Randa Fahmy
Randa Fahmy is internationally recognized for her work in global government affairs, energy policy and national security with more than 30 years of legal and public policy experience, including service in the executive and legislative branches of the US government.
Presently, Fahmy is president of Fahmy Hudome International (FHI), a strategic consulting firm that provides critical advice and counsel to international and domestic clientele with an interest in international business transactions, global government affairs and energy policy. Previously, she was appointed by President George W. Bush as the U.S. associate deputy secretary of energy, served as counselor to U.S. Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-MI) and practiced as an attorney with the law firm of Willkie, Farr and Gallagher. Fahmy’s opinions on international diplomacy and energy policy have been published in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and she appears frequently as an analyst on energy and national security issues on NBC, MSNBC, Fox News, CNN and BBC.
Fahmy received her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center and her B.A. summa cum laude from Wilkes University. She has served on several boards including the United States Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital ALSAC Professional Advisory Board, Wilkes University Board of Trustees and DirectWomen Board Institute. She served on the U.S. Department of State Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy, as chair of the Maryland Commission for Women and the Maryland Governor’s Commission on Middle Eastern American Affairs.
Robert Nickelsberg
Robert Nickelsberg worked as a TIME magazine contract photographer for nearly thirty years, specializing in political and cultural change in developing countries.
After covering Central and South America and the conflicts taking place there in the mid 1980s, he established his base in Asia. Living in New Delhi from 1988 to 1999, Nickelsberg recorded the rise of religious extremism in South Asia. His work has also encompassed Iraq, Kuwait, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and Indonesia. Nickelsberg has documented Afghanistan since 1988, when he accompanied a group of mujahideen crossing the border from Pakistan. His 2013 book, A Distant War, published by Prestel, captures his 25 years of work in Afghanistan.
Nickelsberg was named the 2013 winner of the Overseas Press Club’s Olivier Rebbot Award for Afghanistan-A Distant War given for the best photographic reporting from abroad in magazines and books. His photographs have been exhibited at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, the Queensborough Community College, the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University and at The New America Foundation in New York. He received grants for reporting on and photographing post-traumatic stress disease in Kashmir, India from the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and the South Asian Journalism Association in 2008. In 2015, the O’Halloran Family Foundation presented Nickelsberg with a grant for his ongoing domestic sex trafficking project.
Dr. Emilia Justyna Powell
Dr. Emilia Justyna Powell is a Professor of Political Science and Concurrent Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. She has written extensively on international law, international courts, international dispute resolution, territorial and maritime sovereignty, the Islamic legal tradition, and Islamic constitutionalism. Her prominent publications include two books published in Oxford University Press: The 2023 book, The Peaceful Resolution of Territorial and Maritime Disputes (with Krista E. Wiegand), and the 2020 book entitled Islamic Law and International Law: Peaceful Resolution of Disputes, which has won two best book awards (the International Law Section, and the Religion and International Relations Section, International Studies Association). Professor Powell is also the author of a Cambridge University Press (2011) book Domestic Law Goes Global: Legal Traditions and International Courts (with Sara McLaughlin Mitchell).
She has been a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Durham University, and at the University of Copenhagen Law School, icourts Centre for International Courts. Born in Toruń, Poland, Emilia Justyna Powell received education in the University of Nicholas Copernicus (Poland), Jean Monnet Center for European Studies, the University of Cambridge, and the Florida State University.
Ambassador Francisco Palmieri
Ambassador Francisco L. Palmieri, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, serves as the Chief of Mission of the Venezuelan Affairs Unit (VAU), located in the U.S. Embassy to Colombia, as of May 19, 2023. Mr. Palmieri is also the Chargé d’Affaires, ad interim, of the U.S. Embassy in Colombia. Mr. Palmieri is a 36-year veteran of the Foreign Service. Over the course of his career, he has held leadership positions across the Department and has extensive expertise in U.S. Western Hemisphere relations. Mr. Palmieri previously served as Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs from January 2017 to November 2018. He managed the successful U.S. participation in the 2018 Summit of the Americas in Peru, as well as U.S. engagement with the Lima Group unifying 15 Western Hemisphere democracies in a multilateral diplomatic response to the crisis in Venezuela, and the reorientation of U.S. foreign assistance in support of the Colombia peace process. Mr. Palmieri most recently served as a Senior Fellow and faculty member at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University.
Mr. Palmieri also served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Central America and the Caribbean, and Director of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs’ Office of Policy Planning and Coordination. He was the Director of Embassy Baghdad’s INL Office and served as Director of the Near East and South and Central Asia Office in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL). Mr. Palmieri was the senior Venezuela Desk Officer (1995-1997). Overseas, he also served in San Salvador as the Human Rights Officer (1988-1990) and in Madrid as a Political-Military Affairs Officer. He has served Secretaries Baker, Albright, Powell, Clinton, and Kerry in key team positions as a member of the Executive Secretariat.
Mr. Palmieri obtained a M.S. in International Strategic Studies from the National War College in June 2006. He received his A.B. in Politics from Princeton University in 1983, and attended the University of Texas’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs from 1985-1986, where he studied under the Honorable Barbara Jordan.
Ambassador Stephen Rapp
Ambassador Stephen J. Rapp served as US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice from 2009 to 2015. In that role he coordinated US government support to international criminal tribunals, including the International Criminal Court, as well as to hybrid and national courts responsible for prosecuting persons charged with genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He was credited with arranging for the United Nations Commission of Inquiry and other prosecutorial authorities to gain access to a cache of 55,000 photos documenting torture by the Assad regime.
From 2007 to 2009, Ambassador Rapp served as prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, where he led the prosecution of former Liberian President Charles Taylor. His office achieved the first convictions in history on crimes against humanity charges for sexual slavery and forced marriage and for attacks on peacekeepers and recruitment and use of child soldiers as violations of international humanitarian law.
From 2001 to 2007, he served as senior trial attorney and chief of prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where he led the trial team that achieved the first convictions in history against leaders of the mass media for the crime of direct and public incitement to commit genocide. He received a BA from Harvard College and a JD from Drake University Law School.
Ambassador Allan Rock
Ambassador Allan Rock is President Emeritus of the University of Ottawa, and a former Professor in its Faculty of Law, where he taught International Humanitarian Law and Armed Conflict in International Law. He served as Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations. He is a Senior Advisor to the World Refugee and Migration Council and a member of the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity.
He practiced in civil, administrative, and commercial litigation for 20 years (1973-93) with a national law firm in Toronto, appearing as counsel in a wide variety of cases before courts at all levels, including the Supreme Court of Canada. He was inducted in 1988 as a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. He is a former Treasurer (President) of the Law Society of Ontario.
Allan Rock was elected to the Canadian Parliament in 1993, and re-elected in 1997 and 2000. He served for that decade as a senior minister in the government of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, in both social and economic portfolios. He was Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada (1993-97), Minister of Health (1997-2002) and Minister of Industry and Infrastructure (2002-03).
He was appointed in 2003 as Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations in New York during a period that involved responding to several complex regional conflicts, including those in Sri Lanka, Democratic Republic of Congo and Darfur. He led the successful Canadian effort in New York to secure, at the 2005 World Summit, the unanimous adoption by UN member states of The Responsibility to Protect populations from genocide, ethnic cleansing and other mass atrocities. He participated in the negotiation (in Abuja, Nigeria) of the Darfur Peace Agreement in May, 2006. He later served as a Special Envoy for the United Nations investigating the unlawful use of child soldiers in Sri Lanka during its civil war.
In 2008, Allan Rock became the 29th President and Vice Chancellor of the University of Ottawa, a comprehensive university of 50,000 students, faculty and staff. uOttawa is ranked among the Top Ten in Canada for research intensity, and is the largest bilingual university (French-English) in the world. He completed two terms as uOttawa President in 2016. Allan Rock was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School, associated with the Program on International Law and Armed Conflict.
Dr. Emily Whalen
Dr. Emily Whalen is a historian of U.S. foreign policy and of the Middle East. Dr. Whalen earned her PhD in international history at the University of Texas at Austin in 2020. She is a Senior Non-resident Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Clements Center for National Security, an Ernest May fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a Smith Richardson Foundation predoctoral fellow at Yale’s International Security Studies program, and an affiliated scholar at the American University of Beirut’s Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies. The P.E.O. Sisterhood and the American Association of University Women have also supported her work. Previously, Emily worked as a historical consultant for the EastWest Institute, an international, nongovernmental think tank specializing in track 2 diplomacy.