Focus: Military/Security
Michael Ward
Michael Ward is on the Board of Directors of Commissionaires Ottawa in the Canadian Corps of Commissionaires, the largest group of security companies employing veterans in Canada. He previously served as Chief Operating Officer and Associate Director General for the Canadian Forces Morale and Welfare Services. A Major General, he was previously Deputy Commander of the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan, responsible for the development of the Ministry of the Interior and training of the Afghan National Police – one of the international community’s critical priorities for capacity building in Afghanistan and key to establishing a secure environment that will permit the reemergence of civil society and sustainable development. Prior…
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Martin Sturgeon
Martin Sturgeon has more than 20 years of military leadership experience and international engagement across the spectrum of conflict, including war-fighting in the Gulf, peace support operations in the Balkans, and high-intensity counter-insurgency in Afghanistan. He currently works in the Ministry of Defense in the Customer Design Team, shaping British defense reform following the Strategic Defense and Security Review. Previously, he established and ran the Afghan National Security Forces Transformation Program, which was unique in its comprehensive approach to training, logistics, leadership, and facilities construction. The resulting program became a fundamental element of the NATO strategy for achieving transition to Afghan control in the southwest of the country, and was…
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Matthew Spence
Dr. Matthew Spence is Affiliate at CISAC, and a Managing Director at Guggenheim Partners, where he focuses on cybersecurity and emerging technologies. Prior to entering the private sector, Matthew spent six years in senior national security positions in the U.S. government. From 2012 to 2015, Matthew served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East Policy, where he was the principal advisor to three Secretaries of Defense for U.S. defense policy in the Middle State. He was responsible for fourteen countries in the Middle East, including Syria, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, and the Gulf states. During his time at the Pentagon, Matthew traveled to the region over 30 times,…
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Edward "Ted" Wittenstein
Edward (“Ted”) Wittenstein is a Senior Lecturer in Global Affairs and Director of the Schmidt Program on Artificial Intelligence, Emerging Technologies, and National Power, a signature teaching and research initiative of the Jackson School that examines how AI has the potential to alter fundamental building blocks of world order.  A former diplomat and intelligence professional, Ted teaches undergraduate, graduate, and law courses on intelligence, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, national security decision-making, and the outer space domain. He also serves as Co-Director of the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy and the Yale Cyber Leadership Forum, as well as a visiting faculty fellow at Yale Law School’s Center for Global Legal Challenges. Ted is a graduate of…
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Josh Rubin
Josh Rubin is Director for Indo-Pacific Affairs at the White House National Security Council. Prior to joining the National Security Council, Josh was Senior Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of State at the U.S. Department of State, where he served as traveling chief of staff to the Deputy Secretary on diplomatic missions to over thirty countries. Josh joined the Biden-Harris Administration on January 20, 2021 after serving on President-Elect Biden's transition team in 2020. During the Obama-Biden Administration, Josh was a special assistant in the office of Secretary of State John Kerry and previously served as speechwriter to the Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs. Josh received a J.D….
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Rema Rajeshwari
Rema Rajeshwari is an Indian Police Service Officer with a distinguished career of integrity and passion. She has held various responsible and dynamic positions for nearly a decade. She started her career in the Police service as an Assault Commander with the 'Greyhounds', an elite special force, which undertakes high risk operations through jungle warfare against left-wing extremists. Working for people who are at the fault lines of the lethal intersection of society and violence, she has been instrumental in running successful operations against extremists, a women- and child-trafficking nexus, and other criminal activities. Rema has won accolades as the first female Indian Police Service officer from Munnar, Kerala State…
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Gemma Mortensen
Gemma Mortensen is an award-winning social entrepreneur and thinker and practitioner interested in transformative, systemic change. She is Co-Founder and Vice-Chair of More In Common and a Trustee of Bite Back 2030 and The HALO Trust. She is currently working on The New Constellation, a project to help people make transformational leaps towards regenerative social, political, and economic models. Gemma was previously Chief Global Officer at Change.org, the world’s largest platform for social change, CEO of Crisis Action, an organization that won the MacArthur Award and Skoll Award for its innovative systems model, and she co-chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Council on systems leadership. She has also worked in…
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Arshi Saleem Hashmi
Arshi Saleem Hashmi specializes in religious violent conflicts, counter-violent extremism and conflict resolution with special focus on South Asia. She is currently Dean of Faculty of Contemporary Studies and Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the National Defence University, Islamabad. Arshi has been an Academic Fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies at the University of Oxford. She has also been a South Asia Leadership Fellow for Counter Terrorism Studies at Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Rotary International Peace Fellow. She was Kodikara Fellow at RCSS that resulted in a book titled Conflict Transformation from Ethnic Movement to Terrorist Movement. Arshi is a member…
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Denis Mizne
Denis Mizne heads the private foundation established by global entrepreneur Jorge Paulo Lemann to increase the quality of public education in Brazil. He is also chairman of the board of Instituto Sou da Paz and serves on other boards in the areas of education, human rights and public safety. Before joining the Foundation, Denis was founder and Executive Director of Instituto Sou da Paz, a leading Brazilian NGOs focused on violence prevention. He has contributed to the approval of the "Disarmament Statute," one of the most modern pieces of legislation to control the use of guns. After being enacted, the law helped reduce homicides for the first time in decades…
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Mohamed ElFayoumy
Mohamed ElFayoumy is an Egyptian diplomat with extensive experience in the Middle East. He currently serves as Political Adviser for the United Nations Special Envoy to Syria. Mohamed served as his government’s representative to the Syrian Opposition and he was the Consul in the Egyptian Embassy in Syria where he was instrumental in evacuating thousands of Egyptian nationals from Syria during the conflict in 2011-13. He is also active in a number of civil society organizations working toward the political development of Egypt.
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