Vanda Felbab-Brown is a senior fellow with the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. She is an expert on international and internal conflicts and their management, including counterinsurgency, organized crime, and illicit economies. She focuses particularly on South Asia, Burma, Indonesia, the Andean region, Mexico, and Somalia.

Felbab-Brown is the author of Aspiration and Ambivalence: Strategies and Realities of Counterinsurgency and State-Building in Afghanistan (The Brookings Institution Press, 2012) and Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Brookings Institution Press, 2009) which examines military conflict and illegal economies in Colombia, Peru, Afghanistan, Burma, Northern Ireland, India, and Turkey. Felbab-Brown is also the author of numerous policy reports, academic articles, and opinion pieces. She has conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan, Burma, Indonesia, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Morocco, India, Nepal, and Sub-Saharan Africa. A frequent commentator in U.S. and international media, Felbab-Brown regularly provides congressional testimony on these issues. She received her Ph.D. in political science from MIT and her B.A. from Harvard University.

Among her publications are: Nuclear and Radiological Attacks by Terrorist Groups (Brookings, forthcoming); Political Violence and the Illicit Economies of West Africa" (Terrorism and Political Violence, 2012); Fighting the Nexus of Organized Crime and Violent Conflict while Enhancing Human Security (US Army War College, 2012); Bringing the State to the Slum: Confronting Organized Crime and Urban Violence in Latin America (Brookings 2011); Calderón’s Caldron: Lessons from Mexico’s Battle Against Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking in Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, and Michoacán (Brookings, 2011); Afghanistan Ten Years after 9/11: Counterterrorism Accomplishments while a Civil War Is Lurking? (Brookings, 2011) Not as Easy as Falling off a Log: The Illegal Timber Trade in the Asia-Pacific Region and Possible Mitigation Strategies (Brookings, 2011); The Disappearing Act: The Illicit Trade in Wildlife in Asia (Brookings, 2011); Deterring Non-state Actors in U.S. Nuclear and Extended Deterrence: Consideration and Challenges (Brookings, 2010); Why Legalization in Mexico is not a Panacea for Reducing Violence and Suppressing Organized Crime (Brookings, 2010); Negotiations and Reconciliation with the Taliban: Key Policy Issues and Dilemmas (Brookings, 2010); The Political Economy of Illegal Domains in India and China (International Lawyer, Winter 2009); The Drug Economy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Security in the Region (The National Bureau of Asian Research, December 2009); It’s All or Nothing in Afghanistan (The Daily Beast, October 12, 2009); Narco-belligerents Across the Globe: Lessons from Colombia for Afghanistan? (Real Instituto Elcano, October 2009); The Obama Administration’s New Counternarcotics Policy in Afghanistan: Its Promises and Potential Pitfalls (Brookings, 2009); Afghanistan’s Elections and Accountable Governance (The Los Angeles Times, August 19, 2009); Assessment of the Implementation of the United States Government’s Support for Plan Colombia’s Illicit Crops Reduction Components (USAID, 2009) (co-authored); Strengthen Human Security, a chapter from The Fifth Summit of the Americas: Recommendations for Action (Brookings Institution Press, April 2009); and The Violent Drug Market in Mexico and Lessons from Colombia (Brookings, March 2009).

Elizabeth Ferris is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy and co-director of the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement in Washington, D.C., where her work encompasses a wide range of issues related to internal displacement, humanitarian action, natural disasters and climate change.

Prior to joining Brookings in November 2006, Ferris spent 20 years working in the field of humanitarian assistance, most recently in Geneva, Switzerland at the World Council of Churches. There she was responsible for the Council’s work in humanitarian response and long-term development. In this capacity, she worked with many local, national and international non-governmental organizations to support capacity building and to advocate for protection of refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and other populations affected by conflict.

She has also served as the director of the Church World Service’s Immigration and Refugee Program, the Research Director for the Life & Peace Institute in Uppsala, Sweden and a Fulbright Professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her teaching experience has included positions at Lafayette College, Miami University and Pembroke State University.

Her articles have appeared in Refugee Survey Quarterly, Forced Migration Review, Journal of Refugee Studies, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, the International Review of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and many others. Her most recent book, The Politics of Protection: The Limits of Humanitarian Action, was published by Brookings Institution Press in April 2011.

She was educated at Duke University (B.A., ’71) and the University of Florida (M.A. ’72, Ph.D. ’76).

Carol Graham is the Leo Pasvolsky Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and College Park Professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. She is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).

She is the author of The Pursuit of Happiness: Toward an Economy of Well-Being (Brookings, 2011; also published in Chinese and paperback); Happiness around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (Oxford University Press, 2009; published in Chinese, Portuguese and paperback).

Graham served as Vice President and Director of Governance Studies at Brookings from 2002-2004. She has also served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. She has also been a consultant at the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, United Nations Development Program, and the Harvard Institute for International Development, helping to design safety net programs in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe.

Graham, born in Lima, Peru, has an A.B. from Princeton University, an M.A. from The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a Ph.D. from Oxford University. She is the mother of three children.

Jeffrey Gutman is currently a senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution, focusing on issues of development effectiveness, infrastructure and urban development. He retired from the World Bank in 2010 after a 31-year career where he had extensive strategic, managerial and operational responsibilities covering economic development and poverty alleviation across a range of sectors and regions of the world.

As vice president of Operational Policy and Country Services from 2007-2010, he led the efforts for major reforms of World Bank's operational policies and practices. Serving at the intersection of senior management, the board, and with key interactions with donor and client countries, Gutman's efforts focused on balancing a demand for faster response and a more differentiated approach by type of country and sector with the calls for greater transparency, accountability and attention to results. During this period, he and his team guided a program to overhaul investment lending policies, including those for fragile states; managed the design and adoption of a major reform of disclosure policy; and led the effort to adopt and implement the recommendations of the Volcker Panel report on fraud and corruption.

From the time he joined the World Bank in 1979, he has held a range of technical, policy and managerial positions, relating to infrastructure and urban development. Throughout his career, Gutman remained focused on operations with a reputation for innovation and quality both in substance and in practicality in design.

Prior to joining the Bank, Gutman worked as an economist/planner for a consulting firm including a three-year assignment in Honduras; as a consultant to the U.S. Congress National Transportation Policy Study Commission; and as a legislative aide to a New York congressman. He received his master's degree in city and regional planning from Rutgers University in 1974 and his bachelor of science in industrial and labor relations form Cornell University in 1971. He has lectured extensively at international fora and in college graduate programs.

Ross A. Hammond is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he is director of the Center on Social Dynamics and Policy. His primary area of expertise is modeling complex dynamics of social, economic, political and public health systems using mathematical and agent-based computational methods. His current research topics include obesity, behavioral epidemiology, corruption and anti-corruption policies, ethnocentrism and inter-group relations, and the dynamics of trust.

Hammond received his B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Williams College, and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan. He has authored or co-authored numerous scholarly publications, on a wide range of topics, in journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Evolution, Theoretical Population Biology, Preventing Chronic Disease, PLOS One, and Complexity. His work has been featured in New Scientist magazine, Salon and The Atlantic Monthly. Hammond serves on the editorial board of the journal Childhood Obesity and on the steering committee for the Comparative Modeling Network of the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research (a joint venture of NIH, USDA and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation).

Hammond has previously been the Okun-Model fellow in economics at Brookings, an NSF IGERT IDEAS fellow in the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan, a visiting scholar at The Santa Fe Institute, and a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

John Hudak is a fellow in Governance Studies and Managing Editor of the FixGov blog. His research examines questions of presidential power in the contexts of administration, personnel, and public policy. Additionally, he focuses on campaigns and elections, bureaucratic process and legislative-executive interaction.

John’s forthcoming book, Presidential Pork: White House Influence over the Distribution of Federal Grants demonstrates that pork-barrel politics occurs beyond the halls of Congress. Presidents capitalize on their discretionary funding authority to target federal dollars to swing states in advance of presidential elections. His other work explores how agency staffing, expertise, and institutional structure facilitate or hinder presidential power and influence. This research explores the balance between political control and bureaucratic expertise in the delivery of public policy.

John’s work has been recognized for its quality and contribution by the Midwest Political Science Association and the American Political Science Association’s Presidency Research Group. His work has been supported by institutions including the National Science Foundation.

Prior to joining Brookings, John served as the program director and as a graduate fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. He holds a B.A. in political science and economics from the University of Connecticut and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Vanderbilt University.

Joshua Meltzer is a fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution and is an expert on the intersection between climate change and international trade as well as the relationship between trade and U.S. competitiveness, particularly with regard to U.S. trade with key economies such as China, India, Japan and the European Union.

His research interests also include a range of issues related to the World Trade Organization and free trade agreements, such as the treatment and promotion of trade in energy. Currently, he is an adjunct professor at John Hopkins University, School for Advanced International Studies and Georgetown University Law School.

Prior to joining the Brookings Institution in November 2010, Joshua Meltzer was First Secretary for trade policy at the Australian Embassy in Washington, D.C. At the Australian Embassy, he focused on climate change and energy issues, particularly with respect to their trade-related aspects. He was also responsible for intellectual property and the trade and environment issues in the Doha Round. Meltzer has also worked in the Office of Trade Negotiations in the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, where he was a trade negotiator for Australia's free trade agreement negotiations with Malaysia and ASEAN/New Zealand. He was also responsible for providing the Australian government with legal advice on its commitments under its FTAs, including the Australia-U.S. FTA. Meltzer has also interned in the Legal Affairs Division at the WTO and the United Nations International Law Commission. Recent publications include an analysis of international investment law in free trade agreements and an examination of the extent to which state sovereignty can legitimize the WTO.

Meltzer holds degrees from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia as well as an S.J.D. and LL.M. from the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor.

Adele Morris is a fellow and policy director for Climate and Energy Economics at the Brookings Institution. Her expertise and interests include the economics of policies related to climate change, energy, natural resources, and public finance.

She joined Brookings in July 2008 from the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of the U.S. Congress, where she spent a year as a Senior Economist covering energy and climate issues.

Before the JEC, Adele served nine years with the U.S. Treasury Department as its chief natural resource economist, working on climate, energy, agriculture, and radio spectrum issues. On assignment to the U.S. Department of State in 2000, she was the lead U.S. negotiator on land use and forestry issues in the international climate change treaty process. Prior to joining the Treasury, she served as the senior economist for environmental affairs at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the development of the Kyoto Protocol. She began her career at the Office of Management and Budget, where she conducted regulatory oversight of agriculture and natural resource agencies. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University, an M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Utah, and a B.A. from Rice University.

Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the director of policy at the Metropolitan Policy Program there, co-directs Brookings Mountain West, a partnership between the Brookings Institution and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Mark is an expert on regional innovation systems and economic development and has published extensively on manufacturing, energy issues, and regional industry clusters.

For Brookings Mountain West, Mark’s most recent publications include: "Centers of Invention: Leveraging the Mountain West Innovation Complex for Energy System Transformation; "Export West: How Mountain West Metros Can Lead National Export Growth and Boost Competitiveness" (with Jonathan Rothwell and Emilia Istrate); "Mountain Monitor: Tracking Economic Recession and Recovery in the Intermountain West’s Metropolitan Areas" (with Jonathan Rothwell and Kenan Fikri).

At the Metropolitan Policy Program, Mark recently led the development of state advanced industries strategies for Tennessee’s automotive industry and Colorado’s space / aerospace sector and is currently developing a national definition and measurement of the North American AI sector. He was also the lead author of "Unify, Regionalize, Diversify: An Economic Development Agenda for Nevada."

He is the author of numerous publications on cluster- and technology-based economic development including "The New 'Cluster Moment': How Regional Innovation Clusters Can Foster the Next Economy" and "MetroPolicy: Shaping a New Federal Partnership for a Metropolitan Nation."

Two of Muro’s most well-known publications on energy and energy finance topics are: "Sizing the Clean Economy: A National and Regional Green Jobs Assessment" and "Beyond Boom and Bust: Putting Cleantech on a Path to Subsidy Independence."

Prior to joining Brookings, Mark was a senior policy analyst at the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University. He has also been a staff writer for The Boston Globe and an editorial writer for The Arizona Daily Star. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and a master’s degree in American studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Richard Reeves is a fellow in Economic Studies and policy director for the Center on Children and Families whose research focuses on economic mobility. He is also an associate director of CentreForum. Before his move to Washington, DC in the summer of 2012, he worked as director of strategy to the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister. He is a former director of Demos, the London-based political think-tank.

Richard is the author of John Stuart Mill – Victorian Firebrand, an intellectual biography of the British liberal philosopher and politician, as well as a series of articles, radio programs and publications on politics and policy.

His other principal areas of interest are the theory and practice of coalition building; the development of progressive political thought; policies relating to social mobility; the economics and politics of wellbeing; the formation of character; contemporary gender and masculinity; the future of the workplace; and organizational leadership.

Richard is also a successful public speaker and broadcaster. A former European Business Speaker of the Year, he is co-presenter and co-author of The 80 Minute MBA (2009).

An experienced media presenter and commentator, Richard has written and presented a number of programs for the BBC, including, for Radio 4, Anti-Social Housing, which addressed the failures of the UK social housing system (2009); Character Factories, on the importance of character formation for public policy (2008); and the series Political Roots, an examination of the historical and intellectual foundations of modern liberalism and social democracy (2009). In 2005, he presented the four-part BBC2 TV series, Making Slough Happy.

Richard’s previous roles include director of futures at the Work Foundation; principal policy advisor to the Minister for Welfare Reform, research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, one of the UK’s premier think-tanks, and a researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London.

Jonathan Rothwell is a senior research associate and associate fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings. His research covers a variety of topics on the sources of regional and national economic growth and prosperity with a focus on human capital and innovation. He has written Brookings reports on the labor market for education and skills, the economic consequences of patents and science and technical knowledge, the cleantech industry, and how land regulations create income segregation and unequal access to high-performing public schools. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Penn State, a master’s degree in economics from the New School, and a doctorate in policy from Princeton University. He is a frequent contributor to The Avenue blog at the New Republic, and he has published academic papers in journals such as Urban Studies, Urban Affairs Review, Social Science Quarterly, and American Law and Economics Review.

Jeremy Shapiro is a visiting fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. Prior to re-joining Brookings, he was a member of the U.S. State Department’s policy planning staff, where he advised the secretary of state on U.S. policy in North Africa and the Levant. He was also the senior advisor to Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Philip Gordon, providing strategic guidance on a wide variety of U.S.-European foreign policy issues.

Prior to joining the State Department, Shapiro was the research director of the Center of the United States and Europe (CUSE) at the Brookings Institution and a fellow in foreign policy studies. He was also a non-resident senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University. Shapiro has also worked as a policy analyst at RAND in Washington, D.C. He served from June to July 2009, on General Stanley McChrystal’s initial assessment team that recommended a new strategy for the NATO efforts in Afghanistan. He is the author of numerous articles on European and strategic affairs in various newspapers and journals including The New York Times, The Financial Times, and The Washington Post. He also has published several books and monographs including, with Nick Witney, Towards a Post-American Europe: A Power Audit of US-EU Relations (ECFR, 2009), with Michael O’Hanlon, Protecting the Homeland 2006/7 (Brookings Press, 2006) and with Philip Gordon, Allies at War: America, Europe, and the Crisis over Iraq(McGraw-Hill, 2004), with Lynn Davis, The U.S. Army and the New National Security Strategy (RAND, 2002) and with Zalmay Khalilzad, Strategic Appraisal: U.S. Aerospace Power in the 21st Century (RAND, 2001).

Shapiro graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in computer science and received his M.A. in international relations and international economics from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at MIT.

Jennifer S. Vey is a fellow at the Brookings Institution whose work primarily focuses on the competitiveness and quality of life of cities and metros in the next economy.

She is the author of "Building from Strength: Creating Opportunity in Greater Baltimore’s Next Economy," "Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing America’s Older Industrial Cities," "Organizing for Success: A Call to Action for the Kansas City Region," and "Higher Education in Pennsylvania: A Competitive Asset for Communities." She has co-authored several other Brookings publications, including "Recapturing Land for Economic and Fiscal Growth," "The Next Economy: Economic Recovery and Transformation in the Great Lakes Region," "Back to Prosperity: A Competitive Agenda for Renewing Pennsylvania," "Seizing City Assets: Ten Steps to Urban Land Reform," and others.

Jennifer also co-edited Retooling for Growth: Building a 21st Century Economy in America’s Older Industrial Areas, published by the American Assembly and Brookings Institution Press.

Prior to joining Brookings in June, 2001, Jennifer was a Community Planning and Development Specialist at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, where she assisted urban Empowerment Zones in implementing their strategic plans. She earned a Master of Planning degree from the University of Virginia in 1997, and holds a B.A. in Geography from Bucknell University. She lives with her family in Baltimore.

Niam Yaraghi will be joining Brookings as a fellow the summer of 2014 in the Governance Studies’ Center for Technology Innovation. His work will contribute to the Center for Technology Innovation’s mission, which is to deliver high-quality research that impacts the public debate and policymaking in the arena of U.S. and global technology innovation. He will join Brookings after completing his Ph.D. in Management Science and Systems at State University of New York at Buffalo. The focus of his research is on Health Information Exchange (HIE) platforms. Using data-sets including HIE system logs, patients medical history and insurance claims, he studies several research areas including patients’ privacy decisions, adoption and use of HIE by physicians, and benefits of HIE in reducing costs and increasing quality of healthcare services. His work has been published in academic journals, including the Journal of Risk Research and Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. He has taught in several countries including the U.S., Sweden and Iran, and has helped to develop new graduate courses at the UB school of Management. Yaraghi also holds degrees from the Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden) in Project Management and Operational Development, as well as the Isfahan University of Technology (Isfahan, Iran) in Industrial Engineering.