2006 Participant Bios

Dr. Michael L. Best

Dr. Michael L. Best is an assistant professor with The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech and an adjunct assistant professor with the Institute's College of Computing. In addition, he is a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a research affiliate with the Center for Technology, Policy, and Industrial Development and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Program for Internet and Telecoms Convergence.

Best is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Information Technologies and International Development published by the MIT Press. He also serves as a frequent consultant to the World Bank, International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Best holds a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab and has served as the director of Media Lab Asia in India and head of the eDevelopment group at the MIT Media Lab.

Bart Cohen

Bart Cohen has spent his professional career in the areas of research and education, primarily in the non-profit sector. He is currently the assistant director of the Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) Southeast region, which serves Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

At the ADL, Cohen is responsible for monitoring and studying domestic terrorists and extremist groups. He conducts high-level training for local, state, and federal law enforcement officials in the areas of extremism, radical ideology, threat assessment, tattoo and hate symbol identification, and numerology.

Cohen worked as a media resource and research specialist at the University of Vermont and graduated as a John Dewey Scholar in Cultural Anthropology. He is currently a registered mediator for the state of Georgia and, in addition to his work at the ADL, coordinates its Peace By Piece project, an experiential interfaith program for Muslim, Christian, and Jewish youth in Atlanta.

David A. Gross

David A. Gross David A. Gross is Ambassador and serves as the U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy of the U.S. Department of State.

Since joining the Department of State, Ambassador Gross has addressed the United Nations (UN) General Assembly and has led U.S. delegations to many major international telecommunications conferences and is a member of the United Nations' Information and Communications Technologies Task Force. He led the U.S. Government's participation in the preparatory work and served as head of delegation for both phases of the UN's "Heads of State" World Summit on the Information Society in 2003 and 2005. He also has led interagency telecommunications delegations and conducted bilateral discussions with senior representatives from more than sixty countries, and provided commercial and policy advocacy on behalf of U.S. companies in markets around the world.

Gross began his career in communications more than twenty years ago after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania (B.A. in Economics) and receiving his law degree from Columbia.

Dr. Nancy J. Hafkin

Dr. Nancy J. Hafkin is the director of Knowledge Working, a consultancy on information technology and international development. She has promoted the development of information and communications in Africa over the course of thirty years. After earning a Ph.D. degree in history from Boston University, she spearheaded the Pan African Development Information System (PADIS) of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) from 1987 until 1997. She then served as team leader for Promoting Information Technology for Development within the Development Information Services Division of ECA from 1997 until 2000, coordinating the African Information Society Initiative (AISI), the African governments' mandate to use information and communications technology to accelerate socio-economic development in Africa.

She has a long history of working with gender and development issues. In 1976, she co-edited Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change. From 1976-1987, she worked as chief of research and publications at the African Centre for Women of ECA. In 2000, the Association for Progressive established an annual Nancy Hafkin Communications Prize competition.

Charles Kenny

Charles Kenny Charles Kenny joined the World Bank in 1996. He is a senior infrastructure economist in the Infrastructure Economics and Finance Department (IEF) of the World Bank, where he concentrates on issues connected to corruption and the political economy of reform.

Prior to his appointment to IEF, Kenny worked in the Global Information and Communications Technology Department of the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation. He managed a number of projects related to telecommunications, posts, and broadcasting policy and investment, including coordination of the Bank's information infrastructure activities in Afghanistan and Kenya.

An author of the 1999/2000 World Development Report and an analyst in the Development Economics Division of the World Bank, Kenny has published papers and book chapters on several issues, including the role of information and communications technologies in development, the impact of reform in the telecommunication sector, the digital divide, what we know about the causes of economic growth, the link between economic growth and broader development, and the link between economic growth and happiness. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Cambridge University, a Master of Arts degree in international economics from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a Master of Arts degree in development studies from London University's School of Oriental and African Studies.

Dr. Silas Lwakabamba

Dr. Silas Lwakabamba is the founding rector of the Kigali University of Science, Technology and Management since 1997, where he developed a program to train both engineering and technician personnel, whose scarcity was exacerbated by the 1990-1994 Rwandan Civil war and genocide, which depleted the country's human resources.

The chairperson of the international Human Resources Board for the African Virtual University, Lwakabamba is a member of several national, sub-regional, and international boards and committees, including UNESCO's Executive Board. He is particularly proud to have participated in setting up the African Network of Scientific and Technological Institutions under the Executive Board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), especially setting up the sub-networks on water resources engineering, mechanical production, and energy/power (1976-1986). The current president of the Institution of Engineers of Rwanda, he is chairman of the Board of Directors of the Rwanda Information Technology Authority and a member of various national commissions and steering committees on economic affairs, information and communication technology, human resource development, and higher education.

He has held positions in United Nations-sponsored African Regional Centre for Engineering Design Manufacturing. He holds a Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Leeds.

Dr. Sylvia Maier

Dr. Sylvia Maier is an assistant professor in The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech. Her research and teaching interests lie in the legal, social, and political consequences of cultural diversity, specifically, the legal accommodation of Muslim minority rights in Western Europe.

Maier has written extensively about human rights and society. Her forthcoming book is titled Mainstreaming Muslims: Islam, Culture and the Law in France and Germany. Her work has appeared in the East European Human Rights Review. In other projects, she explores the potential of the Internet to empower women in rural South India, the effectiveness of European Union policies to combat sex-trafficking, state responses to honor killings in Britain and Germany, and the development of an autonomous Islamic feminism in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 2001.

Andrew McLaughlin

Andrew McLaughlinAndrew McLaughlin is senior counsel for Google. He is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, where his work has focused on the law and regulation of Internet and telecommunications networks.

From 1999-2002, he helped to launch and manage the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), serving as vice president, chief policy officer, and chief financial officer. ICANN is the global non-profit organization responsible for coordinating the Internet's systems of unique identifiers, such as domain names and IP addresses.

In recent years, he has focused primarily on developing countries through work as a member of the Board of Directors of Bridges.org, an international non-profit organization based in Cape Town that promotes the effective use of information and communications technology in the developing world to reduce poverty and improve citizens' lives.

Andrew McLaughlin graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Yale University in 1991 and received his J.D. degree from Harvard Law School in 1994.

Dr. Karen Mossberger

Dr. Karen Mossberger is an associate professor in the Graduate Program in Public Administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She focuses on technology and public policy research, concentrating on the use of information technology, particularly the digital divide and e-government. Currently she is completing a manuscript she co-authored with Caroline Tolbert and Ramona McNeal titled Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society, and Participation. A forthcoming article in Public Administration explores the relationship between e-government and citizen attitudes toward government more generally.

Her collaborative work on information technology has been supported by grants from the Smith Richardson Foundation and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, among others, and has appeared in Public Administration Review, Social Science Quarterly, Urban Affairs Review, and Virtual Inequality: Beyond the Digital Divide. Along with co-authors Tolbert and Michele Gilbert of Kent State University, she recently won the 2005 Best Paper Award for the Public Policy Section of the American Political Science Association for " Race, Place, and Information Technology," which will soon appear in Urban Affairs Review. She earned a Ph.D. degree in political science in 1996 from Wayne State University.

Sam Nunn

Sam Nunn is the co-chairman and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a charitable organization working to reduce the global threats from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In addition to his work with NTI, Senator Nunn has continued his service in the public policy arena as a distinguished professor in The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech and as chairman of the board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. After active duty service in the U.S. Coast Guard, he served six years in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve, first entering politics as a member of the Georgia House of Representatives in 1968. He served as a United States Senator from Georgia for twenty-four years (1972-1996) and is retired from the law firm King & Spalding.

During his tenure in the U.S. Senate, Senator Nunn served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He also served on the Intelligence and Small Business Committees. His legislative achievements include the landmark Department of Defense Reorganization Act, drafted with the late Senator Barry Goldwater, and the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which provides assistance to Russia and the former Soviet republics for securing and destroying their excess nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.

Raised in the small town of Perry in middle Georgia, Sam Nunn attended Georgia Tech, Emory University, and Emory Law School, where he graduated with honors in 1962.

Chetan Sharma

Chetan Sharma is the founder of Datamation Foundation Trust, a registered non-profit organization that received an e-Governance Silver Icon Award for Exemplary Leadership and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Achievement in 2004 and 2005 from the Government of India's Department of Administrative Reforms & Public Grievances. He is also the founder and CEO of the Datamation Group, one of India's most reputable knowledge management companies, which seeks to empower women and youth and employs more than 2,500 full-time employees.

Sharma is a member of several of the Government of India's national committees, a member of the Governing Council of the India Country Development Gateway, and a member of the Centre for Public Policy-Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. He actively works with the United Nations-backed gender and youth caucuses of the World Summit on Information Society. He has also assisted with monitoring, evaluating, researching, and capacity-building initiatives of the Universalization of Elementary Education, National Urban Renewal Mission, National Rural Employment Guarantee, and various health programs in partnership with the Government of India and other governments.

A regular speaker at various national and international seminars, he has been a strong proponent and implementer of innovative approaches in India, South Asia, and African countries. He was recently awarded the Global Knowledge Partnership International Gender and ICT Award at the World Summit on Information Society.