Dr. Karen Jacobsen
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
Ambassador Audra Plepyté Ambassador Kristjan Prikk Ambassador Maris Selga Ambassador Paula Dobriansky
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
Kimberly Flowers and Alex de Waal
Virtual
David M. Lampton is Senior Research Fellow at the SAIS Foreign Policy Institute and Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies—SAIS. For more than two decades he was Hyman Professor and Director of China Studies at SAIS. Lampton is former Chairman of the The Asia Foundation in San Francisco, former President of the National Committee on United States-China Relations in New York, and former Dean of Faculty at SAIS. His many publications, academic and popular, deal with US-China Relations, Chinese Foreign Policy, Chinese Leadership, Chinese Politics, and Chinese Power. His most recent volume tells the exciting story of China’s drive to build high-speed railways in Southeast Asia—Rivers of Iron. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in political science where, as an undergraduate student, he was a firefighter. Lampton has an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Far Eastern Studies. He is a Life Trustee on the Board of Trustees of Colorado College and was in the US Army Reserve in the enlisted and commissioned ranks.
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
Tom Andrews, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar.
Virtual
Dr. Evan Ellis is a research professor of Latin American Studies at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, with a focus on the region’s relationships with China and other non-Western Hemisphere actors, as well as transnational organized crime and populism in the region. Dr. Ellis has published over 330 works, including five books: the 2009 book China in Latin America: The Whats and Wherefores, the 2013 book The Strategic Dimension of Chinese Engagement with Latin America, the 2014 book China on the Ground in Latin America, the 2018 book Transnational Organized Crime in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the 2022 book China Engages Latin America: Distorting Development and Democracy? Dr. Ellis previously served on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff (S/P) with responsibility for Latin America and the Caribbean (WHA), as well as International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) issues. In his academic capacity, Dr. Ellis has presented his work in a broad range of business and government forums in 27 countries four continents. He has given testimony on Latin American security issues to US Congress on various occasions, has discussed his work regarding China and other external actors in Latin America on a broad range of radio and television programs, and is cited regularly in the print media in both the US and Latin America for his work in this area. Dr. Ellis has also been awarded the Order of Military Merit José María Córdova by the Colombian government for his scholarship on security issues in the region.
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
Alexandra Vacroux is Executive Director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Her scholarly work addresses many Russian and Eurasian policy issues and she teaches popular courses on the comparative politics of Eurasia and post-Soviet conflict. As Director of Graduate Studies for the Davis Center’s MA program in regional studies, she has mentored dozens of Harvard’s best and brightest students and regional experts. Alexandra lived in Moscow from 1992 to 2004. While there she held a number of positions, including consultant for the Russian Privatization Agency; partner and head of sales at the Brunswick Warburg investment bank; and active member of the board of United Way Moscow. While completing her dissertation on corruption in Russian pharmaceutical markets she was affiliated with the Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR), a Russian think tank associated with the New Economic School. Prior to joining the Davis Center in 2010 lived in Washington, DC, where she was a Scholar at the Kennan Institute, part of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Alexandra received a Dean’s Distinction Award from Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and was given the Alumni Award from the Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) Program at Tufts. As a commentator, she has been praised as "refreshing," "straightforward," and "quick and to the point." She has appeared on NPR, CNN, Fox News Radio, China Central TV, Hromadske TV (Ukraine), and speaks regularly at community forums at home and abroad. She holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University.
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
Dr. Jennifer D. Sciubba, Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
As founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), recognized as the world’s top think tank for science and technology policy, Robert Atkinson leads a prolific team of policy analysts and fellows that is successfully shaping the debate and setting the agenda on a host of critical issues at the intersection of technological innovation and public policy. He is an internationally recognized scholar and a widely published author whom The New Republic has named one of the “three most important thinkers about innovation,” Washingtonian Magazine has called a “tech titan,” Government Technology Magazine has judged to be one of the 25 top “doers, dreamers and drivers of information technology,” and the Wharton Business School has given the “Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award.”
Virtual
Willy Shih
Virtual
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