Jackson Institute for Global Affairs announces senior fellows for 2015-2016

An economist, two ambassadors, and the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East Policy will join 11 returning Senior Fellows at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs in 2015-2016.

The Jackson Institute brings leading practitioners in various fields of international affairs to campus to spend a year or a semester teaching courses and mentoring Yale students. The four newcomers are:

Sigridur Benediktsdottir, director of the financial stability department at the Central Bank of Iceland. Previously, Benediktsdottir was a lecturer and associate chair of the economics department at Yale.  She worked as an economist for the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank in the United States from 2005 to 2007 and was one of three appointed to the Parliamentary Special Investigation Commission on the causes of the Icelandic banking collapse in 2008. She is also a member of the Danish Systemic Risk Council. She will teach courses on international and macroeconomics and financial stability.

Rosemary DiCarlo, former U.S. deputy permanent representative to the United Nations. Prior to this assignment she served as U.S. alternate representative for special political affairs to the United Nations. Her 30-year foreign service career included an assignment as deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, during which she covered issues related to the western Balkans.  She also held the position of U.S. coordinator for stability pact implementation (southeast Europe) at the Department of State. This fall Ambassador DiCarlo will become president of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, a nonprofit organization that works on security challenges facing the United States and conducts Track 1.5 and Track 2 diplomacy.

Robert Ford, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. Ford was the U.S. ambassador to Syria 2011-2014, receiving wide recognition for his work defending Syrians’ human rights in the face of the Bashar Asad regime’s repression.  He received the annual Profile in Courage award in 2012 from the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston for his human rights work and a Presidential Honor award in 2012 for his stewardship of the American Embassy in Damascus during a crisis period. Ford also served five years in Iraq helping the Iraqis establish their permanent government through three rounds of elections and preparation of a new constitution.  He received from Secretary of State John Kerry in March 2014 the Distinguished Service award, the State Department’s highest award.

Matthew Spence, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East Policy. From 2009 to 2012, Spence worked at the White House on the National Security Council as special assistant to the president and senior director for International Economic Affairs and as senior advisor to two national security advisors. Spence is the co-founder of the Truman National Security Project, served as a lecturer in international relations at Oxford University, and has been widely published in national security and foreign policy. Spence received the Secretary of Defense Award for Outstanding Public Service.

The new fellows will be joining returning fellows Eric Braverman, former CEO of the Clinton Foundation; David Brooks, New York Times op-ed columnist; Ambassador Johnnie Carson, former assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of African Affairs; Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont and 2004 Democractic presidential candidate; Tom Graham, former special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia on the National Security Council; Unni Karunakara, former international president of Doctors Without Borders; Clare Lockhart, director of the Institute for State Effectiveness; General (Ret.) Stan McChrystal, former commander of the International Security Assistance Force and commander of United States Forces Afghanistan; Ambassador John Negroponte, former deputy secretary of state; Steve Roach, former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia; and Middle East expert Emma Sky.

Biographies of this year’s Jackson Senior Fellows can be found on the institute’s website.