill holds degrees in political science from Columbia (B.A., summa cum laude), Oxford (M. Phil.), and Yale (M.A. and Ph.D.) universities. He attended the Kennedy School of Government’s Senior Executives Program in 1992 and was an adjunct professor of international affairs at Georgetown University from 1989 to 1996.
McKenzie Millar
McKenzie Millar will serve in IO’s Office of Human Rights, Humanitarian and Social Affairs (IO/HR), working on topics brought before the UN Human Rights Council. McKenzie comes to us from the World Organization for Human Rights USA, where she conducted research for civil litigation on behalf of victims of human rights abuses. Previously, she held research and policy positions at a number of issue-oriented nonprofit organizations, including the The Justice Project, American Rights at Work and the Save Darfur Coalition. In these positions, she conducted research and extensive policy reviews, created factsheets and other materials for members of Congress and created written content for organizational newsletters and web content. She has also analyzed best practices and made policy recommendations to executive–level staff and contributed to the Institute for Policy Studies’ Unified Security Budget for FY 2009.
McKenzie holds a Masters in Peace Operations from George Mason University’s School of Public Policy and a BA in Political Science from the University of Virginia.
Dr. Sarah Deardorff Miller
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Dr. Sarah Deardorff Miller. She is the 200th Franklin Fellow. Dr. Miller serves as a Franklin Fellow in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor’s African Affairs office, where she is focusing on issues relating to the voting rights of displaced persons.
Dr. Miller recently completed her doctorate in International Relations at Oxford University, focusing on refugees and other forced migrants in East Africa. Her research looked specifically at the role of international organizations–the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in particular–in taking on surrogate state-like properties in protracted refugee situations.
Dr. Miller also completed a Master’s in Forced Migration at Oxford University, where she was awarded a Weidenfeld Scholarship, which recognizes international leadership potential. She was a member of St. Antony’s College during her time at Oxford. Dr. Miller also holds a Master’s in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Arts in History, Spanish and International Service from Valparaiso University. She continues to participate in workshops, conferences and other academic meetings.
Dr. Miller has worked both overseas and in the U.S. Abroad, Dr. Miller has worked with various refugee-focused NGOs in Tanzania, Thailand, and Switzerland, and has traveled, researched, and worked in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Nepal, Brazil, Turkey, the Dominican Republic and many other countries across Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. She has also carried out research consultancies and publications with Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre and the Brookings Institution, and has worked with non-profits in the U.S., including World Relief. More recently, she advised USAID.
Dr. Miller is from the Chicago area, and now lives in the Washington, D.C., area with her husband, 1-year-old daughter and two Labrador retrievers.
Thomas Miller
The Franklin Fellows Program is delighted to announce Thomas Miller our 77th Franklin Fellow. Tom, who began his fellowship on February 14, is serving in NEA’s Office of Egypt and Levant Affairs (NEA/ELA), where he will focus on Jordan and Egypt.
Tom comes to us from the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), where he served as a Senior Research Analyst and, more recently, as Associate Director of Sales. At CEB, he acquired more than 70 executive-level clients in the Middle Market Finance Practice and worked on a research team that served Chief Investment Officers in the Asset Management industry. For his work, he received CEB’s President’s Circle Award.
Tom also has worked for Merrill Lynch and, while in graduate school in Vienna, had stints at the UN Office of Drugs and Crime and at Erste Bank. At the Bank, he researched economic and political trends in emerging economies in Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America.
Tom holds a BA in Economics from Indiana University and a Master of Advanced International Studies from the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna in Austria. At the Academy, his thesis was “Is Montenegro a Nation?”
Tom’s interests include running and cooking. He has traveled in Jordan and elsewhere in the region and speaks German and some Arabic.
Dr. Samuel Millington
We are pleased to announce that our 99th Franklin Fellow is Dr. Samuel Millington. Sam, who began his fellowship on October 11, is serving with USAID at Embassy Conakry, where he is developing an Innovation Unit which will focus on developing sustainable public-private sector partnerships to address some the of critical needs facing Guinea and its population.
Sam joins the program after having sold the management consulting firm he founded. As a firm co-located in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Wailuku, Hawai`i, nueva ola management consulting focused on strategic planning, program and resource development, financial management, crisis management, advocacy, community relations, executive coaching and Board support. Clients included a wide range of non-profit service organizations, foundations, government programs and small businesses.
Over the years, Sam has also served as Executive Director of several non-profits, where he was able to develop a number of award-winning projects that leveraged public- and private-sector resources in order to address critical gaps in service.
Sam holds a PhD in Applied Anthropology from Columbia University and several Masters degrees. He earned his BA from the University of Virginia. He spent much of the 1980s abroad and looks forward to re-acquainting himself with various cultures around the world.
The Franklin Fellow Program staff is delighted and proud to welcome Sam to the Franklin Fellows Program. He is our third overseas Franklin Fellow and the first to be recruited in the U.S. specifically to serve his entire fellowship overseas. We are confident that his wide professional background and education will enable him to make important contributions to the work of Embassy Conakry and to improving the lives of the people of Guinea. We are grateful to USAID, where several Fellows already have served, for their strong and continuing partnership on the FFP. We appreciate, also, the work to lay the groundwork for what we hope will be a new overseas chapter in the Franklin Fellows Program.
Maryam Mujica
Maryam Mujica, Franklin Fellow Number 58, recently joined the Office of Iranian Affairs as a Foreign Affairs Officer. Her portfolio includes outreach regarding sanctions as well as other relevant political issues concerning Iran. Prior to joining the Iran desk, Maryam worked in the Bureau of Public Affairs, as an Advisor to the Deputy Assistant Secretary. She worked with the Bureau’s outreach and strategic planning efforts, using the State Department’s assets to influence national and international media outlets. Before joining the Department of State, Maryam worked at Stanford Law School’s External Relations office. Previously, she worked as a real estate litigation attorney in San Francisco.
During law school, Maryam clerked at the San Mateo District Attorney’s Office; the Santa Clara Public Defender’s Office; and for The Honorable Richard A. Kramer in the Complex Litigation Department in San Francisco Superior Court. Maryam received her Juris Doctor from Santa Clara University and her undergraduate degree from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She speaks Spanish, French and Farsi.
Andre Murphy
Franklin Fellow Andre Murphy was a Marketing Specialist in the Office of Current Issues in the Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP). Andre’s role was to market a mobile version of www.America.gov in order to amplify IIP’s mission to engage foreign publics in discussion about ideas, issues, policies and values that help advance global understanding of the U.S. foreign policy. Andre used his experience in communicating with international audiences and marketing background to create awareness and engagement on the mobile and online websites.
Andre has over 15 years of management experience with Verizon, IBM, and Coca Cola. He worked on overseas projects in Spain, Chile, and Australia, including marketing and operations work on three different Summer Olympic Games. Andre volunteered to work on the telecommunications requirements of the 2008 Obama presidential campaigns in Maryland, Virginia and D.C., before serving as a team captain for the inauguration. As Director of Operations at AMGTC, a consulting company, he managed customer relations. He has a bachelor’s degree from SUNY Oswego and an MBA from The George Washington University.
Cora Neumann
Cora joins EB’s Office of Commercial and Business Affairs (EB/CBA), where she is a Senior Advisor to the Global Women’s Business Initiative (GWBI). The GWBI is part of CBA’s Global Entrepreneurship Program. In particular, Cora helps coordinate the African Women’s Entrepreneurship Program (AWEP), which was launched by Secretary Clinton in 2010 and has since become a flagship women’s entrepreneurship program for the State Department. She also serves as liaison to the International Council on Women’s Business Leadership and is involved in MENA region efforts, wPOWER and more.
Cora has extensive experience in international development, women’s issues and policy analysis. As founder and former director of RAND Corporation’s African First Ladies Initiative, she worked closely with first ladies and public and private leaders from 15 African nations and various international NGOs to assist first ladies in their efforts to influence change in the areas of health and women’s issues – including women’s entrepreneurship.
Cora has convened multiple international meetings focused on women’s issues and has a successful track record in building alliances among private, non-profit and public entities and leaders on programs related to women’s issues.
Cora has her MPH in Public Health from Columbia University, a BA in political science from University of New Mexico and is completing her doctorate in International Development at University of Oxford, UK. Her interests/hobbies include yoga, dance, travel, art and – having grown up in Montana – the great outdoors.
Karen Newman
The Franklin Fellows Program is delighted to welcome our 57th Fellow, Karen Newman. Karen will split her service between PA’s New York Foreign Press Center (PA/NYFPC) and USUN’s Office of Press and Public Affairs (USUN/PPA).
Karen comes to the FF Program after ten years with UNDP, UNICEF and the UN Global Compact. During her career in the public, private and international sectors, she has developed expertise with building strategic partnerships, resource mobilization, corporate responsibility and economic development. Her work often includes consulting for companies like Microsoft and Philips Healthcare, as well as with large initiatives supporting the Millennium Development Goals. She worked on the World Business Development Awards 2010 in conjunction with the International Business Leaders Forum, the International Chamber of Commerce and UNDP, and promoted the 2009 Business Call to Action in New York and South Africa.
Karen’s experience with government includes economic development work for New York and Chicago city governments. In Chicago, she worked at The Michael Jordan Foundation and United Way in community affairs and grantmaking. Recently, Karen served on the New York Committee for the World Food Program USA and worked at the Hunger Project raising funds and awareness on poverty and hunger issues. Karen has also served on the Board of NEXCO and Women in International Trade.
Karen earned her MBA and a Masters in Social Service Administration from the University of Chicago.
John O'Connor
John O’Connor joined the Department of State as a Franklin Fellow in the Bureau of Resource Management. He helped transform the way the Department and the private sector work together in an effort to imbed relevant private sector perspectives and methods in appropriate areas of Department management. John was a Franklin Fellow with RM from October 2008 to May 2009.
Most recently John worked as a manager in Ernst & Young’s Advisory Services practice. He was responsible for managing a wide range of projects for multinational corporations, including financial and operational audits, process improvement reviews, and risk assessments. During his eight years at Ernst & Young, John focused particularly on risks relating to contractual agreements and helped to build Ernst & Young’s Contract Risk Services practice globally. John has worked in over 25 countries around the world and lived in the United Kingdom while on assignment.
Prior to joining Ernst & Young, John graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business with a B.S. in Business Administration and a minor in Anthropology.
Cynthia O’Donnell
Dr. O’Donnell serves in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security’s Office of Personnel Security and Suitability as a Senior Advisor for the Continuous Evaluation Program. She has also served in the Bureau of Counterterrorism as a Foreign Affairs Officer and in Western Hemisphere Affairs as a Rule of Law Advisor where she contributed to a variety of initiatives pertaining to terrorism, transnational organized crime, cyber issues, governance and rule of law, conflict stabilization, and homeland security.
She comes to State from Marymount University where she was Director of the Criminal Justice Administration and Policy Master’s Degree Program in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice. Previously, she served as an Assistant Professor at Campbell University in North Carolina. She is also a former law enforcement officer, police academy program coordinator, and has over a decade of experience in the banking industry.
Her research interests include transnational organized crime, terrorism, and border security. Her presentation An Exploration of the Tactics of the Criminal Syndicate MS-13: A Study of Policy Initiatives at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (March 2013) addressed anti-money laundering measures. She is the author of the book The Mounting Threat of Domestic Terrorism: Al Qaeda and the Salvadoran Gang MS-13 (LFB Scholarly, 2009), which explored the possible linkages between organized crime, terrorist groups, and border security. Her work has been noted internationally in media including Voice of America, Interdisciplinary Political Studies, Government and International Affairs Library, CRS Report for Congress, Institute of International Politics, and U.S. Foreign Affairs Doctoral Dissertation List.
Emilio M. Ortiz
The Franklin Fellows Program cordially welcomes Mr. Emilio M. Ortiz. He serves as an advisor to the Secretary’s Special Representative managing projects related to technology, trade, investment and economic development.
As a consultant, Mr. Ortiz specialized in international commerce and technology, providing policy and technical guidance to small and medium-sized enterprises through ‘I Consulting’, a firm he founded in 2002. In 2009, Mr. Ortiz assisted the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration with the development of international markets for U.S. textiles. From 1996-2002, he served as Director at Intrepid Corporation, overseeing the turnaround of the international steel trading company by developing strategic partnerships via the representation of the firm in Asia, Europe and Latin America.
A lifetime supporter of freedom and equality, Mr. Ortiz served in and supported efforts of organizations including, The Marshall Legacy Institute (2012), The Women’s Court in Bangalore (2011), The Mercy Center in Bangkok (2011) and Friendship Bridge Microfinance (2010).
Mr. Ortiz holds an MA in International Economic Policy from the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and a BA in Political Science from Boston College. He is a Microsoft Systems Engineer, a licensed Pilot and a member of the Denver Council on Foreign Relations.
Jennifer Osetek
The Franklin Fellows Program welcomes our 66th Fellow, Jennifer Osetek. She will be working on U.S. biological weapons control policy as part of Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Policy office in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation.
LT Osetek is a member of the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve where she is stationed in the Office of Counterterrorism and Defense Operations. Recently, she served on active duty for 5 months at the National Incident Command participating in the USG’s response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Prior to this assignment, she was stationed at Sector Long Island Sound in New Haven, CT and served as the acting assistant Logistics Officer as well as the special project officer responsible for the relocation, outfitting, and dedication of the new Sector command building.
LT Osetek is currently studying for her PhD in Biodefense with an international security concentration from George Mason University. She holds a Master’s of Homeland Security in Public Health Preparedness from Pennsylvania State University’s College of Medicine and continues to serve as a teacher’s assistant with the program. She also holds a Bachelor’s Degree with Specialized Honors in Neurobiology from Drew University. Following her graduation from Drew, she spent three years conducting cellular and molecular research on Alzheimer’s disease at the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital.
Amaka Ozobia
Amaka joins PRM’s Office of Refugee Admissions (PRM/A) which manages the US Refugee Admissions Program. She will serve on the Admissions Health Team as a consultant on refugee resettlement, particularly in areas related to refugee health.
Prior to joining the Franklin Fellows, Amaka practiced immigration law as an attorney for Church World Service in Miami, Florida where she represented clients from the Cuban-Haitian population, as well as other immigrant and refugee communities. Her litigation experience includes advocating on behalf of clients at hearings before Immigration Court and USCIS field offices. She assisted clients on an array of immigration matters, including asylum petitions, adjustment of status applications, naturalization and immigration relief under the Violence Against Women’s Act (VAWA).
In addition to her legal background, Amaka has collaborated on various projects examining the intersection of health and human rights issues within specific communities, such as immigrants and children. To that end, her health advocacy experience includes service as a Patient Advocate for the AmeriCorps VISTA program as well collaboration with the government agency Desarollo Integral del La Familia (DIF) Guadalajara, in Jalisco, Mexico, where she served on a team of professionals researching and conducting workshops on prominent public health and human rights issues concerning children and other vulnerable populations.
Amaka is licensed to practice in the State of Washington. She holds a Juris Doctorate Degree from Seattle University School of Law where she was a PILF Grant recipient. She has a Bachelors degree in Journalism from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Ms. Ozobia is also pursuing an MSW at Howard University, where she aspires to gain further knowledge examining the psychosocial influences that can impact the health of underrepresented communities.
Amaka was reared with her brother and sister in Las Vegas, Nevada by immigrant parents. She speaks Spanish and is studying American Sign Language and Portuguese. With wanderlust in her heart, she loves discovering new cultures and cuisine. Her other hobbies include the piano, listening to world music (especially Salsa and West African highlife), reading and running in 5k races.
Dr. Agnieszka Paczynska
Agnieszka Paczynska is an Associate Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Program at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution and Associate Faculty at the Center for Global Studies, George Mason University. She has been a research fellow in the Sociology Department of the Warsaw School of Economics and at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the American University in Cairo. She has also worked as the Managing Editor of The Bulletin of Regional Cooperation in the Middle East published by Search for Common Ground and has served on election observing missions to Ethiopia and Liberia.
Her research interests include the relationship between economic and political change and conflict, the relationship between globalization processes and local conflicts and post-conflict reconstruction policies. She has published articles on structural adjustment policies, democratization, and development and security. She is the author of a forthcoming book, Labor, State, and The Transition to a Market Economy: Egypt, Poland, Mexico and the Czech Republic. Another title, Rebuilding Society, Downsizing the State (2009): Post-Conflict Economic Reconstruction Policies, which examines the relationship between peace building and economic policies after civil wars.
She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia and a MA and BA in political science from New York University, New York City. She has also studied Arabic at the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad at the American University in Cairo and at Middlebury College in Vermont.
Dr. Douglas Padgett
We are pleased to announce that our 93rd Franklin Fellow is Dr. Douglas Padgett. Doug is serving in DRL’s Office of South and Central Asia (DRL/SCA), where he covers Central Asia.
Doug comes to us from George Mason University, where he has taught Asian religions and globalization studies in both the Department of Religious Studies and the Global Affairs Program. Doug previously served as a consultant at The Center for the National Interest, where he worked on a range of topics, including the Arab spring, Muslim immigration to Europe, and Mexican drug-related violence. His consulting experience extends to the wine trade where he once worked. In addition, Doug is a former naval officer and served in the Gulf region and Western Pacific.
Doug has studied and conducted field research in Vietnam and within Vietnamese refugee communities. Doug’s work on the global dispersion of Asian religions has resulted in articles and papers on Vietnamese religious history, the Vietnamese Diaspora, Thai American Buddhism, and conversion to Asian religions in North America.
Doug holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Indiana University with concentrations in the study of East Asian religions (primarily Chinese and Vietnamese Buddhism) and religion and American culture. His Master’s degree is from the University of Florida, and he holds a BA from Duke. His book on religion and culture in the Vietnamese diaspora is under review. He enjoys gardening, cooking and skiing and, once upon a time, could stand up on a moving surfboard.
Michelle Perez
We are pleased to announce that our 97th Franklin Fellow is Michelle Perez. Michelle, who began her fellowship on September 28, is working on water issues in OES’ Office of Environmental Policy (OES/ENV). Her focus there is trans-boundary water issues and integrated water resource management, as it pertains to peace, security, development, technology, finance and climate.
Michelle has a BA in International Relations from Boston University and an MS from the Pratt Institute in Environmental Systems Management. She has field experience both domestically and abroad in sustainable planning, community planning, workshop facilitation and bringing large-scale state and national policies down to a local level for implementation. Much of her focus has been on incorporating sustainable infrastructure to communities while engaging constituents in a participatory approach, with emphasis on water resources management, water and sanitation systems and technologies and urban upgrading.
Prior to becoming a Franklin Fellow, Michelle worked at the Suffolk County Health Department in New York in the Division of Environmental Quality, where she focused on wastewater management implementation from a public health perspective. She also had an active role in the development of an international initiative now known as jungledrum.org, which contributes and advocates for solutions that boost international cooperation on global challenges via information and communications technologies and web development.
The Franklin Fellows team is grateful to OES for hosting Michelle, and we are sure that her considerable experience will bring valuable insight and perspective on water issues to the Bureau and to the Department.
Pamela Phan
The Franklin Fellows Program warmly welcomes Pamela N. Phan. She serves in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs as a Special Advisor to the Office of Investment Affairs (EB/OIA). Her role is to advise on matters relating to U.S. investment, promotion of market-based investment standards, and encouragement of sound investment policies in the East Asia and Pacific region, with an emphasis on China. She also supports on investment protection, promotion, policy, and disputes involving other regions of the world and assists in multilateral international investment negotiations.
A specialist in international investment and Chinese law, Pam joins the State Department from Stanford Law School, where she taught and ran the Master of Laws Program in International Economic Law, Business and Policy from 2010-2012. Prior to teaching at Stanford, Pam spent nearly six years as a corporate and finance lawyer in New York, Hong Kong, and Beijing. She held teaching positions at the George Washington University School of Law, as well as Wuhan University School of Law and Northwest University of Politics and Law in China. She also worked on Capitol Hill at the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, serving as the Commission’s Acting General Counsel during the 110th Congress and advising on human rights and rule of law developments in China during the 109th Congress.
Pam’s research interests focus on international investment law, law and development, and the international and domestic law issues posed by China’s economic reforms. She has published on such topics as urban development, property rights, social justice, and the teaching and practice of law in China. Since 2008, she has served on the Board of Trustees of the Yale-China Association. She currently chairs the Association’s Law Subcommittee.
Pam holds a J.D. from Columbia University School of Law and a B.A. from Stanford University. She is licensed to practice law in New York and California. A native speaker of English and Vietnamese, she is also fluent in spoken and written Mandarin Chinese.
Shelly Porges
Franklin Fellow Shelly Porges is serving in the Office of Commercial and Business Affairs (EEB/CBA), where she will serve as the Senior Advisor for the Global Women’s Business Initiative, encouraging women entrepreneurs and promoting gender equity for prosperity throughout the world.
After a long career as both a corporate executive and entrepreneur herself, Shelly was most recently Board Chair of a non-profit; Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence. She also founded Global Payments Experts, a business consulting firm. Her career in finance and marketing includes serving as Chief Marketing Officer with Scudder Weisel Capital among other online firms and as an executive with Bank of America and American Express. She has taught at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and has a Master’s degree from Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration. Shelly speaks Hebrew, French, Italian and Spanish.
Hafizur Rahman
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to
welcome Mr. Hafizur Rahman as the 166th Franklin Fellow. Mr. Rahman serves as
an Accounting Advisor to the Central Accounting and Reporting Division in the
Office of the Chief Financial Officer at USAID’s Bureau for Management.
Mr. Rahman joins the Franklin Fellows Program after accumulating over thirty
years working on and leading multicultural teams in public and United Nations
projects, private sector organizations and community groups in the U.S., the
Middle East and Southeast Asia. Mr. Rahman is a certified public accountant and
he holds an executive jurisdoctor from Concord Law School of Kaplan University.
Most recently he was the assistant director of finance for Stoddard Baptist
Global Care of the Washington, DC Center for Aging Services.
Bob Ransom
We are pleased to announce that our 84th Franklin Fellow is Robert Ransom, who has had a long career working on disability and development, primarily in Africa. Bob, who began his fellowship on June 1, is serving as Advisor on Inclusive Development in the office of the State Department’s Special Advisor for International Disability Rights (SADR). Bob brings a wealth of experience at many levels of the development process: government policy formulation and program design, organizational development and management, and international, national and grass roots project design, implementation and evaluation.
Bob is a former Senior Disability Specialist with the International Labor Organization (ILO) covering Africa and the Caribbean (1986‐2005). During his ILO career, he provided technical guidance on the training and employment of persons with disabilities to governments and civil society organizations in over 35 countries in Africa and some 10 countries in the Caribbean. He also managed a number of ILO technical cooperation projects covering vocational skills training, community‐based rehabilitation and small enterprise development implemented by both government agencies and non‐governmental organizations (NGOs). From 1998‐2002, Bob was Deputy Director of the ILO Office in Ethiopia.
Prior to joining ILO, Bob was International Program Director for Goodwill Industries International (1978-1985). Goodwill Industries is the largest private sector employer of persons with disabilities in the U.S.
Bob is founder and the Executive Director of the Ethiopian Center for Disability and Development (ECDD), a local civil society organization established in Ethiopia in 2005. ECDD promotes and facilitates organizational capacity building for the inclusion of persons with disabilities in mainstream government service delivery and NGO development projects in Ethiopia.
In his work with SADR, Bob will assist the Department, our embassies and contractors, and USAID, its missions and implementing partner organizations, to promote disability rights and the inclusion of persons with disabilities in U.S. foreign policy and assistance programs. Specifically, Bob will be helping the SADR to ensure that Department regional and thematic bureaus are aware of and include disability rights issues in areas such as religious freedom, worker rights, child labor, gender violence, trafficking, refugees and others.
Bob is author of an overview on the situation of children with disabilities in Africa, Missing Voices: Children with Disabilities in Africa, published by the African Child Policy Forum (ACPF). He has contributed chapters to several development publications, including Poverty and Disability, published by Leonard Cheshire Disability and Community‐based Rehabilitation (CBR) Guidelines, published by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Bob is originally from Michigan and is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the American University School of International Service (SIS). He is a member of the Rotary Club of Addis Ababa West and is an active member of the Addis Ababa Hash House Harriers running club. He plans to return to Ethiopia and his wife Kitui (from Kenya), two sons and six grandchildren after his Franklin Fellow assignment.
The Franklin Fellows Program is delighted to welcome Bob and to have such a deep expert on international disabilities issues as a member of our growing Franklin Fellows family. He is the first Franklin Fellow to work on disabilities matters, and we know that he will make a major contribution to the Department’s efforts to advance such rights across the globe.
Wendy Reid
Our 64th Franklin Fellow, Wendy Reid, began her service on December 6. She provides advisory and assistance support to the regional offices of Sudan and other countries in North Africa and the Middle East.
Wendy comes to us from Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), where she was a Senior Vice President and Operations Manager in the Analysis, Simulations, Systems Engineering & Training Business Unit. At SAIC, she managed an organization that supported national security customers in global threat reduction and nuclear deterrence; policy and technical analysis; and strategic planning consultation. Before that, her work at SAIC focused on nonproliferation, arms control and missile defense. She served on SAIC’s board which decides on ethical compliance of SAIC project teams involved in human subject research and served as project lead for improvement of SAIC’s policies and procedures. She also was the first legal research director for the non-partisan Project on National Security Reform.
Before joining SAIC, she worked in civil rights litigation and criminal law as an Associate with Willoughby & Associates. Ms. Reid holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University, a JD from UCLA and a Master of Laws (with Distinction) in National Security Law from Georgetown University. She is a member of the California Bar. Wendy speaks Spanish and enjoys books, music and her Labrador, Charlie.
Mimi Reisner
Mimi Reisner, our 63d Franklin Fellow, will serve in the Office of the Chief of Protocol (S/ CPR) where she will assist and advise in the areas of communications and ceremonies: Ms. Reisner will work with the Public Affairs officer to develop a press and communication plan for the office. Her goal is to establish a process for media outreach and assist in drafting speeches and press releases. Mimi will also work with the Ceremonials division on event presentation and design.
Mimi brings a background in communications and freelance journalism. She is a reporter for “The Washington Scene,” at The Hill Newspaper and is also a contributing writer for DC Modern Luxury Magazine. She covers social events with an emphasis on the philanthropic and her pieces highlight the contributions of the many organizations dedicated to social improvement in the DC area.
With an extensive background in fashion and interior design, it will be her goal to develop and present ideas for image and décor for events at State. Mimi has worked on many not-for-profit benefits including events for Dress for Success, The Jewish Board of Family and Children Services, and The Nightingale-Bamford School. She looks forward to contributing and is honored to serve as a Franklin Fellow.
Luis Renta
We are pleased to inform you that our 85th Franklin Fellow, Luis Renta, began his fellowship on June 6th. Luis is serving in the Office of the Special Representative for Global Intergovernmental Affairs (S/SRGIA), where he works sub-national engagement, bringing elected leaders together with their U.S. counterparts to foment peer-to-peer relationships and promote U.S. policy at the sub-national level. He also is responsible for the Department’s interaction with mayors, including the U.S. Conference of Mayors, National League of Cities and the National Conference of Black Mayors.
Luis is a trade policy expert with over ten years of experience in trade, development and negotiations. His previous experience includes work on the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the Caribbean states and the European Union, which expanded access to European markets for the small island nations of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). Luis also played an integral role in Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) negotiations, helping to expand U.S. private sector access to the markets of Central American and the Dominican Republic, while also securing developing country gains from the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI). Luis spent the early years of his career with Unilever as the youngest Business Unit leader in the region.
Born in Boston, MA and raised in Europe and the Caribbean, Luis holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the University of California and a Master of Public Administration in International Economic Policy from Columbia University and Science Po. His personal interests include SCUBA, trekking and the San Francisco 49ers.
We are delighted to welcome Luis to the ever-growing Franklin Fellows family. His deep experience in business and the region will result in important gains for the work of S/SRGIA. We thank Dr. Lewis and her colleagues for hosting our Fellows and for their continuing support to the Franklin Fellows Program.
Stephen Rickard
We are pleased to welcome our 88th Franklin Fellow, Stephen Rickard, who began his fellowship on June 29. Stephen is Advisor for Human Rights in DRL’s Front Office, where he will be supporting the ongoing work of the Bureau and helping develop proposals to strengthen the procedures for human rights vetting of U.S. military assistance and commercial arms sales.
Stephen comes to us from the Open Society Institute, where he was the Director of the Washington Office and Executive Director of the Open Society Policy Center. He joined OSI in 2003. Since 1989, he has been a leading Washington advocate for human rights, helping to pass important human rights legislation including the Leahy Laws on U.S. military assistance and the Freedom Investment Act.
Stephen has served as the Washington Director for Amnesty International USA (1996-2000), Director of the RFK Memorial Center for Human Rights (2000-2001) and created the Nuremberg Legacy Project (2001-2003). He created and managed the Freedom Investment Project (2003-2008) and served as Coordinator of the Human Rights Leadership Coalition (2001-2004).
Earlier, Stephen was Senior Advisor for South Asian Affairs in the State Department (1994-96), where his primary responsibilities included human rights. He received the Department’s Superior Honor Award in 1996. He served as Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to Senator Patrick Moynihan and as a Senior Professional Staff Member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1989 to 1994. Among other things, he helped secure Senate approval for numerous treaties on international human and labor rights.
Stephen was a litigator with the law firm White & Case in New York, Washington, and Stockholm (1983-1989), where he specialized in international arbitration and helped manage the firm’s pro bono legal aid program. While in New York, he served on the Advisory Committee of Asia Watch and co-authored two book- length reports for Human Rights Watch (Elections in Taiwan and Chile and the Plebiscite).
Stephen grew up in Michigan and is a graduate of Adrian College (summa cum laude, BA 1979). He holds an MPA from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School (1983) and is a graduate of Yale Law School (JD 1983). At Yale, he was a member of the Moot Court Board and an editor of the Yale Journal of International Law. Currently, he is on the Board of the US-East Timor Society and a member of the bar of the State of New York.
Stephen lives in Washington, DC, is married to Kathryn Rickard and has two children, Christopher and Sasha.
Dr. Waymond Rodgers
Waymond’s primary research and practical areas include auditing, commercial lending decisions, decision modeling, ethics, trust issues, intellectual capital and knowledge management. His recent work has been in the area of knowledge transfer, which includes conceptual processes and system/transactional processes, such as how to perform a particular job task. Further, he has studied the ability to track and measure effectiveness of the information that can help management determine whether the knowledge-based assets (intangible assets) are being retained and capitalized on to benefit the organization.
Waymond comes to the FF Program from the University of California, Riverside and is the first Franklin Fellow academic from a California school. Previously he was a professor at UC Irvine and a visiting professor at the University of Arizona. His professional auditing and banking experiences include working as an auditor with Ernst & Young and PriceWaterhouseCoopers, as well as a commercial loan officer with Union Bank. He has consulted with organizations such as CitiCorp, FedEx, Microsoft, Italian Phone Company, Petrobras and Airbus, among others.
Waymond is a CPA (Inactive), and his degrees are from Michigan State University, B.A. in Accounting; University of Detroit-Mercy, M.B.A. in Finance; the University of Southern California, Ph.D. in accounting information systems; and an experimental psychology post-doctorate from the University of Michigan.
Waymond has published in Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory; the Communications of the ACM; European Accounting Review; Journal of Business Ethics; Journal of Applied Social Psychology; Journal of Economic Psychology; Journal of the Association of Information Systems; International Journal of Accounting; Management Science; and Organization Studies, among other journals. Finally, he is the recipient of major research grants from the CGA Canada Research Foundation Grant; Citicorp’s Foundation Grant; Ford Foundation; Franklin Fellows Program; National Institute of Health; National Science Foundation; Department of Defense; and the Navy Personnel Research and Development Center.
Michael Roffman
Michael Roffman recently joined the State Department as a Franklin Fellow in the Office of International Labor Affairs and Corporate Social Responsibility (part of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor). He will be covering the issues of labor rights, corporate social responsibility, and Internet freedom, with a regional focus on East Asia.
Michael lived in both China and Taiwan for a total of nearly three years and is an advanced speaker of Mandarin. He has several years of experience in commercial banking and also has worked as a translator and a journalist. Michael previously worked for the State Department as an intern at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in 1996. He holds a Bachelors Degree in History from Duke University, a Masters Degree in Chinese to English Translation from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and an MBA in Finance from Fordham University.
Mark Rosmann
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to introduce Mr. Mark A. Rosmann, the 146th Franklin Fellow. He is assigned to the Office of Global Food Security where he serves as an advisor on the Feed the Future Program, New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, and food and agricultural policy around the world.
Mr. Rosmann brings to the Department years of experience in farming and agriculture stem from the family’s organic farm in rural southwest Iowa. He and his family believe strongly in sustainable and organic agricultural practices to grow and maintain economic and environmental sustainability, and many have emulated their system and methods.
Mr. Rosmann also served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Honduras from 2009 to 2011. There, as a Protected Areas Management Specialist, he assisted two rural farming communities in central Honduras. He taught environmental science in the local school, dental hygiene, family gardening, fertilizer management for coffee producers, and environmental education for communities located in protected forests. Mr. Rosmann also saw the completion of a two-room school addition, installation of latrines and public trash receptacles in his assigned community, and construction of a vehicular bridge providing year-around access into the town.
In 2008, Mr. Rosmann received his B.S. in Agronomy and a B.A. in History at Iowa State University, and is pursuing a master’s degree in Professional Agriculture via distance education from ISU. He is fluent in Spanish.
James Rudolph
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Mr. James P. Rudolph as the 198th Franklin Fellow. Mr. Rudolph serves as a Franklin Fellow in the Bureau of African Affairs, where he will be working with the Nigeria Policy and Operations Group.
Before coming onboard as a Franklin Fellow, Mr. Rudolph practiced law in California and Washington, D.C. Prior to law school, he attended Columbia University’s graduate program in Punjab, India. He also worked as a Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). At USAID, Mr. Rudolph worked with the Bureau for Democracy and Governance.
Mr. Rudolph has written opinion pieces and letters for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, the Christian Science Monitor and U-T San Diego. He has also written academic articles for a variety of publications, including Justice in Conflict, the Canadian International Council, the London School of Economics and Jurist.
Mr. Rudolph has a B.A. in political science from the University of California at Santa Barbara; a J.D. from California Western School of Law; and an LL.M in international law and human rights from the University of San Diego School of Law.
Amalia Ruiz
The Franklin Fellows Program welcomes Ms. Amalia Ruiz, the 149th Franklin Fellow. Ms. Ruiz is assigned to the Bureau of Population, Refugee, and Migration where she serves as an Advisor on International Migration. Previously, Ms. Ruiz served as a Resettlement Coordinator in refugee resettlement in Tucson, Arizona. There, she implemented and managed a comprehensive immigration program that served the broader Tucson community and single-handedly served the local Cuban community with both their social service and immigration needs. Originally from Argentina, Ms. Ruiz is native in Spanish and is currently finishing her PhD coursework in Conflict Analysis and Resolution
Courtney Rusin
Courtney is serving as an attorney-adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser, Office of Treaty Affairs (L/T). Her primary focus is advising lawyers and policy-makers on international and domestic treaty law related to Western Hemisphere Affairs, East Asian Affairs, and Oceans, International Environment, and Scientific Affairs.
Courtney has several years of experience in foreign policy analysis and international conflict resolution. She held positions at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carter Center and the United States Institute of Peace. Her work has addressed issues related to the rule of law in societies emerging from conflict, such as transparency in elections, public participation in constitution-making processes and the harmonization of formal and customary justice systems. Courtney was a contributing author to Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction, a strategic guide for civilians engaged in peacebuilding missions, published in 2009. Earlier, at the CFR, she did research for and editing on the book Winning the Peace: An American Strategy for Post-Conflict Reconstruction.
Courtney worked on civil liberties issues at the American Civil Liberties Union of the Nation’s Capital and served as a Judicial Extern for the Honorable Roger W. Titus of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. She is a member of the Maryland State Bar and a graduate of the University of Southern California (J.D.) and Wesleyan University (B.A.).
Aparna Sain
The
Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Aparna Sain. She is the 163rd
Franklin Fellow. Ms. Sain serves in the Economic Bureau’s Global Entrepreneurship
Program. She is focused on developing and working with Strategic Partners
to foster Entrepreneurship around the World.
Ms. Sain recently moved to
Washington, DC from the Silicon Valley area where she was focused on helping
Entrepreneurs and Startups build sustainable profitable businesses. In
the recent past, she developed and managed Venture Capital relationships for
Gartner called Gartner Invest. Ms. Sain has 15 years of Sales and
Business Development experience working with various Fortune 500 companies
including, GE, Ernst & Young, MCI and others. She has also worked for
the US Chamber of Commerce, and the US India Business Council as the Executive
Director on the West Coast focused on developing Corporate Partnerships.
Outside of work, Ms. Sain is a networker and loves to explore fun and engaging
networking events.
Elaine Sarao
Elaine Sarao is our 67th Fellow, working in SCA’s Office of Press and Public Diplomacy (SCA/PPD), where she is working with the Pakistani Diaspora in the US to create project proposals with action plans aimed at societal stabilization in Pakistan. For Sri Lanka, Elaine is addressing, with a focus on women, threshold society development for social, economic and governance development. Her efforts on both counties also are aimed at fostering U.S. public diplomacy, as well.
Elaine comes to us from the NGO, Foreign Aid Through Education (FATE), where she has been Executive Director. She has served as Congressional Fellow on Foreign Affairs for Congressman Major R. Owens from March 2000 until January 2007, when he retired. At that time, Congressman Owens represented the largest voting Pakistani-American constituency in the U.S. Elaine is a expert on threshold societal stabilization through economic, social and educational development.
Elaine holds an MFA, which is a terminal degree, in Communication/Advertising from Syracuse University and a BFA in Communications Design from Parsons and the New School. She is also Associate Rector of Wisconsin International Ukraine University in Kyiv and is the Research Associate for the Center for Gender, Culture and Development at the Kigali Institute of Education. Additionally, Elaine has participated in a working group addressing “Al Qaeda in Africa” for the National Defense University.
Paul Scott
Prior to joining the State Department as a Franklin Fellow, Paul worked in Business Development for Lockheed Martin Aeronautics through the development of international marketing strategies, competitive analysis, opportunity development, and customer relationship management. Paul supported a wide range of international customers including Korea, Japan, Singapore, and a number of domestic customers such as the US Navy, Marines, and Air Force.
Paul joined Lockheed Martin in 2001 as a system test engineer and spent approximately two years on the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Program in Fort Worth. Paul then moved into strategic planning and the development of new technology initiatives and derivatives for a number of Lockheed Martin programs.
Prior to joining Lockheed Martin, Paul worked for approximately 2 years as a lead software engineer at L3Communications. Paul was raised in the small farming town of Clint, Texas. He pole vaulted on the track team at the University of Texas at El Paso where he received a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. He is currently attending the University of Texas at Austin where he will receive an M.B.A. in June 2008. He currently lives in Arlington, Virginia.
Melissa Sinclair
Melissa Sinclair serves as a Research Associate to the Office of Civilian-Military Cooperation in USAID’s Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance (DCHA/CMC), with the specific goal of assisting the Office in capturing lessons from its cooperation with the U.S. military.
Ms. Sinclair has been working in conflict zones or on conflict issues for over fifteen years. She spent the spring/summer of 1999 working with refugees from the Kosovo crisis in Albania, and from 2000-2002 managed a variety of education projects with the non-governmental organization World Hope International in the ethnically divided city of Mitrovica, Kosovo. As a Research Associate at the National Defense University (2004-2010) Ms. Sinclair’s research focused on post-conflict reconstruction and development and civilian-military cooperation. She is co-author of the articles Implications of an Independent Kosovo for Russia’s Near-Abroad (2007) and Solutions for Northern Kosovo: Lessons Learned in Mostar, Eastern Slavonia, and Brčko (2006), published by the Center for Technology and National Security Policy.
Ms. Sinclair spent 2011-2013 in Afghanistan with USAID, serving the first year on a District Stability Team in Bala Murghab, a remote district in the northwest, and the second year as USAID’s Liaison to the headquarters for U.S. Special Operations Joint Task Force (SOJTF-A) and the International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) in Kabul.
Ms. Sinclair holds a master’s degree from George Mason University’s (GMU) Peace Operation Policy Program (2008) and is a Ph.D. candidate at GMU’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. Her dissertation explores the history of U.S. Foreign Assistance as a means for observing changes in American self-perception and geopolitical positioning from the birth of the nation through present.
Dr. James H. Small
Dr. James H. Small is the first ever Franklin Fellow at the United States Agency for International Development. James serves in the Office of Development Partners/Private Sector Alliances at USAID, where he is primarily responsible for forging public-private sector alliances and providing technical/advisory services in the agricultural, agribusiness, energy, and small-medium enterprise growth sectors of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Sub-Sahara Africa. Part and parcel with these areas and regions of concentration, Dr. Small performs an integral role in advancing the Africa Bureau’s Agribusiness and Trade Promotion Project, and designing the strategic development plans for the Latin America and Caribbean Bureau. Finally, Dr. Small serves on several Inter-Agency Working Groups, (including, Economic Growth and Global Financial Crisis) as well as a member of the Technical Evaluation and Higher Education Review Panels for the Africa Bureau.
Dr. Small comes to USAID from the private sector, where he worked for several years in the residential and commercial real estate business, (Southern Engineering Corporation) as a project developer, supervisor, and legal advisor. Additionally, James worked in the international investment field, where he founded an agribusiness company, (Harvest Development Group, LLC) which invested and developed sustainable agricultural/agribusiness projects with local joint-venture partners in Latin America. Finally, as a board and council member of international development and micro-finance organizations, (including, Katalysis Partnership, Acción International, and the American Refugee Committee) Dr. Small has participated in the development, financing, and oversight of numerous micro-finance projects in several developing countries.
Recently, James earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in Political Economy, where he specialized in economic development, enabling environment, governance, institutionalism and agricultural value chains. In addition to his doctorate degree, James received a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, where he subsequently focused on real estate, land-use, zoning, contract negotiation, and commercial transactions in his professional career in the real estate and construction business.
Dr. Karen Smid
Karen will be serving in DRL’s Office of African Affairs (DRL/AF), where she focuses on Senegal, Gambia, Cape Verde, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau and is responsible for monitoring, analyzing, and reporting on human rights conditions and democracy-related developments.
Karen is the first Franklin Fellow nominated and sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), a New York-based, private, non-profit federation of 70 national scholarly organizations. Created in 1919, the ACLS is dedicated to the advancement of humanistic studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and social sciences. It made its first grants, totaling $4500, in 1926. In 2010, ACLS awarded over $15 million to more than 380 U.S.-based and international scholars.
Karen is an inaugural fellow of the ACLS’ newly-established “Public Fellows Program,” which is placing eight recent Ph.D.’s in government and the non-profit sector for two years. The Public Fellows Program, made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to demonstrate that the capabilities developed in the advanced study of the humanities have wide application in government and beyond.
Karen is a sociocultural anthropologist, who specializes in religion and politics in West Africa. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Her doctoral dissertation explored Muslim clerics’ and laypeople’s understandings about the legitimacy of religious and political leaders in the Fouta Djallon region of Guinea. Her B.A. was from Carleton College.
Karen has worked as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Studies at the University of Southern California, a Visiting Professor in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of South Florida and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. She published articles and reviews in journals including American Ethnologist, Islamic Africa, Contemporary Islam and Anthropology News. Karen conducted field research in Guinea, Senegal, Mali, Egypt and the United States. She has served as a country condition expert on Guinea for several asylum cases since 2009.
Karen speaks Pular, the language of Peul/Fulani people in west-central Africa. She is a member of the American Anthropological Association and the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology. Her hobbies include yoga, rock climbing and reading literary fiction.
Jackie Spedding
We are pleased to announce that our 96th Franklin Fellow is Jacalyn Piatt Spedding who is serving in EEB’s Office of Commercial and Business Affairs (EEB/CBA). She works on the Global Entrepreneurship Program, where she is Senior Advisor for the Global Women’s Business Initiative (GWBI). While working with established programs, African Women’s Entrepreneurship Program (AWEP), APEC Women’s Leadership Network and Pathways Access Initiative, she will also be involved in expanding the GWBI to other regions.
Jackie comes from the Arkansas retail giant, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (Walmart), where she led Global Women’s Supply Chain Inclusion in Global Sourcing. She was instrumental in developing the vision, strategy and supply chain mapping for the recently announced Walmart Clinton Global Initiative: E-Commerce Empowerment Solution for Women. During the four-year commitment, women from nearly two dozen countries in Africa and Latin America will be impacted. A joint recipient of the WEConnect Vision Award, 2009, Jackie has leveraged relationships with NGOs, multi-laterals, government agencies and academia to build strategic alliances. She traveled frequently to speak on best practices and de-mystify the supply chain for women in the global environment.
Born and raised in Goshen, Indiana, Jackie graduated from Hanover College with a degree in Psychology. She most recently completed an intensive International Certification in International Supply Chain Management (ISCM) from the International Trade Centre in Geneva.
Dr. Jeffrey Stacey
Jeffrey Stacey is a Franklin Fellow working in the Civilian Response Operations (CRO) division of the Office of the Secretary’s Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS). He is working on operationalizing lessons learned and developing doctrine for R&S officials, as well as collaboration with international partners such as the EU, UN, and NATO.
Dr. Stacey has joined the State Department from Tulane University, where he teaches US Foreign Policy and International Relations. Upon receiving his BA from the University of Michigan, Dr. Stacey worked in the British Parliament for former Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath before moving on to work in the European Parliament in Brussels. He then received his MPhil from Oxford University, before obtaining his PhD in International Relations from Columbia University. Dr. Stacey taught at NYU and Fordham universities before moving to New Orleans to join the Political Science Department and the Murphy Institute of Political Economy.
Dr. Stacey’s research interests were initially related to Europe as a region and international organizations and political economy as issue areas, but in recent years his work has incorporated the regions of Asia and the Middle East and the issue areas of international security and democratization. He has recently published articles on Iraq and Burma, and his book on the European Union will be published later this year by Oxford University Press. Dr. Stacey previously worked in Washington as a consultant for the Open Society Institute’s democracy promotion arm.
Tiffany Starr
Tiffany Starr, our 46th Franklin Fellow, will serve in ECA’s Office of Exchange Coordination and Designation, where she will focus and advise on collaborative public-private partnerships with the private sector (a subject near and dear to our hearts).
Before becoming a Fellow, Tiffany assisted people in California communities as an ambassador for Heart Care America. In addition, she managed Silverlion Productions, where she worked with high tech communications companies, event producers, health and fashion companies. While teaching English in France and Switzerland, she directed the documentaries “The Skipper” and “Unity,” which have been shown at several film festivals in the United States.
Tiffany grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her outside interests include figure skating, competitive swimming, track, water skiing, cycling, karate, archery and fencing. She has traveled through Europe, Turkey, Thailand and the Sahara. Her hobby is photography, and she pursues interests in history, psychology and philosophy, as well.
Tiffany has a Bachelor’s Degree in Communications from California State University Los Angeles, a Business degree from Ferris State University in Michigan and a Certificate in French from Language de Accord in Paris, France.
Jennifer Stein
We are pleased to welcome Jennifer Stein as our 72nd Franklin Fellow. Jennifer, who started her service on January 31, is serving in the Office of War Crimes Issues (S/WCI), where she focuses primarily on war crimes issues involving Senegal, Sierra Leone, Cambodia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Jennifer most recently worked at Thompson Hine LLP in the International Trade & Customs Group where she focused on advising clients regarding the movement of goods, services and technology. She represented clients in government investigations before various administrative agencies, including the Bureau of Industry and Security, the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, the Office of Foreign Assets Control and Customs and Border Protection.
Jennifer was also active in pro bono, which included advising NGOs on constitutional drafting issues, the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of ex-combatants in post-conflict society, analysis of conflict mineral issues and advising an NGO on the potential filing of a petition challenging anti-gay legislation. Prior to practicing law, she worked as an extern for Federal District Judge John M. Manos.
Jennifer is a 2006 graduate of Duke Law School and earned her B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis, from which she graduated cum laude. She also studied abroad in Brisbane, Australia. She is admitted to practice law in Ohio and the District of Columbia.
Samaruddin Stewart
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Mr. Samaruddin Stewart as the 189th Franklin Fellow. Mr. Stewart serves as a Foreign Affairs Officer/Media Expert providing strategic advising to the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Office of Economic Policy and Summit Coordination (WHA/EPSC).
He has been working in communications and journalism for over fifteen years having held senior management and editing roles at newspapers, international wire services, and top online news sites.
Recently, Mr. Stewart was chosen by Stanford University as a Knight Journalism Fellow researching media innovation -including social media verification and user generated content. Mr. Stewart holds an MBA from Central European University and a master’s degree from Arizona State University. Mr. Stewart has prior experience with the Department, having been employed as an EFM at Embassy Budapest from 2009-2010, including assisting with coverage of high level visits to that post. During his career, he’s had the opportunity to travel to over 60 countries on 6 continents.
Arsalan Suleman
The Franklin Fellows Program welcomes our 53rd Fellow, Arsalan Suleman, who will serve as the Deputy to Rashad Hussain, President Obama’s Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (IO/OIC). Arsalan will assist the Special Envoy in the Administration’s efforts to deepen and expand the partnerships the President announced in Cairo, Egypt last June.
Arsalan graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service with a B.S. in Foreign Service as an International Security Studies major and with a Certificate in Muslim-Christian Understanding. As a George Mitchell Scholar, he earned a Master’s degree in International Peace Studies from Trinity College, Dublin. His J.D. is from Harvard Law School, where he published several articles on national security and the law and was a Fellow with the Harvard Negotiation Research Project. After law school, Arsalan clerked for Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, a federal district court judge in the Southern District of New York, and worked as a litigation associate at the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP.
Arsalan is admitted to the New York State bar and is a member of the New York State Bar Association and the American Bar Association.
Paul Svab
Paul Svab is a new State Department Franklin Fellow who will be working on projects on the Sweden Desk until January 31, 2015. Paul possesses a unique combination of professional and expert experience in the private and public sectors. His service includes work in Russia, Nordic and Baltic countries, Eastern Europe and Southeast Europe.
Originally from Prague, Paul immigrated to the United States in 1981. Paul became Technical Director for The Coca-Cola Company operating in the former Soviet Union in 1990, and thereafter moved to St. Petersburg to build a new production and distribution facility. More recently, Paul advanced USAID projects that focused on economic growth, job creation and competitiveness in emerging markets.
Paul and his wife, Larissa, enjoy traveling and culinary adventures.
Dr. Severus Tackett
We are pleased to welcome our 129th Franklin Fellow, Dr. Severus Tackett. Severus serves in the Secretary’s Office of the Special Representative for Global and Intergovernmental Affairs (S/SRGIA), where he works with the U.S. interagency community, stakeholders and both foreign and domestic state and local leaders, ultimately playing a key role in developing and monitoring S/SRGIA office management policies and SOPs. He also works on several of the Office’s functional interests, including sustainable urban development, trade and economic issues, finance and multilateral/international organizations and institutions.
Severus comes to us from his own consulting firm, S.D. Tackett & Associates, which offers business development services to SME IT companies. He started his professional career as a young executive at the General Motors Corporation, World Headquarters, continuing in the private sector at several Fortune 100 companies, including as Senior Program Manager IV at Oracle Systems Corporation and as a Principal Financial Analyst at Coca-Cola. As a Senior Research Psychologist at Science Applications International Corporation, he designed and implemented the first-ever scientific research study absent of simulator sickness at the Federal Highway Administration Research Center.
Severus has extensive global professional experience extending to over 20 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. He was a Professor of Psychology with the University of Maryland’s European Division in Heidelberg. While there, he developed and taught undergraduate and graduate programs in psychology, sociology, statistics and research methodologies. Among other successes, he initiated a program whereby senior NCOs and Officers in forward deployed operations could enroll troops in courses. As a credentialed psychologist, he often volunteered his professional expertise in deployed and remote military hospital command operations. In recognition of his service in forward deployed theatres, he is the recipient of the U.S. Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal, three NATO Meritorious Service Medals for work in Bosnia and Kosovo and many other distinguished military honors, medals and awards.
Severus received a bachelor’s degree in Advanced Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley and a doctorate in Applied Experimental Psychology from Oxford University. He was a post-doctoral Dean’s Scholar in Psychology at Stanford University.
His interests include his family, global travel, foreign cultures and world leaders, with special interests in military history.
Dr. Nina Tannenwald
The
Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Dr. Nina Tannenwald. She is the
133rd Franklin Fellow. Dr. Tannenwald serves in the Multilateral Nuclear and
Security Affairs (INS/MNSA) office as a Foreign Affairs Officer (Expert) to
contribute to the office’s work on strengthening the nuclear nonproliferation
regime, the IAEA, and multilateral deliberations on nuclear weapons free zones.
This is not her first time in the State Department: In 1985 she served as an
intern in Embassy Amman.
Dr.
Tannenwald comes to us from Brown University, where she teaches in the Department
of Political Science. She directed the International Relations Program at
Brown from 2003-2006. Previously,
she held positions as Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado,
Boulder, and Associate Research Professor at Brown’s Watson Institute for
International Studies. She has been a visiting professor at Cornell and
Stanford Universities, a Carnegie Scholar, and a MacArthur Foundation Research
and Writing Fellow in International Peace and Security.
Dr.
Tannenwald’s research interests
lie in international institutions and norms in the security area, WMD, and
human rights and the laws of war. Her articles have appeared in numerous
prestigious journals. Her book, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States
and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (Cambridge, 2007) received
the Lepgold Prize for a best book in international relations in 2009. She has
also co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies on the role
of ideas and the end of the Cold War. The MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie
Corporation have supported her research on why some weapons are regarded as
inhumane while others are not.
She
holds a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Public and International
Affairs and a Ph.D. from Cornell University.
William Tarpai
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to have brought onboard our 80th Fellow William Tarpai. William is serving in the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), where he works in the Office of Civilian Response Operations (CRO) on readiness issues related to fielding our U.S. civilian surge capacity.
William had a long career with UNHCR, retiring in July 2010. His career work involved emergency response capacity building, human rights and refugee law advocacy and helping both refugees and internally displaced persons help themselves find durable solutions. He had assignments in Bosnia, Mozambique, Uzbekistan, Angola, Pakistan and Switzerland. He was twice an emergency team member – being deployed to Mozambique monitoring isolated rural border crossing points with Zimbabwe.
Earlier, William was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Dominican Republic, promoting rural community development close to the Haitian border. Then, after service as a United Nations Volunteer with UNHCR in Somalia, William worked as a Peace Corps staff member. He worked with volunteer recruitment in Chicago and subsequently as the first Associate Country Director for Administration in Bulgaria.
William was born in northeastern Ohio and grew up in southern California. He learned Spanish working with migrant farm-workers, has traveled in every state of Mexico and bicycled from Mexico City to the Panama Canal. Military service taught him how to be self-sufficient. He holds a BA in Social Sciences from California State University – San Bernadino and a Master’s of Public Administration from the same university. He also did graduate research on social welfare administration at Uppsala University in Sweden as part of CSU’s International Program.
William is currently a Volunteer Chair of the Measles Initiative in the National Capital Region with the American Red Cross. His passions are helping to rear grandchildren with his wife, Helen, and advocating for citizen involvement to achieve successful outcomes against the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 around the globe.
Dr. Adrian Taylor
Dr. Adrian Taylor of Bowie State University is currently serving in The Bureau of African Affairs’ Office of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. He will have responsibility for the Horn of Africa and will advise AF/PDA teams focused on resolution of regional conflicts and outreach to the African diaspora.
At Bowie State, Dr. Taylor teaches African Government and Politics; Philosophy; Rhetoric; and African-American History. Dr. Taylor’s research concentrates on Counterterrorism, Human Development, and Human Security. He has written on terrorism in the Horn of Africa and is investigating homegrown terrorism, particularly among U.S. citizens inspired and radicalized by transnational terrorists from Southwest Asia and Africa.
Dr. Taylor knows Africa well from his travels, his studies at the Arabic Language Institute in Morocco, his work with the International Research Foundation in Ghana and his study and work with the UNDP and UNESCO in Senegal. He was Africa Affairs Director of the United Nations Association of the National Capital Area. Dr. Taylor worked on political framing and voting rights as a Policy Analyst with the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. Additionally, he was a Teaching Fellow at George Mason University and recently served as a member of the Foreign Service Selection Boards.
Dr. Taylor has been a member of the International Studies Association, the African Studies Association, the Human Capability Association, the United Nations Association of the National Capitol Area and the American Philosophical Association. He has earned three degrees from Howard University — a BA and MA in Philosophy and a Ph.D. in African Studies.
Dr. Kim Tingley
Franklin Fellow Kim Tingley is the Senior Urban & Municipal Services Advisor in USAID’s Water Team in the Office of Natural Resources Management and the Urban Team in the Office of Infrastructure and Engineering. The office helps developing countries provide drinking water supply and sanitation. Tingley provides advice to the Agency in headquarters and the field on water and sanitation service delivery and expansion; urban planning and municipal services; and infrastructure finance.
Kim Tingley started Tingley Construction Company in 1992 to build communities of moderately priced single family homes on a “for profit” basis. He is also a Consulting Engineer and has been the Vice-president and Regional Manager of Atlantic Homes Corporation. While he was there, Atlantic received the Governor of Virginia’s Affordable Housing Achievement Award. Affordability innovations included applying for and receiving special financing from the Virginia Housing Development Authority and downpayment assistance from the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development. Previously, Tingley served as Director of Public Works and Utilities in York County Virginia where he initiated a $10,000,000 water and sewer construction project. He is also a past president of the Homebuilder’s Association of Virginia.
Tingley received his MBA from the College of William and Mary and a Masters in Civil Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Swarthmore College. While he is serving as a Franklin Fellow, his wife, Deborah Lawrence, is simultaneously serving the Department of State as a Jefferson Fellow in the Bureau of Oceans and Science (OES). They are the first combination of husband and wife Franklin and Jefferson Fellows.
Alan Tomkins
The Franklin Fellows Program warmly welcomes Fellow # 74, Dr. Alan J. Tomkins of the University of Nebraska. Alan, who began his service on February 2, has joined the Secretary’s Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative (S/GHFSI) as primary advisor on the diplomatic side of the Feed the Future Initiative.
Alan is the Director of the University’s Public Policy Center, where his research interests include public input to and public trust/confidence in government, and issues of justice and fairness. He has coordinated a multi-year project in which the City of Lincoln (NE) obtains citizen input for municipal budgeting and performance measurements. As part of this work, he and his colleagues have created online and face-to-face opportunities for residents of Lincoln to provide input about their preferences for programs to be reduced or eliminated – or tax increases – required for the City to meet its budget, and identified preferred benchmarks to use to evaluate City service performance outcomes (e.g., police need to respond to 90% of traffic accident calls within 10 minutes).
These public engagement activities are now entering their fourth year, and the trust/confidence data the team has collected shows an increase in the public’s confidence after they have participated in the engagement activities, particularly the face-to-face discussions. The Center’s engagement outreach has become an integral part of the policy approach taken by City Hall and anecdotally appears to now be part of the public’s expectations (residents are eager to weigh in with their perspectives).
Alan’s other current research includes a study pertaining to Congress’s public engagement requirement for nanotechnology research and development (why and which forms, features, contexts of public engagements are meaningful to participants and produce information and insights useful to scientists and policymakers); a project examining resilience and adaptive management related to water resources; and a project development of Geographic Information System (GIS) applications for law enforcement use.
Alan holds a J.D. and Ph.D. from Washington University and a B.A. from Boston University. He is a member of policy and psychology professional societies and is a fellow of two divisions of the American Psychological Association (Psychology-Law and Psychology Study of Social Issues). He also serves as co-editor of Court Review, the journal of the American Judges’ Association. He formerly served as editor of Behavioral Sciences & the Law, an international academic journal that publishes studies and analyses of the social science-and-law intersections.
Caroline Emch
Caroline Emch serves as a Franklin Fellow to the Office of Investment Affairs in the Economic Bureau, with the specific goal of assisting the Office with their Investment Climate Statements and Africa-related investment-matters.
Miss Emch joins the State Department from Singapore, where she has been working as a consultant for Asia Group Advisors, working with foreign firms who want to invest in Southeast Asia. Her specialty includes market entry issues and political risk, looking specifically at markets in Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Previously, she worked for Veracity Worldwide in New York, where she conducted in-depth investigations and research into Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and UK Bribery Act violations in Western and Northern Africa.
Miss Emch graduated with a BA in Political Science from Davidson College and studied Arabic through the State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship program in Amman, Jordan. She was raised in Switzerland and previously lived in Sierra Leone, Sudan, and Argentina.
Kegan Johnson
Kegan Johnson serves as a Franklin Fellow to the Office of East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL/EAP). In this capacity, Mr. Johnson develops analytical tools that help quantify nation-specific and regional trends relating to human rights and democratic development. Working with country experts in DRL/EAP, and in coordination with diplomatic posts, he is tasked with analyzing data and intelligence to better inform U.S. foreign policy. His work includes, but is not limited to, the Bureau’s specific interests in: prisoners of conscience, extrajudicial killings, diplomatic reciprocity, and freedoms of activists.
Mr. Johnson joins the Franklin Fellows program with over five years of business analysis, economic development, and international relations experience. Prior to his appointment with the Department of State, Mr. Johnson worked at Syufy Enterprises in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a member of the Analysis and Corporate Development teams, he assisted in vetting investment proposals and monitoring financial performance for a diverse collection of businesses throughout the United States. He was recognized for his achievements as the 2015 Employee of the Year.
Before joining Syufy Enterprises, Mr. Johnson worked at the World Trade Center San Diego as an associate within the International Relations Office (IRO). In this position, he conducted statistical analyses of international business investments, economic development initiatives, and regional industry trends with an intentional focus on cross-border development. He was also intimately involved in handling logistical support for international business and government delegations, creating state-level customs and business etiquette reports, and overseeing the IRO quarterly report for associated business partners.
Mr. Johnson is the recipient of dual degrees from the University of San Diego in International Relations (BA), summa cum laude and Business Administration (BBA), summa cum laude. As a Division I men’s soccer student-athlete, he was recognized on the Commissioner’s Scholar Athlete Honor Roll for the West Coast Conference. Mr. Johnson was a four-year Dean’s List recipient and only one of three individuals out of his graduating class to be presented with the Edward N. Morin Award in International Relations.
Mr. Johnson’s professional interests include economic development, international trade and finance, political economy, and the democratic conditions that facilitate sustainable development. Personal interests include outdoor recreation and international travel.
Todd Green
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Dr. Todd Green. Dr. Green serves as a Franklin Fellow to the Office of Policy and Global Issues in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs (EUR/PGI). He assesses and analyzes Islamophobia in Europe, including the impact of anti-Muslim prejudice on countering violent extremism initiatives, refugee and migrant policies, and human rights.
Dr. Green’s tenure at the U.S. Department of State is sponsored in part by the American Academy of Religion (AAR)-Luce Fellowship in Religion and International Affairs. The AAR-Luce Fellows Program is made possible by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.
Dr. Green is an associate professor of religion at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, where he teaches courses on European and U.S. religious history as well as interfaith dialogue. He also leads a study abroad course on Islam in Europe, taking students to the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, and the United Kingdom to study the cultural and political debates concerning Muslim minority communities.
A past co-chair of the Religion in Europe group in the American Academy of Religion, Dr. Green’s research focuses on Islamophobia, secularization, and interfaith dialogue in the West. His most recent book is The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West (Fortress Press 2015). He is also the editor of Islam, Immigration, and Identity (MDPI 2014). His public scholarship includes writing for the Huffington Post and interviews with media outlets such as CNN, NPR, Al Jazeera, France 24, and Reuters.
Dr. Green holds a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) from Birmingham-Southern College, a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) from Columbia Theological Seminary, and a Master of Arts (M.A.) and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) from Vanderbilt University.
Dr. Alison Mann
Dr. Alison Mann serves as a Franklin Fellow to the U.S Diplomacy Center in the Bureau of Public Affairs Office (USDC/PA) as a subject matter expert in the field of public history and education.
Dr. Mann was recently Assistant Professor of History at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, GA, teaching courses in public history, multicultural America, and a cultural history of the Civil War. She has also taught diplomatic history and the history of American slavery and abolitionism at the University of New Hampshire and Franklin Pierce University, and worked for Boston African American National Historic Site.
Dr. Mann previously served as a Franklin Fellow (2010-2011) at the Washington Foreign Press Center in the Bureau of Public Affairs (FPC/PA) as a media affairs officer for Eastern Europe and staff historian.
Dr. Mann holds an MA and Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire, and a BA from Rutgers University. She is the author of “Horrible Barbarity, the 1837 Murder Trial of Dorcas Allen, a District Slave,” Washington History, (Spring, 2015), and Slavery Exacts an Impossible Price: John Quincy Adams and the Dorcas Allen Case, Washington, D.C. (diss, University of New Hampshire, 2010). She is currently working on turning her dissertation into a book manuscript.
Terry Tracy
The Franklin Fellows Program would like to welcome Ms. Terry Tracy. She is the 191st Fellow. Ms. Tracy serves as a Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of International Disability Rights in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor working on issues related to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Over the last 20 years Ms. Tracy has made a career of foreign affairs in a variety of sectors: civil society, development assistance, journalism, and diplomacy. She began in 1990 as a volunteer caring for street children in an orphanage in El Progreso, Honduras. She returned to the US and spent two years in a human rights non-governmental organization, the Washington Office on Latin America. In 1994, she traveled to Guatemala as a journalist. In 1998, she became managing editor of the Grassroots Development Journal.
In 2000, Ms. Tracy joined the State Department as a foreign affairs officer to work as a negotiator for the Summit of the Americas and subsequently served in the US Mission to the Organization of American States. As a consequence of her epilepsy she became interested in disability rights and helped organize an employee advocacy organization inside the State Department. She wrote the charter for the Disability Action Group, which was founded in 2007. Shortly thereafter she left the State Department. During her seven years outside of government she authored the novel, A Great Place for Seizure, and became active in the international disability rights movement.
Ms. Tracy holds a master’s degree from Cambridge University.
Jonathan Turner
The Franklin Fellows Program welcomes our 78th Fellow, Jonathan Turner. Jonathan serves as the primary advisor for press and public diplomacy in EUR’s Office of Policy and Regional Affairs. EUR/PRA takes the Bureau lead in planning, formulating and implementing policy on nonproliferation, civil nuclear cooperation, arms control, space policy and security assistance issues.
Prior to becoming a Franklin Fellow, Jonathan worked as a Marketing Consultant in New York City, specializing in Public Affairs. He was a Congressional Liaison Officer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and worked in advertising for the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center.
Jonathan received his M.A. in History from the George Washington University with a concentration in Imperial and Colonial Studies. He holds a B.A. in History from New York University, where he was a University Honors Scholar and a member of Phi Alpha Theta, the History Honor Society.
Jonathan’s hobbies include photography, travelling, hiking, whitewater rafting and wilderness expeditions, while his main interests are history, politics and international affairs.
Laurel Voloder
Laurel, our 117th Fellow, is assigned to DRL’s Office of International Religious Freedom, charged with monitoring and reporting on religious persecution and discrimination and with formulating U.S. policies and programs to promote religious freedom around the world. Laurel will oversee policy development and program activities in a portfolio comprising countries in Eastern and South-Central Europe.
Laurel is the second Franklin Fellow nominated and sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), a New York-based, private, non-profit federation of 70 national scholarly organizations. Created in 1919, the ACLS is dedicated to the advancement of humanistic studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and social sciences. It made its first grants, totaling $4500, in 1926. In 2010, ACLS awarded over $15 million to more than 380 U.S.-based and international scholars.
Laurel is an inaugural fellow of the ACLS’ newly-established “Public Fellows Program,” which is placing eight recent Ph.D.’s in government and the non-profit sector for two years. The Public Fellows Program, made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to demonstrate that the capabilities developed in the advanced study of the humanities have wide application in government and beyond.
Laurel recently received her doctorate in Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz. She spent the last three and a half years living in Sarajevo, where she conducted dissertation and postdoctoral research. Her thesis examined evolving discourses of cultural identity in Bosnia from the death of Tito to the present day, with a focus on the media of underground music, mosque architecture and diaspora literature. For her postdoctoral research, Laurel looked at the contributions of women cultural producers to public discourses about challenges facing post-socialist Bosnia, and she identified ways in which their voices could be strengthened. Her research was supported by the ACLS, the American Association of University Women and American Councils for International Education.
Laurel earned a Master’s degree from the University of Chicago in Comparative Literature, with an emphasis on the 19th-century French and Russian novel. Her Bachelor’s is from The College of William & Mary in Literary and Cultural Studies.
Laurel has contributed essays and articles to several books and journals in the fields of avant-garde art and literature. She also worked as a grant-writer for the Sierra Club and has served as a volunteer for organizations that assist refugees, facilitate interfaith dialogue and strengthen women’s role in civil society.
Laurel moved from Sarajevo with her husband and daughter. Her personal interests include cooking, travel and yoga.
Michael Wack
The Franklin Fellows Program is proud to welcome our 87th Fellow is Michael Wack, who entered on duty on June 20. He is serving as Counselor to Ambassador Philip Verveer in EEB’s Office of the U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy (EEB/CIP), where he focuses on privacy and data protection policies, cloud computing, internet governance and freedom and preparations for the World Conference on International Telecommunications Economic Issues.
Michael comes to us with an extensive background in politics, regulation and business. He began his career as an aide to U.S. Senator John Glenn (D-Ohio), concentrating on regulated industries, principally communications. He ultimately rose to the twin positions of Legislative Counsel and Deputy Director of Issues and Research of the Senator’s 1984 Presidential campaign.
Michael performed two tours of duty at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). During the first, his work focused on interconnection issues and economic incentive regulation of wireline telephony companies. During the second, he led a team of lawyers and economists that developed a series of FCC orders ending state regulation of wireless telephony rates and market entry. He is a recipient of the FCC Silver Medal for Distinguished Service to the Commission.
In the private sector, Michael practiced law at the firm of Reed Smith Shaw & McClay. Thereafter, as Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of NextWave Telecom, Inc., a wireless start-up firm, he was instrumental in guiding the company through years of complex and contentious proceedings before Congress, the FCC, and multiple federal courts — including the U.S. Supreme Court — concerning the company’s wireless spectrum license rights, culminating in the sale of those rights for more than six billion dollars.
Michael was born in Washington, DC, and grew up there and in Rockville, Maryland, where he lives today with his wife, Nancy. He is a graduate of the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America and has been named a Distinguished Alumnus of his alma mater, Towson University. He is a member of the District of Columbia and Federal Communications Bar Associations.
We are delighted to welcome Michael to the Franklin Fellows family. His legal and communications background, both in and out of government, will be a huge asset to the Department and EEB. We again thank EEB and Ambassador Verveer for hosting our Fellows and for their strong and continuing support to the FF Program.
Michael Wasco
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Mr. Michael Wasco as the 150th Franklin Fellow. Mr. Wasco is an international human rights lawyer and this is his first time working for the State Department.
Mr. Wasco’s interests and expertise include the codification of rights in Islamic Constitutions, unilateral mechanisms for combating sexual and gender based violence in conflict, and the workings of the Inter-American human rights system.
Most recently, Mr. Wasco worked in Khartoum, Sudan, managing programs for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. Working with local civil society organizations, Mr. Wasco designed and implemented programs on electoral law reform, election monitoring, and constitutional review.
While serving as head of United Nations Advocacy for the Institute for Inclusive Security, Mr. Wasco successfully advocated for the increased role and number of women in peace processes. He has also worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland and the Inter-American Human Rights Court in San Jose, Costa Rica.
Prior to his international career, Mr. Wasco was a successful civil litigation attorney in Chicago, where he tried over thirty jury trials to verdict.
He has authored numerous publications on international law and human rights and holds a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies and a J.D. from Chicago Kent College of Law.
Shaun Yavrom
Our 92nd Franklin Fellow, Shaun Yavrom serves in the Office of Population and International Migration in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, where he covers policy issues of detention of irregular migrants and immigration reform as well as matters arising from the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Shaun comes to us from Dallas, Texas, where he practiced immigration law. He has represented clients in deportation proceedings as well as assisted clients to obtain immigration benefits through various paths, including the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and U-visas for victims of certain crimes. He has also presented before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights regarding the rights of undocumented workers in the U.S. Shaun holds a JD and a Master’s in international politics from American University. He received his BA in Sociology from the University of California, Davis.
Shaun is licensed by the State Bar of Texas. He is a member of the board of directors for Mil Mujeres, a non-profit organization in DC, which provides legal services to low-income individuals with immigration and family law issues.
Lilian Zia
We are pleased to announce that our 119th Franklin Fellow is Lilian Zia. Lilian is serving in IRO’s Office of eDiplomacy, where she is the Senior Innovation Advisor. Lilian’s portfolio is to look for opportunities to leverage technology for diplomacy around the world.
Lilian has many years of engineering and leadership experience. She is on a one-year leave of absence from Intel Corporation, where she is a Senior Product Manager, working on software platforms for mobile devices. Prior to her current role at Intel, she was a Senior Product Marketing Engineer, responsible for open source projects marketing for Mobile Internet Devices. Before Intel, she served various engineering roles at Qualcomm, where she worked on several mobile platforms and products.
Lilian graduated from McGill University (Montreal, Canada) with a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering and a Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering. She also graduated from Cambridge University (Cambridge, U.K.) with a Master’s in Business Administration. Lilian has a broad exposure to different cultures, as she has lived in many countries. She speaks Aramaic and Arabic and has good knowledge of French.
We are proud to welcome such an experienced professional to the ever-growing Franklin Fellows family. We have every confidence that Lilian will make important contributions to eDiplomacy’s global efforts. We thank IRM for its interest in the Franklin Fellows Program and eDIP Director Richard Boly and his team for welcoming another Franklin Fellow to their office.
Prof. Dr. Ashok K. Vaseashta
Prof. Dr. Ashok K. Vaseashta, our 65th Fellow, comes to us from Norwich University Applied Research Institutes, where he serves as Director of the Institute for Advanced Sciences Convergence and the International Clean Water Institute. Dr. Vaseashta will serve in the Bureau of Arms Control Verification and Compliance, Office of Verification and Transparency Technologies (AVC/VTT) where he will evaluate arms control requirements for treaties, both present and future.
Dr. Vaseashta previously served as a Foster Fellow to the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, working with the Office of Weapons of Mass Destruction and with the Terrorism and Foreign Consequence Management Program. He has also been a professor of physics at Marshall University’s Graduate Program in Physical Sciences, where he was the Director of the Nanomaterials Processing & Characterization Laboratories. He holds a visiting professorship at the 3 Nano-SAE Research Centre, University of Bucharest, Romania and is visiting scientist at the Helen and Martin Kimmel Center of Nanoscale Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.
Dr. Vaseashta has earned several other fellowships and awards for his meritorious service including 2004/2005 Distinguished Artist and Scholar award. Dr. Vaseashta’s research interests include counter-terrorism; advanced and nanomaterials for development of chemical-bio sensors/detectors; water safety and security; environmental pollution monitoring, detecting and remediation; and green nanotechnology.
Dr. Vaseashta is one of the leading researchers in the field of green nanotechnology. Dr. Vaseashta has authored over 200 research publications, edited/authored four books on nanotechnology, presented many keynote addresses and lectures worldwide on nanotechnology, environmental risk-assessment, and water safety and security. He served as the Director of three NATO Advanced Study Institutes and co-chair of an International Symposium on Nanotechnology. He also joined the U.S. Department of Commerce, NIST, and ANSI delegation to the U.K. representing the U.S. position on Standards in Nanotechnologies at the inaugural meeting of the ISO/TAG to TC-229. He is a member of NATO-SET-040, an exploratory team panel investigating security and surveillance applications of nanotechnology. He serves as an expert counsel to the UNESCO, ObservatoryNANO, and COSENT – south-east consortium on Nanotechnologies on NANO-Science and Technologies. He is an active member of several national and international professional organizations.
He earned his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech,, a Master’s Degree in Materials Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from the University of Delhi. Dr. Vaseashta speaks Japanese and French.
Frederi Viens
The Franklin Fellows Program welcomes Dr. Frederi Viens, who will join the Bureau of African Affairs’ Economic Policy Staff (AF/EPS) as an advisor for environment, science and technology issues.
Dr. Viens is sponsored by Purdue University, where he is a Professor of Statistics and Mathematics and Director of the Computational Finance Program. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in probability, statistics, quantitative finance, and insurance mathematics. His research centers on stochastic analysis, a multi-disciplinary scientific field that seeks to find rules behind random and chaotic natural and sociological phenomena. Dr. Viens’ applied interests include climate forecasting, actuarial science and econometrics. He is the author, editor and organizer of numerous research articles, books and conferences on both theoretical and applied topics.
Dr. Viens earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Irvine. He has been awarded a number of fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation and has held two postdoctoral positions in Europe. He has many international collaborators, including in countries of southern Africa, where he currently is involved in research and outreach activities.
Howard Wachtel
Howard Wachtel is a Franklin Fellow in the Political Section (Sanctions Unit) of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York, where he focuses on the al Qaeda/Taliban, Cote d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Iraq sanctions regimes. During the course of the year, Howard will be monitoring each of these regimes, attending Security Council sanctions committee meetings, and contributing to the negotiation and drafting of Security Council resolutions related to each regime. He comes to the U.S. Department of State from Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett LLP, where he is a litigation associate.
The Sanctions Unit is responsible for advocating and implementing U.S. policy at the United Nations related to current UN sanctions regimes, as well as helping to maintain existing sanctions regimes and developing new ones. Mr. Wachtel is primarily responsible for USUN’s interaction with the Security Council on issues related to al-Qaeda/Taliban sanctions (the “1267 regime”). He is responsible for providing guidance and recommendations regarding the strategic direction of the 1267 regime, including new measures to address recent litigation challenging the regime and to ensure that the regime adapts to the evolving nature of the terrorist threat.
Mr. Wachtel represents the United States on the Security Council Committee which oversees this regime, advocates U.S. opinions in the Committee and negotiates with other Committee members to advance U.S. foreign policy priorities. He also provides detailed reporting and analysis to Washington about developments in the 1267 Committee.
In addition to his duties related to the 1267 Committee, Mr. Wachtel supports USUN efforts on other sanctions regimes, most significantly for Cote d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Iraq. This may require attending Sanctions Committee meetings, negotiating texts, managing paperwork and assisting in the drafting of new Security Council resolutions.
Mr. Wachtel has worked as an attorney for three years, where he has been exposed to a diverse litigation practice, which includes securities law, international arbitration, reinsurance law, and antitrust law. Prior to beginning his practice as an attorney, he worked as an extern in the Office of the Legal Adviser (Treaty Affairs) at the U.S. Department of State. He has also worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies in London, in addition to serving as an intern on Capitol Hill. He has published three articles relating to the intersection of international law and foreign policy and has presented a fourth article for discussion at a Yale Journal of International Law symposium.
Mr. Wachtel received a Juris Doctor, as well as an LL.M. in international and comparative law, from Duke University. He received an undergraduate degree from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and a General Course Diploma in international relations from the London School of Economics.
M. Karen Walker
M. Karen Walker comes to the Franklin Fellows program while pursuing her doctoral degree in rhetoric and social change at the University of Maryland College Park. Her dissertation research will develop the rhetorical dimension of soft power, evinced through public-private partnerships in international diplomacy. Supporting areas of study include argumentation theory, public sphere theory, Diaspora studies, and analysis of leadership and ideologically-based social movements.
For example, Ms. Walker presented an analysis of transformational diplomacy at the 2007 annual meeting of the National Communication Association; addressed the narrative strategies of the Millennium Challenge Corporation at the 2008 NCA gathering; published an essay exploring the Arab public sphere, and is currently preparing a book chapter on American Exceptionalism. Ms. Walker has taught an undergraduate course on argumentation and public policy, and led an undergraduate seminar on rhetorical analysis relevant to terrorism studies. Also in the terrorism studies domain, Ms. Walker authored a chapter on “New Media’s Influence on the Assessment of Publicly Communicated Terrorist Threats” in Information Warfare 2.0: How States and Armed Groups Compete for Strategic Influence. Ms. Walker’s web site, www.rhetoricalens.info, informs policy development and advocacy in the domains of security studies, terrorism studies and public diplomacy by highlighting areas of interest and inquiry in common with the field of rhetoric.
Ms. Walker began her Fellowship with the Global Partnership Initiative, where she outlined regional and Departmental strategies for Diaspora community engagement and contributed to the evidence base for innovative approaches to partnership building. Ms. Walker currently serves in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Office of Near East and South Central Asia, managing democracy and governance programs and policy planning in Iraq.
Ms. Walker brings to her position expertise in program management, strategic planning, public diplomacy, and relationship management attained through her ongoing research as well as prior government service. Ms. Walker previously served as a public information officer in the U.S. Information Agency; supported energy efficiency and environmental security programs managed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; conducted environmental diplomacy, commercial diplomacy and public diplomacy programs for the U.S. Department of State; and brought the social and behavioral sciences to bear in meeting homeland security and information analysis requirements.
Ms. Walker’s professional affiliations include the International Communication Association, National Communication Association, and Rhetoric Society of America. In support of the sciences generally, Ms. Walker is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Ana West
The Franklin Fellows Program is delighted to welcome our 47th Franklin Fellow, Ana West. Ana will serve in the Office of International Health and Biodefense (OES/IHB), where she will serve as a Foreign Affairs Officer, working on matters specifically related to family planning, reproductive health, maternal and children’s health issues, and bioterrorism/biodefense; assessing the relationship of reproductive health, maternal health, infectious disease, health systems, and sustainable development questions to assist foreign policy and international efforts.
Ana served with the Southern Region Model United Nations (SRMUN) for seven years, assisted the YMCA Strong Kids Campaign with their fundraising efforts and coordinated data resources for Good Shepherd Services. She has studied in St. Petersburg, Russia and Olomouc, Czech Republic and holds a BA in Political Science from Valdosta State University. Ana also has a Master’s Degree in International Relations and Diplomacy from the John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy at Seton Hall University and is working toward a Doctorate in Health Policy and Management at New York Medical College.
Dr. Vivienne Wildes
Dr. Vivienne Wildes is currently serving in DRL’s Office of International Labor and Corporate Social Responsibility (DRL/ILCSR), working on business and human rights.
Dr. Wildes comes to us from The Pennsylvania State University, where she teaches courses in Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Human Resource Management (HRM) in the School of Hospitality Management in the College of Health and Human Development. Her research agenda is interdisciplinary and encompasses issues surrounding corporate responsibility.
Dr. Wildes has worked at international, national and local levels. She wrote curriculum and instructed on Information Sharing projects funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Bhutan and is an instructor for the Bhutan Middle Management Hotel Programme (BMMHP). In 2009, she initiated Books for Bhutan, an outreach effort to help build a library for the new tourism school. She is a Fellow at the Rock Ethics Institute, active member of Principles for Management Education (PRME) and was a board member for the National Association of Fellowship Advisors (NAFA). She is a member of the Commission for Women and Global Programs at Penn State.
Dr. Wildes holds a Ph.D. in Man-Environment Relations (MER) and a Master’s degree in Management from The Pennsylvania State University, as well as certifications from the Institute of the World Bank and the University of Nairobi.
Youngha Yu
Youngha Yu is serving as a Franklin Fellow in the Office of Economic Policy in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. He works on a variety of topics including energy, transportation and macro-economic policy issues facing the region. Young joins the Franklin Fellows from Goldman Sachs & Co. where he is a Vice President in the prime brokerage area of the Securities Division. He applies an in-depth and practical knowledge of a wide range of products, global markets and investment strategies in order to manage the daily prime brokerage relationship with a number of Goldman Sachs & Co. hedge fund clients.
Young holds a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics from Boston College and is a CFA charter holder.
Dr. Sousan Abadian
Dr. Sousan Abadian serves as a Franklin Fellow to the Office of International Religious Freedom, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, focusing on gender and human rights as well as the importance of addressing collective trauma and cultural revitalization in preventing radicalization and violent extremism. She is an Iranian-born scholar with three graduate degrees from Harvard University: an M.A. in the Anthropology of Social Change & Development, an M.P.A. with a concentration in Economic Development, and a Ph.D. in Political Economy and Government. In recent years, she served as a Fellow at M.I.T.’s Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values as well as the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Dr. Abadian’s academic research on what it takes to heal collective trauma, a key contributing factor in generating cycles of violence and intergenerational poverty worldwide, has been described as “pioneering” and “highly original” by Nobel laureate in economics Amartya Sen. Her work on healing collective trauma demonstrates the importance of not only individual recovery from trauma but also, cultural renewal. For several decades she collaborated closely with the innovative Adaptive Leadership program at Harvard’s Kennedy School, was a founding Associate with Cambridge Leadership Associates, and has had a private practice training individuals to develop their leadership capacity to more effectively orchestrate and pace positive sociocultural change, healing and reconciliation.
Dr. Abadian’s early career revolved around poverty reduction which led her to rural Bangladesh and India where she researched micro-lending enterprises such as Grameen Bank and BRAC in the early 1980s. Her research and work centered around righting gender disparities in economic development and generating greater autonomy for women and access to resources. Her concern for the consequences of high birth rates on wellbeing and on the natural world led her to research humane means of reducing fertility. Her research was among the pioneering efforts which established that greater autonomy for women resulted in lowered birth rates, culminating in the publication of her findings based on a 40-country econometric analysis in World Development journal, “Women’s Autonomy and Its Impact on Fertility.”
Jennifer Glaudemans
The Franklin Fellows Program is pleased to welcome Jennifer Glaudemans as the 228th Franklin Fellow. She serves in the Office of Global Criminal Justice (formerly the office of War Crimes Issues) as a Foreign Affairs Officer. Her portfolio in J/GCJ includes accountability and transitional justice issues in Nepal, Sri Lanka, and North Korea and ongoing legal and policy planning in regard to international criminal tribunals, including the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia and the International Criminal Tribunal in Bangladesh. Ms. Glaudemans also serves as the backup officer for accountability and transitional justice concerns in Burma.
Ms. Glaudemans comes to J/GCJ from New York University School of Law where she recently completed an LLM in international legal studies, focusing on international human rights, international humanitarian and international criminal law. While there, she completed an internship at Human Rights Watch and competed in the American Red Cross’ Clara Barton International Humanitarian Law Competition as one of three team members chosen from NYU. Prior to NYU, Ms. Glaudemans was the Executive Director for an NGO that supported democracy and civil society in Russia, and conducted contract research analyzing corruption in Central Asia and the Caucuses. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Ms. Glaudemans worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research as an analyst of Soviet foreign policy in the developing world and Soviet arms control policy respectively, winning several awards for Meritorious Services, and traveling throughout the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. She has also served as guardian ad litem for the Family Court Operations Division of the District of Colombia Superior Court.
Ms. Glaudemans is also a blue water sailor, having circumnavigated the globe on her 44-foot catamaran from 2010 to 2012.
In addition to her LLM, Ms. Glaudemans earned her JD from the University of Connecticut, a Master’s in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, and a BA from the University of Texas at Austin (Plan II Program).
Dr. Karin L. Johnston
Dr. Karin L. Johnston serves as a Franklin Fellow in the Office of Partnerships and Strategic Communications in the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO/PSC). Her work will focus on civil-military issues and post-conflict stabilization strategies.
Dr. Johnston teaches European Politics at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, D.C. Her research has focused on foreign and security policy analysis, U.S.-European relations, public opinion and the media, and German foreign and security policy. She has worked in policy research institutes in Washington, D.C., including as Senior Research Associate at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS).
Dr. Johnston has written on German foreign policy decision-making on out-of-area operations, German public opinion on the Bosnian crisis and the 2003 Iraq war, media and politics, religion and politics, and U.S.-German-French relations, including: “A New Assertiveness? Germany wades into the Syrian conflict with vote for anti-ISIS military mission.” AICGS Advisor Newsletter, December 15, 2015; “Germany,” in Richard Sobel, Peter Furia, and Bethany Barratt, eds., Public Opinion and International Intervention: Lessons from the Iraq War (Potomac, MD: Potomac Books, 2012); and “Religion and Politics: The European Debate,” AICGS Issue Brief #15 (Washington, D.C.: AICGS, 2007). Her current research includes projects on the European refugee crisis, European security and defense policy, and civil-military cooperation and conflict management in multilateral peace and stability operations.
Dr. Johnston received a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and a M.A. in International Studies from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. While in Denver, she also served as an assistant to the Lieutenant Governor of Colorado. She holds a B.A. from the University of Nebraska-Omaha. Fluent in German, Dr. Johnston has been a recipient of a Mercator Fellowship at the NRW School of Governance, University of Duisburg-Essen (2014) and is a former Fellow of the Robert Bosch Foundation Fellowship Program. She is a non-resident Fellow at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS).
Dr. Christopher Mott
Christopher Mott serves as a Franklin Fellow in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in the South and Central Asia region (DRL/SCA), with the specific task of researching the effectiveness of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programs in Central Asia as well as analyzing the diplomacy the United States uses in communicating related human rights issues in the region.
Dr. Mott comes from a predominantly academic background, having acquired a BA in History (Rutgers University-2007) with a focus on Native American warfare and diplomacy, an MA in International Relations (London Metropolitan-2008) with a focus on U.S. offshore balancing strategy in the East Asia/Pacific region, and a Ph.D in International Relations (University of St Andrews-2014) with a dissertation on analyzing Central Asian geopolitics through a historical lens. He also took part in Semester At Sea during the spring of 2006 semester.
Dr. Mott has spoken at international relations themed conferences at Durham University, the University of Iceland, the University of Helsinki, and the University of St Andrews. He has published multiple articles and a book, ‘The Formless Empire: A Short History of Diplomacy and Warfare in Central Asia’ (2015, Westholme Publishing).
In addition to academic tutoring and research, Dr. Mott has prior work experience in a congressional office (2007) and a history archive (2015) as well as having been an intern at the Canadian Embassy in D.C. (2008).
Dr. Bahiyyah Muhammad
Bahiyyah M. Muhammad, PhD., serves as a Franklin Fellow in the capacity of a Foreign Affairs Officer assigned to the Office of Multilateral and Global Affairs, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL/MLGA), with the specific goal of reviewing the U.S. policy on the human rights of children and helping design new approaches to assist the U.S. government in addressing the issue. Dr. Muhammad will examine how the United Nations addresses human rights and advise on new ways forward. As a member of the M team, her portfolio consists of Child’s Rights/CRC, Race/CERD, US-UPR, and Special Procedures.
Prior to Franklin Fellowship, Dr. Muhammad serves as Assistant Professor of Criminology at Howard University (2014-Present). She is a global ethnographer and trained criminologist working on human rights issues for children of incarcerated parents for over thirteen years. She spent the summer of 2015 working with children of incarcerated parents on death row in Africa, and summer 2016 with children of incarcerated parents in Asia. During spring 2017, she presented her recent study, “Far From Prison: Success and Resiliency Among Children of the Incarcerated” at the conference for the International Coalition for Children with Incarcerated Parents (INCCIP) in New Zealand. Dr. Muhammad is co-author of “The Prison Alphabet: An Educational Coloring Book for Children of Incarcerated Parents” (2013), “Mass Incarceration: Perpetuating the ‘Habits of Survival’ and Race Identities of Black Women Caregivers to Children of Incarcerated Parents” (2016) and forthcoming articles in the Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law and the Journal of Criminal Justice & Law Review.
Dr. Muhammad holds a B.S. in Administration of Justice from Rutgers University with credits in Family Law from the University of Natal-Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, and M.A. in Corrections Administration from John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Rutgers University, Newark-School of Criminal Justice. Her dissertation, “Exploring the Silence Among Children of Prisoners” (2011) was an ethnographic study focusing on the experiences of domestic children of incarcerated parents.
Ike Syed
Ike Syed works as a Franklin Fellow in the Office of the Chief Economist (OCE). The OCE reports to the Secretary, through the Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment (E), and focuses on providing strategic advice, capacity building and outreach around emerging economic issues. As a sixteen-year veteran of the Information Communications Technology industry, Ike will advise on policy impacts of data localization, cyber-security and other next-generation technologies.
Previously, Ike worked as a Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Business Development at Connectloud, a next-generation Cloud Computing company. Before Connectloud, he was a management consultant at Oliver Wyman and a finance executive at Fidelity Investments, where he advised corporate leaders globally on critical strategic and business issues. In the past, Ike has led product management and technical research initiatives at Cisco Systems in Silicon Valley and Lucent Technologies/Bell Laboratories.
In 2012, Ike was selected to be part of Boston Chamber of Commerce’s Future Leaders program. He received his BASc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada and a MS in Computer Science from Boston University. A licensed Professional Engineer, he obtained his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Marc Warburton
Marc Warburton serves as a Franklin Fellow to the Office of Regional Affairs in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, with the specific goal of helping identify diplomatic initiatives to enhance nuclear stability and deterrence in South Asia.
Mr. Warburton has been working on nuclear weapon and ballistic missile issues for over 36 years. He spent five years in USSTRATCOM’s Policy and Plans Directorate (J5) supporting their Strategic Deterrence Assessment Lab as a deterrence analyst and modeling expert, where he helped develop J5’s initial all-of-government strategic deterrence and combatting WMD OPLANs. From 1992-2004 he worked for the Intelligence Community as a ballistic missile weapons system and proliferation analyst in Washington DC, specializing in modeling foreign ballistic missile performance and program development. Between 1983 and 1991 Mr. Warburton worked on a wide range of nuclear weapon systems programs, including advanced nuclear weapons concepts, ballistic missile defense penetration, and ICBM operations concept development and modeling. Mr. Warburton is currently the Director of National Security Education Programs at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and, since 2009, the Director of UNL’s IC Center for Academic Excellence, a DIA program that helps prepare students for careers in the IC.
Mr. Warburton holds a master’s degree in physics from the University of California, San Diego, and a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of California, Davis.
Steven Comerford
Steven Comerford serves as a Franklin Fellow in the Bureau of Counterterrorism and Countering Violent Extremism, Office of Counterterrorism Finance and Designations (CT/CTFD). His work focuses on the Department of State sanctions.
Previously, Steven Comerford has lectured on American Foreign Affairs, American Government and Civil Liberties. Steven has carried out research in exploring the legal limits of hyper-globalized crime and terrorism through new media. Steven has written on mental competency to stand trial, the legality of biometrics and the right to privacy, Afghan national security and building of the Afghan national army, and the compatibility of Sharia Law verse Democratic Constitutionality.
He has served in the U.S. Army, at NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan, and the Special Forces Advisory Groups in Afghanistan. He also served in Germany, where he performed day-to-day control and management of funding allocated to the Financial Management Company composed of five detachments disbursed in Europe. In addition, as a civilian, Steven returned to Afghanistan as a Special Forces/Finance advisor/trainer.
Steven has degrees from the University of Colorado (BA in Political Science), Mississippi State University (MPPA in Public Policy and Administration), and University of Kent (LLM/MA in International law with International Relations) and continues to complete his PhD in International Law. He has also has a Public Law certificate from The Hague Academy. As a graduate student at MSU, he was selected by the President of the United States to represent the U.S. interests for the future of space travel and exploration at the “Moon to Mars” Commission. He was also selected to represent the U.S. interests in new energy proposals talks for the future with the IAEA.
Linda Maizels
Linda Maizels serves as a Franklin Fellow to the Security Governance Initiative (SGI) in the Africa Bureau’s Office of Security Affairs, with the specific goal of contributing to SGI’s comprehensive goal of improving security sector governance and capacity in Africa for six countries (Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Tunisia).
Dr. Maizels works on public policy issues connected to Israel, the Middle East, and antisemitism and how these issues affect civil society, particularly the American and international Jewish communities. She was most recently the co-author of “Academic Freedom, Freedom of Expression, and the BDS Challenge: A Guide and Resource Book for Faculty” and “On Whiteness and the Jews” for the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism. She regularly teaches and lectures on these issues and also contributes articles to the popular press.
Dr. Maizels holds a Ph.D. in History from the Avraham Harmon Institute of Contemporary Jewry from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her dissertation focused on antisemitism at American colleges and universities.
Mahmoud El-Hamalawy
Mahmoud El-Hamalawy serves as a Franklin Fellow in the Bureau of Public Affairs at the US Diplomacy Center (USDC) with the specific goal of developing a mainstream and social media strategy for the Center, and advise on content and Engagement efforts.
A highly accomplished journalist and producer, Mr. El-Hamalawy has been working in the field for over 16 years with Aljazeera Media Network’s Washington DC Bureau. He led high profile team coverage of major news stories, social and cultural topics, and feature programs on behalf of his network. As a Senior News Producer, he has covered 4 US Presidential Elections, reporting on the significance of US policy and how that policy could impact a global audience. Working in-the-field throughout the country and internationally, Mr. El-Hamalawy has been a pillar in the network’s coverage of major world events, serving as a point of contact for the network’s DC Bureau, and inviting US perspectives on major global events like the War on Terror, the Financial Market Crash, and the Arab Spring. He has regularly coordinated and organized his network’s in-the-field coverage of international summits like the annual United Nations General Assembly, NATO Summits, G8/G20, and ASEAN. Mr. El-Hamalawy has also worked in several disaster zones including the earthquake aftermath in Haiti, tornado ravaged Joplin, and protests in Charlotte. He has also planned and covered various business, technology, and human interest stories.
Refugee integration into US society is a passion for Mr. El-Hamalawy. He volunteers with the Global Center for Refugee Education and Science as a Partnerships Officer. In this capacity, he helps the NGO communicate and establish relationships with outside organizations, think tanks, and non-profits. He has also moderated several of their panels and public conferences.
In 2010, Mr. El-Hamalawy was awarded the United Nations (Millennium Development Goals / MDG’s) Journalism Fellowship. In 2011, Mr. El-Hamalawy addressed the Winter Conference of the Junior Statesmen of America in Congress on the impact of social media in the Arab Spring. He holds a BA from GMU in Government and International Politics and a Minor in Information Technology.
Mary Borgman
Mary Borgman serves as a Franklin Fellow to the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator and Health Diplomacy (S/GAC), the U.S. Department of State’s coordinating office for PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), with the specific goal of supporting the Gender Team with the DREAMS program and reducing stigma, discrimination, and violence toward key populations with the Affected Populations, Human Rights, and Community Engagement unit.
Ms. Borgman has worked in child protection and implementation of HIV prevention and care services both domestically and internationally for over 13 years. She has supported the provision of social services with a trauma informed perspective to address child abuse/neglect, substance use, domestic violence, gender based violence, mental health, and public health initiatives in underserved populations. From 2005-2011 Ms. Borgman worked with Washington State Child Protection Services to address the safety, health, and welfare of vulnerable children. She went on to direct orphans and vulnerable children’s programming in the South African township context (2011-2014), which included empowerment of women and girls, addressing societal expectations of boys and men, and supporting resiliency. Ms. Borgman has experience collaborating with partners and supporting local staff to improve management of resources and transparency. More recently (2015-2018), she has provided integrated mental health services for medically-underserved children and adults with a Federally Qualified Health Center, specializing in trauma treatment and HIV care.
Ms. Borgman holds a master’s degree in social work (2006) and is a licensed independent clinical social worker (LICSW) in Washington State. Ms. Borgman’s academic studies focused on political science and international social work, including research with an informal settlement community in Eastern Cape, South Africa.