Jürgen Kluge
CEO of Haniel, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Celesio, and former Head of McKinsey Germany

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Kluge studied Physics in Cologne and Essen, Germany. He holds a PhD in experimental physics (laser) and spent some time during his PhD work developing high-frequency electronics for a US laser company. Additional professorship in mechanical engineering at Technical University, Darmstadt, Germany.

Jürgen Kluge joined McKinsey & Company in 1984 in Düsseldorf, Germany. He was elected Partner in 1989, and Director in 1995. From 1999 until 2006 he lead the German Office of McKinsey. From January 2007 until December 2009 he was responsible for Worldwide Proprietary Knowledge, Building and Worldwide Recruiting. Jürgen Kluge was a long standing member of McKinsey's Shareholder Council, and several other Firm committees.

He has co-written books such as "Einfach überlegen/Simplicity Wins" and "Wachstum durch Verzicht/Shrink to Grow". Recent publications include "Wissen entscheidet/Knowledge Unplugged", "Die Zukunft der Bildung" (The Future of Education), "Schluss mit der Bildungsmisere – Ein Sanierungskonzept", "Wirtschaftsmacht Europa" (Economic Power Europe), and "Globale Produktion", published in February 2006. As of January 1, 2010 Jürgen Kluge is appointed CEO of Franz Haniel & Cie GmbH in Duisburg, Germany.

Claus Kleber
Anchorman of Germany's leading daily TV news program "heute journal" on channel ZDF

Claus Kleber is the anchorman of the news show heute journal of ZDF, a German public TV station. Specifically, he is known for his expertise in United States politics and German-American relations, as evidenced by his 2005 book Amerikas Kreuzzüge (America's crusades).

Kleber started building his reputation during the 1980s as a Washington correspondent for the German public radio station Deutschlandfunk (DLF). In the spring of 1989, Kleber returned to Germany as chief editor of RIAS Berlin, the city’s most influential radio station. There, he was on location for the fall of the Berlin Wall, and brought eyewitness accounts of the crumbling Soviet Empire to Germany.
In 1990, Kleber returned to Washington as a senior correspondent and bureau chief for the ARD, one of the two nationwide German public television networks (the other being the ZDF, where he currently works). There, he dedicated twelve years to setting high standards in international reporting and consequently gained a reputation as one of his country’s most influential foreign policy journalists.
He has reported from all fifty states in the US, and he has covered, met and interviewed every American president since Ronald Reagan as well as the most influential members of the George W. Bush administration, including President Bush himself as well as secretaries Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell.

In 2001, Kleber moved to London as the ARD’s bureau chief. Only a few months into the new job, he received an offer from ZDF to take over as managing editor and principal anchor of Heute Journal, Germany’s leading television news program - an offer nobody can refuse.
The national press hails Kleber as the dynamic force that changed the face and nature of public television news. Under his stewardship, heute journal, already a leader in the business, has increased both its reputation and its ratings significantly.

Kleber is also a documentary-maker, and together with his long-standing professional partner, Angela Andersen, he has made many works, including the award-winning America, Almighty (2003), Peoples of the Orient (2003), Minefield Afghanistan (2004) and India – Unstoppable (2006).
Claus Kleber is a recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the Quandt Preis (1998) for excellence in economic reporting, the RIAS-Preis (1997, 1999 and 2003), and the Deutscher Fernsehpreis (the German equivalent of the American Emmy) in 2005 and 2006. His best-selling book Amerikas Kreuzzüge (America's crusades) earned the 2005 Corine Preis Award for best non-fictional work. Shortly before the 2008 presidential election, Kleber published an updated edition with his views on the candidates.

[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_Kleber]

Klaus Scharioth
German Ambassador to the United States

Ambassador Dr. Klaus Scharioth presented his credentials on March 13, 2006. He was born 1946 in Essen, North Rhine Westfalia, Germany. He studied law in Bonn, Geneva and Freiburg, as well as international relations, international law, international finance and economics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Harvard Law School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government and holds M.A., M.A.L.D. and Ph.D. degrees in addition to the German Law Degree.

In 1976 he joined the German Foreign Service. Since then he has held posts around the world, including Quito, Ecuador, the Permanent Mission of the Federal Republic of Germany to the United Nations in New York, Chef de Cabinet (director of the private office) to the NATO Secretaries General Wörner, Claes and Solana; but also in Germany as Head of the German Foreign Minister's staff and as Head of the North America and Security Policy Directorate.
From 1999 to 2002 he headed the Political Directorate-General and was Political Director of the German Foreign Office. From 2002 until March 2006 Dr. Scharioth served as State Secretary, the highest civil service post in the German Foreign Office.

Klaus Scharioth is married and has three children.

Daniel Schrag
Director of the Harvard Center for the Environment and member of the President's Advisory Council on Science and Technology

Daniel Schrag is the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at Harvard University.  Prof. Schrag studies climate and climate change over the broadest range of Earth’s history.  He has examined changes in ocean circulation over the last several decades, with particular attention to El Niño and the tropical Pacific; he investigates Pleistocene ice-age cycles over the last million years; he studies the warm climates of the Eocene, 50 million years ago; and, with colleagues from Harvard, helped to develop the Snowball Earth hypothesis that explains extreme glacial events that occurred over 600 million years ago. 

Currently he is working on the early history of Mars and Earth, trying to understand the environmental conditions around the time of the origin of life.  He is also working on new technological approaches to mitigating future climate change, including advanced energy technologies for low-carbon transportation fuel, and various strategies for carbon sequestration.  Since 2004, Prof. Schrag has served as the Director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. 
He received a B.S. in Geology and Political Science from Yale and a Ph.D. in Geology from the University of California at Berkeley.  He taught at Princeton before moving to Harvard in 1997.  Among various honors, he was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2000.  He currently serves on President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology.

Matthias Kleiner
President of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

Professor Matthias Kleiner was born in Recklinghausen, Germany in 1955. He studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Dortmund where he received his doctorate in 1987. He then worked as senior researcher at the Institute of Forming Technology for seven years where he qualified as professor in 1991.

In 1994 he was appointed to a full professorship at the Brandenburg Technical University of Cottbus. In 1998 he became Head of the Department of Forming Technology at the University of Dortmund, now Institute of Forming Technology and Lightweight Construction (IUL), which is divided into three departments: sheet metal forming, profile forming, and high speed forming and joining.
In addition to his activities as coordinator of numerous research projects, many of which funded by the DFG, he was elected member of the DFG senate, joint committee and grants committee in 2002 and became Vice President of the DFG in 2005.

Moreover, Professor Kleiner is a member of various national and international institutions and associations. He was awarded the “Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Prize” by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 1997. On May 31st 2006 Professor Kleiner was elected new President of the DFG by the DFG's General Assembly. Professor Kleiner took office on January 1st 2007, succeeding Professor Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker.

Kent Nagano
American conductor and music director of the Munich State Opera

Kent Nagano has established an acclaimed reputation as one of the formost interpreters within the fields of both operatic and symphonic literature. In September 2006, he became General Music Director of the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich as well as Music Director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

Kent Nagano’s first role in Europe was with the Paris Opera where he was to play a key role in the world premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Opera “Saint François d’Assise” at the request of the composer who brought Nagano to Europe and introduced him to European culture. Since this time, Nagano’s success in America led to European appointments: Music Director of the Opéra National de Lyon (1988-1998), Music Director of the Hallé Orchestra (1991-2000), Associate Principal Guest Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra (1990-1998), Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (2000-2006) after which he was given the title Honorary Conductor and new director of the Los Angeles Opera (2003-2006).

As a much sought-after guest conductor Kent Nagano has worked with most of the world’s finest orchestras including the Vienna, Berlin and New York Philharmonic Orchestras, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra (Washington, D.C.), the Dresdner Staatskapelle and the Russian National Orchestra. In addition he has also been involved in working closely with many of the great composers of our time including Messiaen, Berio, Dutilleux and Ligeti. World premieres from past seasons include several major works like Peter Eötvös’ “Three Sisters”, John Adams’ “The Death of Klinghoffer” and “El Niño”, Wolfgang Rihm’s “Das Gehege”, Kaija Saariaho’s “L’amour de loin” and Unsuk Chin’s “Alice in Wonderland”.

In April 2008, Nagano and the OSM released their first joint recording on Sony/Analekta: “Beethoven: Ideals of the French Revolution”. One year after, Kent Nagano and the OSM released Mahler’s “The Song of the Earth” on Sony. In 2009 they recorded Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 as well as the incidental music to Beethoven’s “Creatures of Prometheus”. In February 2009 Sony released the first orchestral CD collaboration between the Bayerische Staatsoper and Nagano, a recording of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4. The cycle of Bruckner recordings will continue with the Bayerische Staatsorchester’s upcoming releases of Bruckner’s Symphonies No. 7 and 8.

Jürgen Partenheimer
German artist

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Partenheimer, born in Munich, Germany in 1947, studied in Germany, Spain, the USA, Mexico and France.

Jürgen Partenheimer counts among the internationally most renowned German artists of his generation. His work, emerged in Germany in the early 1980s, reveals the artist’s profound experience in his artistic activities which include painting, drawing, sculpture and which also draw on theory, poetry and prose as his referential grammar of artistic expression. Partenheimer's ability to combine his art with serious theoretical discourse testifies to his extraordinary qualities as an artist.

He participated in the Paris Biennial; Sao Paulo Biennial and Venice Biennial. His work was included in exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; Gulbenkian Foundation Lisbon, Fondacion Joan Miró, Barcelona; The Singapore Art Museum; Museum Ludwig Cologne or the National Gallery of Art in Berlin.  Individual exhibitions include the National Gallery of Art in Berlin; Kunsthalle Karlsruhe; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Graphische Sammlung, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; S.M.A.K. Ghent; The Gemeentemuseum Den Haag; IVAM Valencia, IKON Gallery Birmingham and Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo.

In the year 2000 Partenheimer was the first contemporary German artist honored with a comprehensive retrospective of his work by the China National Gallery of Art in Beijing and the Nanjing Museum in Nanjing. He was awarded the 1. Class Federal Cross of Merit of Germany for outstanding international achievement.

He taught as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California at Davis; Visiting Artist and Professor of Art at the San Francisco Art Institute; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; the Edinburgh College of Art; Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. Currently Muthesius Guest Professor of Art in Kiel, Germany.

Matthias Matussek
German journalist at Der Spiegel

Matthias Matussek, studied comparative literature in Berlin, then started working as a cultural editor at the newspaper Berliner Abend. In 1982 he moved to Stern magazine. Since 1987 Matussek has been on the staff of the German news magazine Der Spiegel. From 1992 to 1996 he was the Bureau-Chief of Der Spiegel in New York, from 2000 to 2004 in Rio de Janeiro. After that he was running the London Bureau for the magazin. From August 2005 to 2008 he was in charge of the cultural section of the magazin in the headquarter in Hamburg. He currently workes at reporter at large fort he magazine.

His books include: Palasthotel Zimmer 6101 (Palace Hotel, Room 6101), Das Selbstmord-Tabu (The Suicide Taboo), Fifth Avenue - Short Stories, We Germans, When we were young and gay.

For his reports from East Germany, Matussek received the Egon-Erwin-Kisch Prize, the most prestigious award given to journalists in Germany. His book „We Germans – why it is okay to like us“ was on the SPIEGEL- Bestsellerlist Top Twenty for 13 weeks and was translated into French.

Peter Badge
Photographer

Peter Badge was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1974, and began his career in photography as a free-lance artist in 1993. In 1995, he moved to Berlin to study Art History and has been living and working there ever since. He initially worked as a free-lance photographer for different magazines, but soon started to develop his own ideas and projects.  

Choosing portraiture as his main focus, Badge concentrated on noted personalities such as artists and actors, musicians and photographers, and in his latest works on “Icons of the Economy” and “Philanthropists”. He also did a series on the electronic music pioneer Oskar Sala, on Elvisimpersinators “Elviswho” and a documentary on Marius Müller-Westernhagen (in cooperation with Art Cologne and the National Music Center in Washington, D.C.).             

Badge embarked on a series of photographs of Nobel Laureates in 2000, commissioned by a number of renowned organizations like Deutsches Museum, Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of American History and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. as well as his partners, the Council for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings and the Foundation Lindau Nobelprizewinners Meetings at Lake Constance. This project turned out to be a long-term, ongoing mission which has taken him all over the world in order to capture an image of every living Nobel Laureate.                        

Peter Badge has published several books; his work is represented in numerous private and public collections around the globe and has been printed in magazines and newspapers.

Katharina Janus
PhD, MBA, assistant professor at Columbia University

Katharina Janus, PhD, MBA, is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s department of health policy & management since 2007 and will take over the newly established full tenured professorship of health care management at Ulm University, Germany, in spring 2010.

She focuses her research on managed care, incentive systems, and decision-making of health care professionals in the United States and Europe. At Columbia University, Dr. Janus is working on change management and leadership strategies to reduce errors in medicine. She has been a senior lecturer for health services management at Hannover Medical School, Germany, since 2003 where she worked on legislative proposals, integrated care delivery, and incentive systems in health care. Dr. Janus also has been a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley since 2005 and served as the principal
investigator of an international study of physician job satisfaction in cooperation with the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University.

Born in Eutin (Northern Germany) in 1975, Dr. Janus earned her Master's Degree in Business Administration at the University of Hamburg and the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris in 2000.  She holds a PhD in Business and Social Sciences from Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg (2003). Dr. Janus
was a 2006-07 Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy at The Commonwealth Fund.

Annette Widmann-Mauz
Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Health

Annette Widmann-Mauz was born on 13th June 1966 in Tübingen (Baden-Wuerttemberg). She is Roman Catholic, married and lives in Baden-Wuerttemberg, in Balingen on the Schwäbische Alb.

Annette Widmann-Mauz studied political and legal science at Eberhard-Karls-Universität in Tübingen and worked, from 1993 to 1998, on a project of the European Commission at Tübingen University. Since 1998, she has been a member of the German Bundestag for the Tübingen-Hechingen constituency (direct mandate since 2002). Since October 2009 Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Health. 2002 - 2009 health policy spokesperson of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, 2005 - 2009 chair of the Working Party on Public Health and 2000 - 2009 member of the Executive Committee of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag; since 1998 member of the Bundestag (direct mandate in the Tübingen constituency).

Imdat Solak
Consultant in the new media area

Imdat Solak, born 1969 in Turkey, is currently Head of Strategy, Planning, Analytics & Operational Excellence of Media at Nokia, Inc, White Plains/NY.

In this role, he is the business owner of Ovi Store, Nokia's mobile applications store, worldwide.

Prior to joining Nokia in July 2009, he worked at various large media companies in Germany as business innovator. In his previous role as VP New Media International at Axel Springer AG, Germany's largest publisher, he managed to create businesses with a total revenue of around 150m EUR within three years.

Samina Ahmed
South Asia Project Director at the International Crisis Group

Dr. Samina Ahmed is South Asia Project Director at the International Crisis Group based in Islamabad, Pakistan. There, she oversees the organization's work in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nepal.  She examines the political, social, economic and military factors that increase the risks of extremism, internal conflict and war, and she makes policy recommendations to overcome these threats.

In general, her team focuses on political, security and stability issues in South Asia, including problems of authoritarianism; Islamic extremism, domestic and regional terrorism; educational, judicial, and security sector reform; international involvement and intervention in the region, including US relations with authoritarian states; and domestic insurgencies and the risk of inter-state conflict. She also frequently briefs representatives of foreign ministries and international organizations, and is regularly involved in advocacy efforts internationally.

She is a sought-after commentator on regional developments, including the war efforts in Afghanistan and was formerly a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Michael Kruklinski
Chief Strategy Officer at Siemens Corporation USA

Michael Kruklinski is Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Corporate Development of Siemens Corporation USA and Business Board Member American Council on Germany. He has held a number of senior positions
within Siemens AG.

Prior to joining the company Michael Kruklinski worked as a Senior Principal at A.T. Kearney Inc. in the firm’s financial institutions and high tech industry group. Further, he was Sr. VP and Director of Finance & Director of Business Process Innovations at First American Corporation.

Michael Kruklinski is married and has two children. He resides in Northern New Jersey.

Philip Giudice
Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources

Commissioner Giudice brings diverse and expansive experience to DOER. He is a geologist (B.S. from University of New Hampshire and M.S. in Economic Geology from the University of Arizona) and management professional (M.B.A. from Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth) with over 30 years experience in the energy industry.

Commissioner Giudice serves as board member, board executive committee member and treasurer of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, Governing Board chair for the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust, board member for the National Association of State Energy Officials, leadership group member for the National Action Plan for Energy Efficiency, vice chair for the National Council on Electricity Policy and a board member of the Commonwealth’s Energy Facilities Siting Board.

Prior to joining DOER, Commissioner Giudice served as Senior Vice President at EnerNOC, a start-up company providing electricity demand-management services to businesses, institutions, utilities, and grid operators. The Commissioner was also a Senior Partner, and leader of Mercer Management Consulting’s global energy utilities practice.
Commissioner Giudice is also active in the nonprofit realm. He is board chair of the Center for Effective Philanthropy and serves on the President’s Council of ACCION. Previously, he served full terms on the board of City Year Boston, First Parish Church of Wayland (Unitarian Universalist), Haitian Health Foundation, and was the founding chair of Boston Cares.

Eicke Weber
Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems

Professor Eicke R. Weber is Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE and Professor for Physics / Solar Energy at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics and at the Faculty of Engineering at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg, Germany. The ISE institute is one of the world-leading research institutes in the field of renewable energy and energy efficiency. The focus of Prof. Weber’s research is the analysis of lattice defects in Si and compound semiconductors. Recently he studied specifically how good solar cells can be produced out of upgraded metallurgical (“dirty”) silicon with high metal content.

Prof. Weber studied Physics at the University of Cologne, Germany where he made his doctorate in 1976 and his habilitation in 1983. From 1983-2006 he lectured at the faculty of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering of the University of California, Berkeley - since 1991 as Professor of Materials Science. In 1990 he was appointed visiting professor at the Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan and in 2000 at the Kyoto University in Kyoto, Japan.
In 1994 he received an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award. From 2004-2006 he served as the chair of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Graduate Group in Berkeley. He was president of the Alexander von Humboldt Association of America (AvHAA) from 2001-2003 and in 2003 he was elected founding president of the German Scholars Organization (GSO). In 2006 he received the Award of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz am Bande) of the German President. He is fellow of the American Physical Society.
In July 2008 Prof. Weber was appointed Director to the SEMI International Board of Directors.
He received the Electronics and Photonics Division Award of the Electrochemical Society ECS in June 2009.

Ursula Gather
President TU Dortmund University

Prof. Dr. Ursula Gather was appointed president of TU Dortmund University on 1 September 2008. She got her PH.D. in Mathematics at RWTH Aachen University in 1979, was full professor in the Statistics Department at TU Dortmund University (1986-2008), head of this department (1991-1994) and held several visiting professorships, e.g. at Yale University; La Trobe University, Melbourne; at the University of Iowa, and at the Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille, France.

For her scientific achievements she was awarded prizes such as the Alfried Krupp Award, the IREX-Award (Australia), the Springorum Medal, and the Borchers Medal.
She worked together with physicists in intensive care on the improvement of bed side-alarm systems, she directed a large collaborative research center on analysing complex data (1997-2009) and published over 150 papers in scientific journals. Gather supervised more than 30 PH.D. theses and has been editor of scientific journals and book series.
In addition Gather chairs various national and international associations: she is vice-chair of the Senate of the German Aerospace Center, council member of the International Statistical Institute, and spokesperson of the DFG-Review Board Mathematics.

Annette Grüters-Kieslich
MD, PhD, Professor for Paediatrics, Dean of the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin

Prof. Dr. Annette Grüters-Kieslich completed her studies at the Medical School of the Free University Berlin in 1980 and received her doctoral degree (PhD) in 1982. After starting the training in Pediatrics she spent a DFG funded research fellowship in Perinatology at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1982 to 1984.

In 1998 she became Professor for Paediatric Endocrinology. In 2004 she was appointed as full professor in Pediatrics. Since 2005 she has been the Medical Director of the Charité Center for Women and Child health and Human Genetics. Her research focuses on the molecular pathogenesis of thyroid disorders and the pathophysiology of childhood obesity.

In 2008 she has been elected as Dean of the Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

Vera Lengsfeld
German politician, human rights activist, author

Born in East Germany, Lengsfeld’s human rights activism lead first to her expulsion from the SED, then her arrest for carrying a banner declaring all citizens’ right to free and open expression in the lead up to the Liebknecht and Luxembourg demonstration in East Berlin and eventually her deportation.

On November 9th, 1989 she returned to East Germany, resumed her work as a civil rights activist and was a member of the Constitutional Commission on the German Reunification. Lengsfeld served as a German MP from 1990 till 2005 and is recipient of the prestigious Federal Cross of Merit. Lengsfeld is the author of numerous books describing both the historical but also very personal reality of the GDR and its dissolution.

Charles Maier
Professor of History, Harvard University

Charles S. Maier received his A.B. degree summa cum laude from Harvard University in June 1960, studied on a Henry Fellowship at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and completed his Ph.D. in history at Harvard in December 1966.  He taught history and social studies at Harvard until 1975. He then worked as a professor of history at the University of Bielefeld and Duke University. Since l981 he has been professor of history, Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies, and Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University.

Annette Heuser
Executive Director Bertelsmann Foundation, Washington, DC

Annette Heuser is Executive Director of the Washington, DC office of the Bertelsmann Foundation, a private, non-partisan operational foundation that promotes and strengthens trans-Atlantic cooperation.

Before launching the Foundation’s first U.S. office, Annette served in the corporate sector as Vice President of International Relations at the Guetersloh, Germany-based Bertelsmann AG, Europe’s largest media company. She also established the Foundation’s Brussels office and served as its director from 2000 to 2006.

From 1995 to 2000, she was Director Europe/USA at the Bertelsmann Foundation in Guetersloh. In this function, she managed its European and transatlantic projects, and developed its European networking activities.

Before joining the Bertelsmann Foundation, Annette was editor of the "Jahrbuch der Europäischen Integration" (“Yearbook of European Integration”), an annual publication that covers the year's institutional and political developments concerning European integration.

Annette studied political science, law and sociology at the University of Mainz in Germany. She has authored articles on transatlantic relations and European affairs that have appeared in major US and European publications. She has appeared on numerous television news programs as an analyst on trans-Atlantic foreign and security policy.

Annette is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of the European Union, the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Advisors Group and the European Council on Foreign Relations. She also serves as vice chair of the Council on Foundations’ Global Philanthropy Committee.

Kelly Golnoush Niknejad
Founder, Editor-in-Chief, Tehran Bureau

Born in Iran, Kelly Golnoush Niknejad moved to the US when she was 17. She holds a BA in Political Science and Writing and a law degree with an international and European focus. Following her initial news work in Southern California and Massachusetts, Niknejad moved to New York City and earned two Masters degrees in journalism from Columbia University, focusing first on print and then politics and government.

Niknejad is on the board of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association. Her work includes reporting for PBS/Frontline, the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, TIME Magazine and California Lawyer. She launched Tehran Bureau in November 2008. Tehran Bureau is now in partnership with PBS/Frontline.

Holm Keller
Executive Vice President for Strategic Development and Administration at Leuphana University Lueneburg

Philip G. Altbach
Director of the Center for International Higher Education (CIHE), Boston College

Philip G. Altbach is J. Donald Monan, S.J. University Professor and director of the Center for International Higher Education in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. He was the 2004-2006 Distinguished Scholar Leader for the New Century Scholars initiative of the Fulbright program. He has been a senior associate of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and served as editor of the Review of Higher Education, Comparative Education Review, and as an editor of Educational Policy.

He is author of Turmoil and Transition: The International Imperative in Higher Education, Comparative Higher Education, Student Politics in America, and other books. He co-edited the International Handbook of Higher Education. His most recent book is World Class Worldwide: Transforming Research Universities in Asia and Latin America.

Dr. Altbach holds the B.A., M.A. and Ph.D degrees from the University of Chicago. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the State University of New York at Buffalo,, and was a post-doctoral fellow and lecturer on education at Harvard University. He is chairperson of the International Advisory Council of the Graduate School of Education at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and is a Guest Professor at the Institute of Higher Education at Peking University in the Peoples Republic of China, both in China.

He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, the Institut de Sciences Politique in Paris, and at the University of Bombay in India. Dr. Altbach has been a Fulbright scholar in India, and in Malaysia and Singapore. He has had awards from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), has been Onwell Fellow at the University of Hong Kong, and a senior scholar of the Taiwan Government.

Gregor Schmitz
Correspondent in the Washington office of DER SPIEGEL

Dr. Gregor Peter Schmitz, born 1975, is a correspondent in the Washington office of DER SPIEGEL.

He covers US politics and the White House both for the magzine and SPIEGEL ONLINE and was recently awarded the Arthur F. Burns-Price for his reporting. 

Prior to that assignment, Schmitz was director of the Brussels office of Bertelsmann Foundation and in charge of all US activities of the foundation. He also gained job experience as an associate with Gruner und Jahr, Paris, and as a development aid worker in Latin America.  

Schmitz holds a law degree from Munich University and is a graduate of Sciences-Po, Paris. He also earned graduate degrees in history from Cambridge University, Great Britain (M.Phil.), and in government from Harvard University (MPA) where he was a McCloy-Scholar of the German National Merit Foundation. He spent a year as Visiting Fellow at Harvard's History Faculty where he conducted research for his dissertation on legislation against Holocaust Denial.  

Schmitz has published and written several books on Political Strategy and Political Communication and is a frequent commentator on Deutschlandfunk.

Ijad Madisch
CEO and Co-Founder of Researchgate

Ijad Madisch studied both medicine and computer science at the University of Hanover, Germany and at Harvard Medical School in Boston. He received a scholarship from the Biomedical Program BMEP for conducting research at the Massachusetts General Hospital, a division of Harvard Medical School, in the field of ultra high resolution volume computer tomography in 2004, afterwards spending two years as a researcher at MGH.
In 2005, his research won the Young Investigator Prize by the Radiological Society of North America, awarded to medical students in the USA. He wrote his doctoral thesis in virology, specifically about the molecular typing, evolution, and gene therapy vector design of adenoviruses for which he won the prize for the best doctoral thesis at the Medical School of Hanover, Germany.

He (co-)authored more than 17 original articles in high ranking journals, and more than 30 conference abstracts for international conferences. At the moment Ijad Madisch is a researcher in the Radiology department at MGH. Ijad Madisch is CEO and Co-founder of ResearchGATE, which was started in 2008 and has grown to the leading scientific networking platform in the world with more than 250,000 members. It offers tools and applications for researchers to interact and collaborate. The platform provides a global scientific web-based environment in which scientists can interact, exchange knowledge and collaborate with researchers of different fields.

In 2010 he co-founded also the first scientific microblogging platform in the world with the name Sciencefeed, which enables scientists to spread scientific breakthroughs in real time.

Stefanie Friedhoff
Special projects manager at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard

Stefanie Friedhoff is special projects manager at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and a freelance journalist for U.S. and European media. Her articles have appeared in Time magazine (U.S.), Frankfurter Allgemeine and Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), and Folio and Facts (Switzerland), among others.

Friedhoff started a career as a freelance correspondent based in Cambridge, Mass., in 1998. Previously, she worked for BZ, Berlin’s largest daily newspaper, where she was news editor and editor of the Sunday magazine. She was a 2001 Nieman Fellow.
At Nieman, Friedhoff directs the specialized Nieman fellowship in Global Health Reporting and organizes interdisciplinary conferences on diverse subjects such as trauma, journalism and storytelling or religion and human rights.

Mohammad Akbar Quraishi
Former Director of Assessments at the Afghan National Security Council

Born in 1974 in Herat, Afghanistan; left after the Soviet invasion to Iran and returned to Afghanistan After the collapse of Communist regime. Moved to Pakistan to further education in and lived in Peshawar and Islamabad for about two years until the collapse of Taliban regime. Joined the Afghan government in 2002 in Afghan Assistance Coordination Authority (AACA), and joined Afghan National Security Council in 2003 as researcher. Counter terrorism fellow at the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington DC (2005-2006) and 2006 until August 2008 served as the Director of Assessments at the Afghan National Security Council

William W. Hogan
Raymond Plank Professor of Global Energy Policy and Research Director of the Harvard Electricity Policy Group

William W. Hogan is the Raymond Plank Professor of Global Energy Policy. He is Research Director of the Harvard Electricity Policy Group at M-R CBG and Chair of the Kennedy School Faculty Appointments Committee. He served on the faculty of Stanford University, where he founded the Energy Modeling Forum (EMF), and is past president of the International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE). Professor Hogan's research focuses on the interaction of energy economics and public policy, with an emphasis on the restructuring of the electricity industry in the United States and worldwide. He has worked to design the market structures and market rules by which regional transmission organizations coordinate bid-based markets for energy, ancillary services, and financial transmission rights. Selected papers are available on his website, www.whogan.com. Professor Hogan received his undergraduate degree from the U.S. Air Force Academy and his PhD from UCLA.

Mathias Risse
Associate Professor of Public Policy and Philosophy, Harvard Kennedy School

Mathias Risse is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Philosophy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of . Government. He works mostly in social and political philosophy and in ethics. His primary research areas are contemporary political philosophy (in particular questions of international justice, distributive justice, and property) and decision theory (in particular, rationality and fairness in group decision making, an area sometimes called analytical social philosophy.) His articles have appeared in journals such as Ethics; Philosophy and Public Affairs; Nous; the Journal of Political Philosophy; and Social Choice and Welfare. 

Risse studied philosophy, mathematics, and mathematical economics at the University of Bielefeld, the University of Pittsburgh, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Princeton University. He received his BA, BS and MS in mathematics from Bielefeld, and his MA and PhD in philosophy from Princeton. Before coming to Harvard he taught in the Department of Philosophy and the Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics at Yale.

F.M. Scherer
Harvard Kennedy School Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Management

F.M. Scherer is the Harvard Kennedy School Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Management in the Aetna Chair, Emeritus. From 1974 to 1976, he was chief economist at the Federal Trade Commission.

His research specialties are industrial economics and the economics of technological change, leading inter alia to books on Industrial Market Structure and Economic Performance (third edition with David Ross); The Economics of Multi-Plant Operation: An International Comparisons Study (with three coauthors); International High-Technology Competition; Competition Policies for an Integrated World Economy; Mergers, Sell-offs, and Economic Efficiency (with David J. Ravenscraft); Innovation and Growth: Schumpeterian Perspectives; and The Weapons Acquisition Process (two volumes, one with M. J. Peck).

Wolfgang Daum
President and Chief Executive Officer of Boston Heart Lab

Dr. Daum is President and Chief Executive Officer of Boston Heart Lab. He is a serial entrepreneur in the medical and healthcare industry since 15+ years.
Prior to Boston Heart Lab, he successfully started, raised and sold three medical device companies in the US and Europe, DAUM, CardioTools, and Thermonix. In addition he brings extensive experience in corporate and business development, marketing and sales.
He has led various international distribution networks during his professional career. He holds a M.S. in Physics and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Hamburg, Germany.