Dr. Victor Cha is currently the D. S. Song-Korea Foundation Chair in Asian Studies and is the Director of the Asian Studies program at Georgetown University. He is also senior advisor and the inaugural holder of the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.

Previously, he has served as Director for Asian Affairs in the White House's National Security Council, when he participated in the Six Party Talks on the Non-Proliferation Treaty in North Korea from 2004-2007. His responsibilities included Japan, North and South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. He was President Bush's top advisor on North Korean affairs.  

Dr. Cha has written articles for numerous journals including Foreign Affairs and Political Science Quarterly. He serves as an independent consultant, and has testified before Congress on Asian security issues. He has been a guest analyst for various media outlets including CNN, ABC's "Nightline", NBC's "The Today Show", CBS's "Morning Show", Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, BBC, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and National Public Radio.

Dr. Cha has authored five books since 2000 including his most recent book, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future. It is one of the first books that looks at North Korea after the death of Kim Jong-Il.

Dr. Gary Sick is a leading expert on Iran and the Persian Gulf. He is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Middle East Institute. Dr. Sick has served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan and was the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis.

Dr. Sick has also served as the deputy director for international affairs at the Ford Foundation, member emeritus of the board for Human Rights Watch and founding chair of its advisory committee on the Middle East and North Africa; and is the executive director of Gulf/2000, an international online research project on political, economic and security developments in the Persian Gulf.

Dr. Sick was voted one of the top five teachers in 2009 at the School of International and Public Affairs. He is the author of All Fall Down: America's Tragic Encounter With Iran and October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan.

Dr. Sick received his BA from the University of Kansas, a Master of Science from George Washington University and a PhD from Columbia University.

Dr. Lisa Anderson was appointed president of the American University of Cairo in 2011. She is a specialist on politics in the Middle East and North Africa with an extensive background in university education. Prior to joining AUC, Dr. Anderson served in various capacities at Columbia University, including Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations, and Director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute. Dr. Anderson supported joint ventures with Network 20/20 while at SIPA. She has also taught government and social studies at Harvard University.

Dr. Anderson is the author of Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-First Century, The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830-1980, and is editor of Transitions to Democracy and co-editor of The Origins of Arab Nationalism.

Dr. Anderson is a member emerita of the board of Human Rights Watch, where she served as co-chair of Human Rights Watch/Middle East; and she was president of the Middle East Studies Association in 2003. She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, an MA in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and a PhD in political science from Columbia University.

Charter Network 20/20 Member Dr. Reza Aslan is an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions and contributing editor for The Daily Beast.  Aslan is a best-selling author, whose first book, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, was an international bestseller and named one of the hundred most important books of the last century.  He has made regular appearances on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart", CBS News, and Tavis Smiley among many others. 

Dr. Aslan is also CEO of Aslan Media Inc., whose holdings include BoomGen Studios, the first ever motion picture studio entirely focused on entertainment content about the greater Middle East and its globally dispersed communities.  His non-profit organization, Aslan Media Initiatives, uses social-media technology to provide news and information about the Middle East to young people all over the world.

Dr. Aslan has degrees in religions from Santa Clara University, Harvard University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, where he was named the Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction. He serves on the board of directors of the Ploughshares Fund, which gives grants for peace and security issues; Abraham's Vision, an educational, conflict transformation organization for Israeli and Palestinian youths; PEN USA, which champions the rights of writers under siege around the world; and the Levantine Cultural Center, which builds bridges between Americans and the Arab/Muslim world through the arts.

David E. Sanger is Chief Washington Correspondent of The New York Times.  In twenty-six years at the Times, he has twice been a member of Times reporting teams that won the Pulitzer Prize and has been awarded numerous honors for national security and foreign policy coverage.

Mr. Sanger appears regularly on public affairs and news shows. He has written two books on US foreign policy; The New York Times best-seller The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power and Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power.

Mr. Sanger has reported from New York, Tokyo and Washington, covering a wide variety of issues surrounding foreign policy, globalization, nuclear proliferation, Asian affairs and the Bush and Obama presidencies. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College.

Dr. H. Onno Ruding is a Dutch-born internationally renowned financial expert, who has served as Vice Chairman of Citicorp/Citibank from 1992-2003, Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund from 1977-1980, and Minister of Finance for the Netherlands from 1982-1989. 

Currently, Dr. Ruding is a member of the Board of Directors for the Centre for European Policy Studies, the largest independent think-tank focusing on EU affairs. He is a member of Network 20/20's Advisory Council, and also serves on boards or advisory councils of several other charitable, financial, and cultural organizations. 

Dr. Ruding began his career at the Ministry of Finance at the Hague, before moving to Amsterdam-Rotterdam Bank (AMRO), where he rose to become a member of AMRO's Board of Managing Directors. He received a doctorate degree in economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam. 

AUIS is unique in all of Iraq. It is open to all ethnicities and creeds and provides educational opportunities for young Arabs, Kurds, and Turks to work together. They exchange classroom notes, play sports together, and interact in English.

Dr. Athanasios Moulakis has over forty years of experience in higher education and academia in Europe, the United States, and Asia. Dr. Moulakis joined the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani in September 2010.

Before joining AUIS, Dr. Moulakis served as Interim President and Professor of Government & International Relations at the American University of Afghanistan. Prior to moving to Asia, Dr. Moulakis was an Adjunct Scholar in South-East European Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C..  Between 2001 and 2005, he directed the Institute of Mediterranean Studies at the University of Italian Switzerland, Lugano.

Dr. Moulakis has also held teaching positions in political science, philosophy, and the humanities at University of Colorado, Boulder, the European University Institute, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Ruhr Universität, Germany.  Dr. Moulakis obtained a Ph.D. in Political Theory from Ruhr Universität, Germany in 1969. Dr. Moulakis speaks fluent English, German, French, Italian and Modern Greek.

Ambassador Bruno Stagno Ugarte joined the Security Council Report in 2011 and currently serves as the executive director. During his 16-year career in the Costa Rican Foreign Service, he has served as the Foreign Minister, Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Chief of Staff of the Foreign Ministry, Adviser to the Foreign Minister, Minister Counselor and Consul General in the Embassy in Paris.

Ambassador Stagno has also served as President of the Assembly of States Parties of the International Criminal Court (ICC), based in the Hague, Co-President of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Conferences, Co-President of the UN 2005 Summit Outcome Document negotiations and Vice-President of the UN Commission of Sustainable Development.

He is a graduate of Georgetown University, Université de la Sorbonne and Princeton University. In addition to his native Spanish, Ambassador Stagno is fluent in English and French.

Dr. C. Michael Smith is an accomplished educational leader in the United States and internationally. He has held executive positions in international universities and accrediting agencies, and has served as CEO of public trusts in support of improved K-12 education. In August 2009 he was named the President of the American University of Afghanistan.

While he served the American University of Nigeria from 2005-2009, the university grew from 124 students and 14 faculty members to 1200 students and 85 faculty members. Prior to joining the American University of Nigeria, Dr. Smith was Director of the Commission for Academic Accreditation in the United Arab Emirates from 2002-2005. In this role he advised the UAE Minister of Higher Education on matters related to higher education quality.

In the United States, Dr. Smith served as President of the Hillsborough Education Foundation in Tampa, Florida, and CEO of the Philadelphia Education Fund, the nation’s second largest education fund. In these capacities, he raised over $40 million in support of education. From 1982-90 he was as Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs at Winthrop University.

Dr. Smith is a graduate of the Institute for Educational Management at Harvard University and holds a Ph.D. in British and American Literature from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He has served on a number of boards and committees and on the faculty at Winthrop University, University of California, and Los Angeles.

Joseph Watkins is a nationally-recognized political commentator and TV and radio hot,drawing on decades of experience as a former US Senate staffer, White House aide, businessman and pastor of the oldest African-American Lutheran church in Philadelphia. He served as the Associate Director of Public Liaison in the White House under President George W. Bush in 1998 before leaving in 1991 to start his own consulting firm. He was the Associate Director of Government Relations at Buchanan, Ingersoll and Rooney, one of the nation's largest law firms, and has served as Director at Hill Solutions, Managing Director and Principal of MDL Capital Management firm, and President of Advent Capital Management Partners. Since 1998 he has been the pastor of Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church, the oldest African-American Lutheran Church in Philadelphia.

As a political analyst and evangelical pastor, he has hosted CNN's Crossfire, and regularly appears on NBC and CNBC news programs like The Today Show and SquawkBox. He has also appeared on ABC's Good Morning America, CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, Paula Zahn Now, American Morning, Fox's Hannity & Colmes and Fox News. He has also been a regular contributor to National Public Radio on Political Corner with Juan Williams and other programs.

Dr. Parag Khanna was named one of Esquire’s “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century,” and was featured in WIRED magazine’s “Smart List.” He is a leading geo-strategist, world traveler and author. He is Director of the Hybrid Reality Institute, a research and advisory group focused on human-technology co-evolution and geo-technology issues. His current affiliations include: Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation, Senior Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, and Senior Fellow at the Singapore Institute of International Affairs. 

Dr. Khanna lectures frequently at international conferences and gives executive briefings to major corporations on global trends, systemic risks and emerging market strategies. At the New America Foundation, Parag co-directs the World Economy Roundtable and advises the U.S. National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2030 program. Previously, he served in the foreign policy advisory group to Barack Obama in his 2008 Presidential campaign. During 2007 he served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a senior geopolitical adviser to United States Special Operations Forces. 

Dr. John Waterbury is a political economist who has published widely on the politics of the Middle East, the political economy of public enterprise, and on the development of international river basins. His book The Nile Basin: National Determinants of Collective Action was a pacesetting analysis.

Dr. Waterbury was president of the American University of Beirut from 1998 to 2008, where he oversaw the first master plan to develop new and renovate facilities, led a strategic academic review, and championed a successful fundraising campaign – the Campaign for Excellence. He received an Honorary Doctorate during his last commencement exercises at the university in recognition of his achievements as a president. He also received an honorary degree from Princeton University in 2008.

Dr. Waterbury has participated in many organizations worldwide as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; the Advisory Board of the Greater Middle East Studies Center, RAND Corporation; the Advisory Board of the Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University; the Academic Advisory Board to the Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development; the International Advisory Board of the National Bank of Kuwait; and as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Murat Köprülü joined Mariner Investment Group as head of the emerging markets group, and is focused on expanding the group’s footprint in a number of asset classes in the emerging markets. Mariner is an alternative investment management firm which manages more than $13 billion of assets across multiple credit and fixed income related strategies. The firm’s clients are primarily institutions and include public funds, sovereign wealth funds, corporate plan sponsors, university endowments, and insurance companies. The firm has a history of attracting top proprietary trading talent and is focused on achieving superior risk adjusted returns with particular focus on risk management.

Mr. Köprülü was formerly CEO of Multilateral Funding International (MFI), a New York based emerging markets investment and financial advisory firm, which he founded in 1988, specializing in the regions comprising Eastern Europe, Russia, Turkey, Middle East, and Central Asia. He was also Managing Partner of MFI's brokerage affiliate, MFI Securities, L.P., trading in the capital markets of the above regions. At MFI and MFI Securities, he innovated and assisted in a number of first ever capital market and investment transactions in the above regions, including assisting in the creation of investment funds for the region such as a ground-breaking $1 billion global emerging markets fund.

Mr. Köprülü worked at the World Bank from 1980 through 1983 at the Turkey and Egypt Departments and was an advisor to the Turkish Prime Minister from 1985-1986. From 1983-1987, he was Managing Director of IntraLink Ltd., which provided financing sources for international trade transactions in a diverse list of emerging countries such as Egypt, Ivory Coast, Greece, Turkey, and the Philippines.

Arthur Sculley is a member of Network 20/20’s Advisory Council and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Emerging Markets Enterprises, Fletcher School, Tufts University.  Arthur is a Business and Peace Task Force member at the United States Institute for Peace, and a member of The Fletcher School’s European Advisory Group. Previously, Arthur was a co-founder and chairman of several B2B companies including IntraLinks, Inc. and CreditTrade, Ltd. He has consulted for governments and corporations including Ireland, New Zealand, Bermuda, IBM, Shell Oil, JPMorgan and i2 Technologies. He is the co-author of B2B Exchanges: The Killer Application in the Business-to-Business Internet Revolution, which was a business book best seller, was distributed at the World Economic Forum in Davos and is a must read in many business schools. For 25 years he held numerous roles at JP Morgan in New York and overseas, including CEO and Managing Director of JP Morgan’s private bank.

Arthur Sculley has been living part time in Istanbul for the past year doing research in Anatolia, Northern Iraq and Central Asia on the impact of trade and commerce on Turkey’s recent foreign policy. He received a BS from the Wharton School and a MA from The Fletcher School’s GMAP program at Tufts University.

Professor Kalantry focuses on strategies to promote international, economic and social rights for women, particularly the right to education. She received a Fulbright-Nehru grant to conduct research in India on the Indian Supreme Court in January 2012.

On October 25, Professor Kalantry will discuss her interdisciplinary field research on acid violence in Cambodia, India, and Bangladesh. Acid violence is a form of gender-based violence as defined by the Convention on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, and is used in many countries to punish women who fail to conform with gender norms. She will argue that businesses can play a crucial role in curbing acid misuse, and present concrete measures that governments and business can take.

Professor Kalantry’s works have been published in Human Rights Quarterly, the National Law Journal, and the Stanford Journal of International Law. Prior to joining Cornell Law School, she was a visiting clinical lecturer at Yale Law School where she co-taught a clinic focusing on national security and civil liberties. She also practiced private international law at two major international law firms.

Peter Fischer is the Minister of Economic Affairs at the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Washington, DC. He is responsible for a broad range of policy areas including economics, finance, industry, trade, investment, energy, environment, climate change, science & technology, labor, transport and agriculture. Mr. Fischer represents German interests in the United States and reports to the German government on developments here.

On October 22, Mr. Fischer will explain the background of the Euro crisis from a German perspective, analyze the German strategy for coping with the problems, and elaborate on how the transatlantic marketplace is of particular significance for the United States.

Peter Fischer is a career diplomat, who has focused on economic and global issues. Prior to taking on his current role in the German Embassy in July 2011, Mr. Fischer was head of the Department for Economic and Financial Policy at the Foreign Office in Berlin. He has served the German government in Israel, England, France, China and Singapore.

Peter Fischer has an M.A. in history and political science from the Free University of Berlin, and an M.A. in government from Georgetown University which he attended on a Fulbright Scholarship. He studied international relations at L'Institut d'études politiques in Paris on a scholarship awarded by the German Academic Exchange Service.

Ahmed Rashid is a highly respected scholar, author, and analyst of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and U.S. relations. British educated, Rashid spent ten years in the hills of Balochistan, western Pakistan attempting to organize an uprising against the Pakistani military dictatorships of Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan. He ended his guerrilla fighting days frustrated and defeated and turned his attentions to writing about his homeland.

He has been the Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph for more than 20 years and a correspondent for Far Eastern Economic Review. He also writes for the Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Daily Times (Pakistan) and academic journals. He appears regularly on international TV and radio networks such as CNN and BBC World. His commentary also appears in the Washington Post's Post Global segment.

Rashid's 2000 book, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, was a New York Times bestseller for five weeks, translated into 22 languages, and has sold 1.5 million copies since the September 11, 2001 attacks. The book was used extensively by American analysts in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Ann Lee, author of What the U.S. Can Learn from China, is a Senior Fellow at Demos and an adjunct professor of economics and finance at New York University. She was also a former visiting professor at Peking University and taught at the China Center for Economic Research.

A former investment banker and fixed income trader, Ann Lee is an expert on financial derivatives, the global financial system, China’s economy and economic initiatives. She was an economic advisor to the Ministry of Finance as well as to several large Chinese asset management firms. She has provided economic commentary on ABC, CBS, CNBC, CNN, Fox Business, Bloomberg TV, NPR and published op-eds in The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Businessweek, Forbes, Worth, and the Hong Kong Economic Journal.

Ms. Lee was educated at U.C. Berkeley, Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs, and Harvard Business School. Her dual role as scholar and practitioner in the U.S. and China enables her to comment on issues and opportunities around global trade, global financial markets, U.S. competitiveness, Chinese leadership outlook, and other related business and economic issues.