Meet the Voices from the Field

NB: All biographies were recent as of the relevant Voices year.

2014-15: Russia in the 21st Century

Karoun Demirjian
Moscow Correspondent, The Washington Post; Fulbright Recipient, Ukraine 

Mike Eckel
Writer and Editor, Voice of America, covering Russia’s annexation of Crimea and subsequent events; former Moscow Correspondent, Associated Press

Ilya Lozovsky
Assistant Editor, Democracy Lab, Foreign Policy; former Program Officer, Freedom House

Stephen Schmida
Co-Founder and Managing Director, SSG Advisers; former Regional Director, Russia and Central Asia, Eurasia Foundation; former Program Officer, National Democratic Institute

Shorena Shaverdashvili (EPIIC’99)
Partner and Editor, Liberali, Georgia

Zach Witlin
Associate, Eurasia Group; former Alfa Fellow, Cargill, Moscow; Fulbright Research Scholar, Ukraine

2013-14: The Future of the Middle East and North Africa

Sarah Arkin
Sarah Arkin is U.S. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s Senior Legislative Assistant, advising the Congresswoman on foreign poli- cy, trade, healthcare and other legislative priorities. She previously served in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in a variety of positions, including coordinating the Bureau’s human rights, women’s rights and religious freedom programming and on the Libya desk. She spent most of 2012 in Cairo, Egypt on a Boren Fellowship. While getting her master’s degree she worked as a research assistant at the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies and the Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University. Before that, she worked as photojournalist and journalist based in Tel-Aviv, Israel, Chicago and Virginia, winning a Virginia Press Association Breaking News Award in 2009. She is a Truman National Security Project Political Partner, has B.A. with honors from Tufts University in International Relations and Spanish and an M.A. with honors from Georgetown University in Conflict Resolution.

Rachel Brandenburg
Rachel Brandenburg is a program officer with the Syria and Arab-Israeli teams in the Middle East and Africa Center at the United States Institute of Peace. She previously worked at the State Department in the Office of Middle East Transitions as the Tunisia assistance coordinator, and in the Middle East Partnership Initiative office. Prior to joining the State Department, she was a Middle East program specialist at USIP primarily supporting work related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran, including the Senior Working Group for Middle East Peace, co-chaired by former National Security Advisors Samuel R. Berger and Stephen J. Hadley, and publication of the Iran Primer: Power, Politics, and U.S. Policy. Brandenburg has significant experience across the Middle East and North Africa, including as a Critical Language Scholarship recipient in Jordan, a Fulbright Scholar in Israel, and conducting research in Tunisia, Turkey and Iran. She completed a Master’s of Science in Foreign Service at Georgetown University with a focus on foreign policy and international security and holds a bachelor’s degree in international relations and Middle Eastern studies from Tufts University.

Matan Chorev
Matan Chorev joined the Department in February 2013 as a speechwriter and special assistant in the Office of the Deputy Secretary of State. He previously served as a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development, Executive Director for the Future of National Security Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and a Rosenthal Fellow at the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning. Matan holds a BA from Tufts and a MALD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Gabriel Koehler-Derrick
Gabriel Koehler-Derrick is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point and an Asso- ciate at the Combating Terrorism Center. Prior to joining the Combating Terrorism Center, Mr. Koehler-Derrick was a Program Officer at Soliya, inc. a small nonprofit organization where he worked on issues related to technology, conflict negotiation and resolution training, and project management. Mr. Koehler-Derrick holds an M.A. in International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a B.A. in International Relations from Tufts University.

Steven Krubiner
Steven Krubiner has spent the past decade working on Middle East conflict resolution on three continents, including five years based in Israel. As Chief of Staff, Steven leads J Street’s senior team in strategic planning and management for the organization. Prior to serving as J Street’s Chief of Staff, Steven was J Street’s Director of Israel and International Programs and oversaw efforts to highlight the signif- icant support that exists in Israel for a two-state solution. He first joined J Street shortly after its inception in 2008 as the Assistant Di- rector of Political Affairs and then moved into the position of Assistant Director of Legislative Affairs. He served as Policy Lead on Israel and the Palestinian territory for Oxfam International in Jerusalem. He was also a policy associate at the Institute for Inclusive Security where he worked with Israeli and Palestinian women leaders on designing inclusive peace and security processes. Prior to that, Steven worked for Search for Common Ground in Jerusalem where he was one of the coordinators of the Madrid+15 conference, convening officials and civil society leaders from the Middle East, Europe, the US, and the UN to strategize on launching a regional, comprehensive approach to resolving Arab-Israeli conflicts. A trained mediator, he holds a bachelors degree from Tufts University in International Re- lations and a master’s degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Middle Eastern Studies. He is currently earning his MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sherif Mansour
Sherif Mansour is an Egyptian-American democracy and human rights activist. He is currently the Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), where he works on issues of press freedom and protections for journalists across the MENA region. Before joining CPJ, Sherif worked at Freedom House, where he managed advocacy trainings for activists from the Middle East and North Africa. In 2010, Mansour co-founded the Egyptian Association for Change, a Washington-based nonprofit group that mobilizes Egyptians in the U.S. to support democracy and human rights in Egypt. In Egypt, he worked with the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies and has worked as a freelance journalist for Al-Kahera newspaper. In 2004, he was honored by the Al-Kalema Center for Human Rights for his work in defending freedom of expression in Egypt. Mansour has authored several articles and conducted research studies on civil society and the role of the new media and civil society in achieving democracy. He was named one of the top 99 young foreign policy professionals in 2013 by the Diplomatic Courier. He received his Master’s in international relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and his bachelor’s in education from Al-Azhar University in Cairo.

Duncan Pickard
Duncan Pickard is a nonresident fellow at the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, focusing on North African politics. Pickard was the Libya country director for Democracy Reporting International, where he is currently a constitutional adviser. He previously worked in Tunis for the International Foundation for Electoral Systems. His writing on constitutional reform in Libya and Tunisia has been pub- lished by Foreign Policy, Huffington Post, Journal of Democracy, and Journal of North African Studies, among others. Pickard holds de- grees in international relations and Middle Eastern studies from Harvard University and Tufts University. He is based in Berlin, Germany.

Negar Razavi
Negar Razavi is currently a doctoral student in cultural anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the knowledge systems, practices, and networks of influence U.S.-based foreign policy experts working on the Middle East. Specifically, she is looking at the negotiations and translations of this policy expertise into national security and human rights policies towards Egypt and Iran. Prior to coming to Penn, Negar worked as the Egypt Country Officer at the Education for Employment Foundation and as a research assistant in the U.S. foreign policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations, focusing on issues of gender and economic and political development across the Middle East. Negar has a Masters in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford and a bachelor’s in history from Tufts University.

Mouin Rabbani
Mouin Rabbani is the Head of the Crisis Management Initiative’s Programme in the Middle East. He leads CMI’s programme activities throughout the region. He joined CMI in 2010 and previously worked as Senior Project Manager for the Middle East and North Africa Programme. He previously worked as Senior Middle East Analyst and Special Advisor on Palestine with the International Crisis Group (ICG), as well as with a number of other organizations. He has published and been cited widely on Palestinian affairs and the Arab-Israeli conflict, including as a Contributing Editor to the Middle East Report. He also worked as Palestine Director of the Palestinian American Research Centre. He is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine.

Oleg Svet
Oleg Svet is a doctoral candidate at the War Studies Department, King’s College London. In the final year of writing up his thesis, his research examines the expansion of the Iraqi armed forces under the Baathist regime. Prior to beginning his PhD, between 2010 and 2011, he worked in Baghdad as a strategic planner with US Forces-Iraq during the last phase of the war in Iraq. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University-SAIS in 2010 with an MA in Strategic Studies and International Economics, and from Tufts University in 2008 with a BA in International Relations.

Alex Taylor
Alex Taylor is a Master of Arts in Law & Diplomacy candidate at the Fletcher School focusing on International Security Studies and Southwest Asia & Islamic Civilizations. She is currently a staff editor for The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs and for Al Nakhlah, Fletcher’s journal for Southwest Asia. Previously Alex worked as the International Editor and as a reporter at The Daily Star newspaper in Beirut, Lebanon covering local news, politics, social issues, health, and lifestyle. She has also worked as a research consultant for The World Bank, preparing a case study on the military’s role in governance in Turkey. Alex is a graduate of Tufts and an alumna of EPIIC.

2012-13: Global Health and Security

Ezra Barzilay
Dr Barzilay is currently the Team Lead of the National Surveillance Team and the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS), in the Enteric Diseases Epidemiology Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr Barzilay received his Bachelor’s and Medical degrees from Tufts University, in Boston, MA. Dr Barzilay completed a residency in pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine and then joined the Epidemic Intelligence Service corps at CDC to train in infectious disease epidemiology and is board-certified in pediatrics. Fluent in seven languages, Dr Barzilay’s field experience includes international public health interventions, foodborne outbreak investigations, and serving as a trainer and expert consultant for the World Health Organization.

Daniel Holmberg
Daniel Holmberg began his career in humanitarian aid in the South Sudan civil war in the early 1990s with the United Nations. He served with the International Com- mittee of the Red Cross between 1995-97 in the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide and on the front-line in the civil conflicts in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the early 2000s, he served as a Country Logistics Manager in Iraq, Liberia and Northern Sudan. Most recently, Daniel was the Country Director in Pakistan for Action Contre la Faim/Action Against Hunger.

Gregg Nakano
Gregg Nakano is an independent consultant focused on water insecurity in coastal communities and helping the US Army Public Health Command (USAPHC) implement their Veterinarian Support to Stability Operations Course (VSSOC). He is a former Program Development Officer for the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, where he lectured at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences (USUHS) and Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Center (KAIPTC), as well as assisted the Center for Disaster and Humanitarian Assistance Medicine (CDHAM) develop a language and cross- cultural curriculum for military health providers supporting stability operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Between 2007-2008, Nakano was an INSPIRE Fellow at the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL), where he helped refocus the Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services (ALLIES) priorities to include interagency coordination and stability operations. Nakano also laid the groundwork for ALLIES’ first Intellectual Roundtable, Simulation Exercise (SIMULEX), and supported the Joint Research Project to Jordan in 2008. He has helped the Department of Defense improve interagency coordi- nation during military health support for stability operations; deployed as a civil-military coordinator to Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Philippines, Guatemala and Cuba in support of the United States Agency for International Development’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID/OFDA); co-developed the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) “green border” pilot training program for Afghan Border Police in Tajikistan; and served as a Marine in the first Gulf War and the Rodney King riots. His academic background includes the United States Naval Academy, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Fudan University in China, and the University of Tehran in Iran. Nakano continues to be a mentor to the ALLIES program in its mission of civil-military education.

Louino Robillard
Louino Robillard was born in rural, northern Haiti but was raised in the infamous slum of Cite Soleil. He managed to complete primary and second- ary schooling despite the significant violence at the time, and was beginning his studies in linguistics when the earthquake of January 12, 2010 struck Haiti. He decided to re-dedicate his life to community service and social change and learned to be a mapper using the OpenStreetMap platform to map earthquake damage, and later began to work for the International Organization on Migration (IOM). At the same time, he was one of the found- ing members of a social movement in Cite Soleil called Konbit Soley Leve, which works to bring warring neighborhoods together through community action. He is now a master’s candidate in Community Change and Peacebuilding with the Future Generations Graduate School and is working on a nation-wide “success mapping” project with Future Generations Haiti.

Sabina Carlson Robillard
Sabina Carlson Robillard graduated Tufts in 2010 with a degree in Community Health and Peace and Justice Studies. She was involved in the IGL com- munity throughout all four years of undergraduate studies; in lieu of taking the Global Poverty and Equality EPIIC class, the IGL encouraged Robillard to embark on an independent study that would lead to her co-founding a community-driven research program in rural, northern Haiti called RESPE Ayiti. She led the first undergraduate trip to Haiti since the coup d’etat in 2004, and Robillard and her co-founders were awarded a Davis Project for Peace Prize in 2010. She took a leave of absence from Tufts in 2009 for an internship supporting nutritional and agricultural pilot programs with the Ministry of Agriculture of the Government of Southern Sudan and was seconded to UNHCR to pilot an agriculture project in the Lasu refugee camp. Robillard was a core member of the Ushahidi Haiti deployment at Tufts University, heading up diaspora outreach and being deployed to the field to coordinate services with displaced persons. She moved back to Haiti immediately after graduation, and settled in Cite Soleil, normally labeled a “red zone” or off-limits for security reasons. There she helped support community-based social movements for peace between warring neighborhoods. She became the youngest Program Officer at the International Organization for Migration in Port au Prince, supervising programs for Disaster Risk Reduction and communications in IDP camps, and left to work more closely with community initiatives in Cite Soleil. Robillard is currently a master’s candidate in Community Change and Peacebuilding with the Future Generations Graduate School; she and her husband Louino Robillard are leading an initiative called Wozo Ayiti to map and network successful community-led development across Haiti.

2011-12: Global Conflict in the 21st Century

This year’s Voices topic was “The Relationship between Military and Intergovernmental/ NGOs in Post Conflict and Emergency Situations.” Integrated with the EPIIC symposium on Global Conflict in the 21st Century, the Voices program examined the effects of the increasing role of the military in humanitarian relief efforts.

30-year humanitarian relief worker Daniel Holmberg and Fletcher School Security Studies Fellow Col. William Ostlund (US Army) were joined by Tufts alumni, Commander of the CDC, Dr. Ezra Barzilay, and senior United Nations Peacekeeping official, Nicholas Birnback.

Below is an outline of the topics covered in the discussions.

Discussion I: Where have the strategic goals of humanitarian organizations and the military been aligned and where have they diverged?

- Where is the “neutrality” debate moving given the impact of the changing military role on humanitarian organizations?
- From your perspective, where do the strategic goals of private military contractors and defense consultancy firms lie - how often are they aligned/divergent with other parties involved?
- When these goals are aligned or divergent, how is the relationship of stakeholders with local and government authorities affected?

Discussion II: Cases of mutual strategic goals

- What cases fall into this category?
- How can outcomes be optimized?
- How can the coordination between humanitarian organizations, the military and other stakeholders be improved?
- Are there emerging opportunities for collaboration that haven’t been implemented? 
- Are there scenarios where too much overlap creates complications? How can they be minimized?

Discussion III: Cases of divergent strategic goals

- What cases fall into this category? 
- How can outcomes be optimized? 
- How can the coordination between humanitarian organizations and the military be improved?
- Are there emerging opportunities for collaboration that haven’t been implemented? 
- Are there scenarios where too much overlap creates complications? How can they be minimized?

Ezra Barzilay
Dr Barzilay is currently the Team Lead of the National Surveillance Team and the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS), in the Enteric Diseases Epidemiology Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr Barzilay received his Bachelor’s and Medical degrees (he was a Schweitzer Fellow) from Tufts University, in Boston, MA. Dr Barzilay completed a residency in pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine and then joined the Epidemic Intelligence Service corps at CDC to train in infectious disease epidemiology and is board-certified in pediatrics. Fluent in seven languages, Dr Barzilay’s field experience includes international public health interventions, foodborne outbreak investigations, and serving as a trainer and expert consultant for the World Health Organization.

Nicholas Birnback (Tufts’92, EPIIC’91)
Nicholas Birnback is currently the Chief of the Public Information Office in the United Nations Political Office for Somalia. Prior to his current post, he served as Chief of the Peacekeeping Public Affairs Unit in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations. Additionally, he previously worked as a Political Officer and served as the Special Assistant to the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General at the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea. He has also worked as an Information Officer in Liberia and Sierra Leone, a Civil Affairs Officer and Special Assistant to the Deputy Commissioner of the UN Mis- sion’s International Police Task Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and an information Officer and Acting Spokesman for the United Nations Mission in East Timor. He has also worked as an External Relations Officer for the UN Department of Political Affairs’ Electoral Assistance Division. His areas of expertise are peacekeeping and military affairs. He has received an Alumni Achievement Award from the IGL and a Light on the Hill Award from Tufts.

Daniel Holmberg (F’12)
Daniel Holmberg began his career in humanitarian aid in the South Sudan civil war in the early 1990s with the United Nations. He served with the International Committee of the Red Cross between 1995-97 in the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide and on the front-line in the civil conflicts in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the early 2000s, he served as a Country Logistics Manager in Iraq, Liberia and Northern Sudan. Most recently, he was the Country Director in Pakistan for Action Contre la Faim/Action Against Hunger. This year, he was pursuing a Master’s in Humanitarian Affairs at Tufts and graduated with highest thesis honors in May.

William Ostlund
Enlisting in the Army in 1983, Colonel Ostlund served with the 1st Battalion, 75th Rangers and was stationed at Hunter Army Airfield through 1987. As a Staff Sergeant, he transitioned to the Nebraska National Guard’s Long Range Surveil- lance Detachment and simultaneously enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and joined their ROTC program. Colonel Ostlund was commissioned in the Infantry and re-entered the active Army in 1990. He served as a Platoon Leader and Company Executive Officer in the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) – which included service in OPERATION DESERT SHIELD and DESERT STORM – and in the 75th Ranger Regiment. He commanded a mechanized infantry company in the Republic of Korea and then attended graduate school at The Fletcher School, Tufts University. Colonel Ostlund was subsequently stationed in Vicenza, Italy, where he served as the Southern European Task Force’s Chief of Operations and as an Operations Officer for an airborne battalion and airborne brigade. This assignment included service in the BALKANS and OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM. He then served in the Strategic Command’s Plans and Policy Division as the Chief, European Support Section and Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction Planner. Colonel Ostlund subsequently, commanded 811 paratroopers in 2nd Battalion (Airborne), 503rd Infantry Regiment – The ROCK – of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team. While in command of The ROCK, he deployed his unit for 15 months to Kunar Province, Afghanistan adjacent to Pakistan in the Hindu Kush Mountains in support of OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM. Upon return, Colonel Ostlund served as the Deputy Commander of the 3600-man 75th Ranger Regiment. He deployed to Afghanistan several times fora total of 15 additional months – he returned from his most recent deployment in August 2011. While deployed, twice he served as the Commander for a large Joint Inter-Agency Special Operations Counterterrorism Task Force. In addition, he served as the Task Force Liaison Officer to the Commander of International Security Forces Afghanistan for four months. Colonel Ostlund currently serves as a Senior Service College Fellow with duty at The Fletcher School and for a follow on assignment as a Brigade Combat Team Commander. In July/August 2009, Colonel Ostlund was published in the Military Review – Tactical Leader Lessons Learned in Afghanistan and has contributed to over a dozen books and articles. In June, COL Ostlund assumed Command of the Duke Brigade (3rd BDE, 1st ID).

“I was privileged to participate in the ALLIES/EPIIC Voices From the Field forum with Col Ezra Barzilay from CDC, Nick Birnback from the UN, and Daniel Holmberg with vast NGO experience. These three men, all exceptionally experienced in the field, and I were hosted and moderated by the EPIIC students. For four hours we discussed our experiences and the relevance of these experiences to each other and the students. I am in my third year at Fletcher – two as a student and one as an Army Fellow – I have benefited from scores of forums and speakers but believe I learned more in a shorter period yesterday than in any single forum on campus. KUDOS to your students; they were super and their panel guests were fantastic. Thank you and your students for a great experience.” -- COL William Ostlund

The Voices from the Field program was on hiaitus for the 2009-2011 EPIIC symposia.

2007-08: Global Poverty and Inequality

This year’s discussions focused on poverty alleviation efforts, addressing the following topics: “Perceptions of Poverty and Poverty Alleviation”, “Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Approaches to Poverty Alleviation”, “Conditions on the Ground”, “Sustainability”, and “Reconciling the Professional and the Personal.” The discussion topics are developed and facilitated by members of the EPIIC student committee.

The 2008 Voices were:

Andrea Araujo (EPIIC’03)
Currently a student at the Institute for International Studies in Geneva, Andrea spent the last four years working in the microfinance and development fields. Most recently she worked with the Norms Specialist of the International Labour Organization office in Brasilia. Prior to that, she worked in the Chile Country Office of the United Nations Development Program, where she assisted with the Global Microentrepreneurial Award and participated in the Microcredit Regional Summit; coordinated the Strategic Planning Workshop for Technonet Latin America and the Caribbean, a regional cooperation network for SMEs, a replicate of the successful Technonet Asia network; and was part of the inter-agency working group for a UN Consolidated Plan in response to Emergencies. She also worked for the Fundacion para la Superacion de la Pobreza, an NGO focusing on microentrepreneurs.

Neil Blumenthal (EPIIC’02)
Currently a director of the Scojo Foundation, Neil began his association with Scojo in 2003 as a consultant in El Salvador developing the foundation’s first program. He subsequently joined the New York team to expand and manage operations globally. Prior to joining the Scojo Foundation, Mr. Blumenthal worked with the International Crisis Group and attended the Institute for International Mediation and Conflict Resolution in The Hague, Netherlands. Mr. Blumenthal was a 2005-6 Emerging Leaders in Public Service Fellow at NYU Robert F. Wagner School for Public Service.

Geoffrey Chalmers (EPIIC’94)
Geoffrey is USAID/Mexico’s Economic Growth and Environment Team Leader, where he manages the Mission’s micro and rural finance activities and oversees activities related to rural development and the environment. Previously, as Microenterprise Development Advisor in USAID/Washington, he worked in the areas of microfinance, business development services, and rural finance at USAID’s Office of Microenterprise Development. Prior to joining USAID’s Microenterprise Development Division, Geoff worked in the Microenterprise Division of the Inter-American Development Bank, and served as an advisor to Chispa, a microfinance institution in Masaya, Nicaragua, where he developed a pilot program to expand Chispa’s outreach to small coffee and dairy farmers. He is author of “Hortifruti in Central America: A Case Study About the Influence of Supermarkets on the Development and Evolution of Creditworthiness Among Small and Medium Agricultural Producers” and “Jumpstarting Agribusiness Markets for Small Producers in Honduras.”

Gail Schechter (EPIIC’89)
Gail has over 24 years’ experience in housing advocacy, discrimination complaint investigation, tenant and community organizing, and public policy research and development. Since 1999, she has served as Executive Director of the Interfaith Housing Center of the Northern Suburbs, a fair and affordable housing advocacy group serving Chicago’s North Shore. In addition, she teaches public policy for Northwestern University’s School of Continuing Studies. She is the recipient of numerous honors for her social justice advocacy, including the 2001 Champion of the Public Interest Award from Business and Professional People for the Public Interest. Originally from New York City, Ms. Schechter was Director of Organizing for a Brooklyn not-for-profit group and later co-founded the Chicago Mutual Housing Network while with the Center for Neighborhood Technology.

Sonja Wolfe (EPIIC’92)
Sonja joined DAI as an Associate Business Manager for the Agriculture and Economics Group, and most recently worked as an Operations Specialist with the Management and Operations Services Team (MOST). As Operations Specialist, she was responsible for a wide-range of project management topics, including providing support & training for project closedown, drafting security management tools, process, and policy, finance procedures, designing project management audit tools, and coordinating policy & process with other DAI support offices. Prior to joining DAI, Sonja worked at the National Academies of Science and has also lived and worked in Cairo, Egypt.

Robin Young (EPIIC’91)
Robin is a consultant, team leader, and project manager who provides technical assistance, training, and business development support for DAI’s projects in Latin America. She specializes in institutional and market assessments, business planning, credit products, and human resource development for rural and microfinance. With 5 years of experience, Ms. Young has been based in Central America for the past seven years.

2006-07: Global Crises

The theme of this year’s Voices discussions was “The Accountability of NGOs in the Transition from Relief to Development.” The topics that were addressed included: “The Accountability of NGOs in the Field”, “Local Involvement: When, How, and to What Degree?”, “Leaving the Scene: Minimizing Dependency”, and “Balancing Emergency Relief and Long-Term Development Goals”.

This year’s Voices were:

Leila Abu Gheida (EPIIC’87)
Head of Democracy and Conflict Mitigation Team, USAID Nepal; Senior Conflict Advisor, USAID Nepal; Former Coordinator, Casamance Reconstruction Program, USAID Senegal

Aparna Basnyat (EPIIC’97)
Regional Program Analyst, Tsunami Recovery Unit, United Nations Development Program, Sri Lanka

Jana Frey (EPIIC’99 and ‘02)
International Rescue Committee, Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo; Former Project Development Manager, Sanayee Development Foundation, Afghanistan

Gregg Nakano (F’91)
USAID Military Liaison Officer, Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance; Former Head, USAID Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART), Banda Aceh; Former Marine Infantry Officer, Gulf War

The Voices were joined in the discussions by scholars and professionals studying these issues. They included:

Jagabandhu Acharya
Jagabandhu Acharya joined Oxfam America in October 2005 as head of the Learning, Evaluation and Accountability Department (LEAD). Dr. Acharya came to Oxfam with 28 years of experience as a development researcher, trainer and manager. He has worked with development agencies such as ActionAid and Danida, and management institutes like IRMA, IIM-Bangalore and the Administrative Staff College of India. He has founded and directed a number of institutions, such as Books for Change, Action Enterprise (Sabha), and Total Knowledge Management (Asia’s first exclusive knowledge management support agency). He has also served on the governing boards of several non-profit agencies, such as ActionAid India Society and Partners in Change.

Astier Almedom
Astier Almedom is the Henry R. Luce Professor in Science and Humanitarianism at Tufts University and a Fellow at the Institute for Global Leadership. She has over twenty years of experience researching in a wide range of areas including: infant feeding, growth and health; maternal health; environmental health; public health policy and practice; mental health and psychosocial wellbeing in war-affected settings; and program evaluation of disaster relief and development aid. Her special interests include the dissemination of research findings among their intended users, including decision-makers and the study populations themselves. Prior to her arrival at Tufts in 2000, Dr. Almedom was a Research and Evaluation Manager with Health Action Zone; a Lecturer in Medical Anthropology, Tropical Health Epidemiology Unit and Health Promotion Research Unit at the University of London; and a Senior Consultant to the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development, the Food and Agriculture Organization, UNICEF, and Oxfam. She is working on a forthcoming book, Anatomy of Resilience.

David Dapice
David Dapice (Chair, IGL Faculty Advisory Committee) is an Associate Professor of Economics at Tufts University and Senior Economist for the Vietnam Program at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Mukesh Kapila
Mukesh Kapila is the Former United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator and the UN Development Program Resident Representative in Sudan; the Former Special Adviser to the Special Representative of the Secretary General in Afghanistan and to the High Commissioner for Human Rights of the United Nations and a Former Member of the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination System.

Margaret McMillan
Margaret McMillan is an associate professor of economics at Tufts University. She has published widely in the areas of international trade and investment focusing primarily on developing countries. She is a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a recipient of research grants from the National Science Foundation and the Center for Aids Research. Professor McMillan has worked in several African countries including Ethiopia, Gabon, Kenya, Mali, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa. Before coming to academia, she worked for a variety of organizations including the Peace Corps, Lehman Brothers, USAID, UNDP and the World Bank.

2005-06: The Politics of Fear

The theme of this year’s Voices discussions was the social and psychological impacts of working in these fields. The topics that were addressed during the five-day workshop, designed by the Voices from the Field student committee, tracked the experience of people working in complex humanitarian crises, from Motivations to Adjustment to Coping to Organizational Interactions to Success and Failures to Reintegration.

Leila Abu-Gheida (EPIIC’87)
Leila Abu-Gheida is currently the Senior Conflict Analyst and Manager for the Special Projects office of USAID Nepal. She is responsible for overseeing diverse activities which seek to promote peace and reduce the impact of the -year conflict in Nepal, including human rights protection, income generation support, small scale infrastructure construction and increasing capacity at the national and grassroots levels to address the conflict. Before moving to Nepal, Leila was Coordinator for the Casamance Reconstruction program for USAID Senegal. She has also worked with the International Rescue Committee, the World Bank, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Africare, the Peace Corps, and in the private sector. Her skills include needs assessment, situation analysis, proposal writing, and donor liaison, as well as project management in conflict and post-conflict situations, and in remote rural areas. She has an in-depth knowledge of international development issues through her many professional and educational experiences. During the Great Lakes Crisis, she directed the Rwandan refugee camp in Ngare, Tanzania (250,000 people).

Aparna Basnyat
Aparna Basnyat is currently working with UNDP Sri Lanka with the Tsunami Recovery Unit. She is working on incorporating human rights based approaches into the Tsunami Recovery Programmes. She had previously been working with UNDP at the regional level on producing regional human development reports and working on justice and human rights initiatives in Asia and the Pacific. Aparna enrolled in EPIIC as a freshman and her research project to Nepal from that year was written about by David Nyhan in The Boston Globe in 1997, along with the work that Leila Abu Gheida had done in Tanzania.

Kirsten Gelsdorf
From 1997-9, Kirsten worked for the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) on media, information, and human rights programming. From 2000-0, she worked for CARE Ethiopia in southern Borana during the food crisis and for the CARE East Africa Management Unit in Nairobi, Kenya. From 2002-06, Kirsten worked for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA): in New York as the Southern Africa Desk Officer; in Liberia as the Field Coordinator for Buchanan; in Aceh, Indonesia after the Tsunami as the IDP Advisor; and in Geneva and Pakistan as a Humanitarian Affairs Officer for the South Asia earthquake. Kirsten graduated from Dartmouth College in 1997 with a double major in International Environmental Affairs and Asian Studies and from The Fletcher School in 2000 with concentrations in Humanitarian Affairs and Food Security.

Maura Lynch (EPIIC’94)
Maura Lynch is currently the primary desk officer for the tsunami affected region with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and will soon be starting an interagency liaison position with the Bureau for Conflict Prevention and Recovery (BCPR) at UNDP headquarters. She has also been Special Advisor to the UN deputy envoy in Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Prior to those assignments, she was the Head of OCHA’s offices in Jordan (during the Iraq war) and Georgia, and worked with the UN mission to Iraq during 99. She has over six year’s work experience with Catholic Relief Services in Armenia, Georgia, Lebanon, Bosnia-Herzegovina, India, Albania, Kosovo and Eritrea and has worked with the UN World Food Programme in Kenya. These assignments included work related to emergency response, post-conflict rehabilitation, capacity building with local NGOs, girls’ education and women’s non-formal education projects, and civil society development. She has served as a caseworker for female asylum seekers with claims of gender-based persecution with the Women’s Refugee Project at the Harvard Law School clinic in Somerville. Maura was a research assistant for three years with a progressive public opinion and political consulting firm on a range of US and international electoral campaigns, referenda, and issue-oriented campaigns and research. Maura has also worked with U.S. Senators John Kerry (MA) and Jeff Bingaman (NM). Maura graduated cum laude from Boston College with a B.A. in Political Science and Soviet and East European Studies. She earned her M.A.L.D. from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in May 1995, concentrating in the fields of International Human Rights and Refugee Law, Public International Law, and Nationalism and Armed Conflict Resolution.

John Moore
Previously with the US Departments of Defense and State covering terrorism and political military issues in the Middle East and South Asia from 1996 to 1999, John Moore has since served with humanitarian and development agencies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Somalia and Nepal in program development and management, security risk mitigation and civil-military roles. John is currently with IFES in Iraq as Head of Field Office Central Region for the IFES Election Violence Education and Resolution (EVER) project. EVER is a USAID-funded effort to monitor and evaluate election violence to inform design and implementation of community-level conflict resolution programming. John was trained academically in security studies and political economy, having received a Masters degree with distinction from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in May 2002 and a Bachelors in International Studies with distinction from the Virginia Military Institute in 1999.

Jake Sherman (EPIIC’96)
Jake Sherman is a consultant on peace-building and conflict resolution, based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Most recently, he designed a research project for the Cambodian NGO Alliance for Conflict Transformation examining relations between Cambodian Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim communities. From March 200 to January 2005, he was a Political Affairs Officer for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). There, he worked in Kabul with the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General and in UNAMA’s northeast regional office in Kunduz. Previously, he was a Senior Program Officer for the International Peace Academy’s Economic Agendas in Civil Wars program, for which he co-edited The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance. He has a forthcoming chapter for IPA on the challenges of state-building in Afghanistan, due out in mid-2006. He has also worked for Physicians for Human Rights in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, assisting in the organization’s forensic investigations on behalf of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia. He holds a Masters degree from the School for International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and graduated from Tufts University in 1996.

Jacob Silberberg
Jacob Silberberg is currently covering the American presence in Iraq for The Associated Press. Jacob previously documented social issues and conflicts in Sudan’s Darfur region, the Nigeria’s delta, and Turkish Kurdistan. His work has been published in the The New York Times, TIME and Newsweek. He is a 2002 Tufts graduate, 2002 China program member and 200 EPIIC Colloquium member.

Mark Slezak (A'00)
Mark Slezak graduated from Tufts in 2000 with a degree in International Relations. After graduation he worked as a Caseworker and Field Team Leader for the US Refugee Resettlement program assisting Somali and Sudanese refugees in Kenya and throughout the East African region. In 200, Mark took a Field Team Leader contract with the US Refugee Resettlement Program in Accra, Ghana, assisting Liberian and Sierra Leonean refugees in the sub-region. In 2004 Mark began worked as an Operations Officer with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) assisting refugees and IDPs in Cote d’Ivoire. Mark transferred to Liberia and worked as the Head of Operations for IOM Liberia, conducting IDP return operations. Mark recently returned from an assignment as Logistician and Emergency Manager with OXFAM GB working to provide assistance to victims of the Nias Earthquake in South Asia. He was a member of the 997-98 EPIIC Colloquium on “Exodus and Exile: Global Security, Migration, and Refugees.”

The Voices were joined in the discussions by scholars and professionals studying these issues. They included:

Stephen Lennon
Stephen Lennon is currently the Senior Officer for the Emergency and Post Conflict Community Stabilization Unit for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), where he works on post-conflict programming with an emphasis on DDR, community stabilization, return and reintegration of refugees and IDPs, IDP site management, infrastructure rehabilitation, civil society development, host government capacity building, and emergency response operations worldwide. He also is the special advisor for IOM programming in Haiti, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. With IOM, he has served in a number of senior positions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Macedonia, Turkmenistan, and Washington, DC. His other experience includes serving as an international election monitor for the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe in Albania and as an election education project coordinator in Cambodia. He received his Masters from Columbia’s School for International Affairs.

Giuseppe Raviola
Giuseppe (Bepi) Raviola, MD is a fourth-year resident in adult psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and at McLean Hospital in Boston. Dr. Raviola graduated cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1994, majoring in history with high honors. He is a 2002 graduate of Harvard Medical School, where he spent a fifth year abroad in Kenya and Tanzania as a recipient of the Dr. Paul Dudley White Fellowship in International Health. In Nairobi, Kenya, he worked as a medical student at Kenyatta National Hospital, East Africa’s largest hospital, also engaging in participant observation to develop an ethnography of physician experiences. For this work he received the Dr. Sirgay Sanger Award for excellence and accomplishment in research, clinical investigation or scholarship in psychiatry, for research documenting the demoralization and burnout of physicians in public medical practice in East Africa under the burden of poverty, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. While in East Africa, Dr. Raviola further developed an interest in issues of child mental health in the context of HIV and AIDS. In 2001 he participated in a pilot study in Tanzania with child psychiatrist Dr. Felton Earls to assess the prevalence of mental health problems in children, and the capacity of communities to alleviate the burden of suffering from these conditions. In his residency training Dr. Raviola has explored psychological trauma and violence prevention, child and family resilience, and mental health promotion, prevention and treatment in resource-poor settings in coordination with existing medical, cultural, community and familial structures. Currently he serves as the first Chief Resident in International and Community Mental Health at MGH, with administrative responsibilities at the Erich Lindemann Mental Health Center in Boston. He has been involved in the development of the new International Division of Psychiatry at MGH which seeks to improve the education of trainees in issues of international mental health, develop research on “Best Practices” in psychiatry in collaboration with colleagues from overseas, and implement clinical paradigms that will improve international mental health care. He also serves as a course director and lecturer in “Global Health Equity,” a course for medical students in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Monique Skidmore
Monique Skidmore is a medical anthropologist and a Fellow at the Australian National University. Monique taught medical anthropology at McGill University and a variety of other subjects during her four years as a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne. Before joining the CCR as ARC researcher in May 200, she was a 2002 Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. She is the author of the first book on Burmese everyday life since 965, Burma at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, and of Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear. She has worked in military-ruled Burma for over a decade in villages, in capital cities, and in government medical facilities, and has created innovative reflexive methodologies for studying the impact of violence and terror as detailed in her 200 American Ethnologist article and her in-press edited volume with P. Lawrence: Women and the Contested State: Religion, Violence and Agency in South and Southeast Asia. She has written extensively on conflict, medicine, violence, fear, and dangerous fieldwork situations in 5 internationally refereed book chapters and articles and has worked as a consultant to international development agencies in Burma. She is currently writing a book for the Public Anthropology series at University of California Press entitled, Complicity: Health, Human Rights and Global Culpability in the Twenty-First Century.

2003-04: Dilemmas of Empire and Nationbuilding

The third annual Voices from the Field covered five days during the EPIIC symposium. The core themes discussed were the militarization of the humanitarian space and the interface between the military, private voluntary organizations (PVOs), NGOs, private construction contractors and private military security forces in the confused welter of nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The participants included Tufts alumni who are security experts, military officers, refugee officials, complex humanitarian emergency personnel, NGO officers, former National Security Council directors, and field contractors. Senior practitioners and scholars who met with the Voices included Dr. Jennifer Leaning of Physicians for Human Rights, Ambassador Jonathan Moore, Former Undersecretary of Defense Sarah Sewall, and Senior Vice President of Louis Berger Inc., Frederic Berger.

Faculty and cadets from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and Institute for Global leadership students were observers.

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