Michele Gelfand is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Professor of Psychology by Courtesy at Stanford University. Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational, and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture — as well as its multilevel consequences for human groups. Her work has been cited over 20,000 times and has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Voice of America, Fox News, NBC News, ABC News, The Economist, De Standard, among other outlets.

Gelfand has published her work in many scientific outlets such as Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Psychological Science, Nature Scientific Reports, PLOS 1, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Research in Organizational Behavior, Journal of Applied Psychology, Annual Review of Psychology, American Psychologist, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Current Opinion in Psychology, among others. She has received over 13 million dollars in research funding from the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, and the FBI.

She is the author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World (Scribner, 2018) and co-editor of the following books: Values, Political Action, and Change in the Middle East and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2017); The Handbook of Conflict and Conflict Management (Taylor & Francis, 2013); and The Handbook of Negotiation and Culture (2004, Stanford University Press). Additionally, she is the founding co-editor of the Advances in Culture and Psychology Annual Series and the Frontiers of Culture and Psychology series (Oxford University Press). She is the past President of the International Association for Conflict Management, past Division Chair of the Conflict Division of the Academy of Management, and past Treasurer of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. She has received several awards and honors, such as being elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2021) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019), the 2017 Outstanding International Psychologist Award from the American Psychological Association, the 2016 Diener Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Annaliese Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Stan Markus is an Associate Professor of International Business at the University of South Carolina and an Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. He received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Markus works on state-business relations and is broadly interested in the political economy of development. His projects explore property rights protection, oligarchs, corporate social responsibility, lobbying, corruption, state capacity, and institution building.

His book — Property, Predation, and Protection: Piranha Capitalism in Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge University Press, 2015) — was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research. His research has also been published in the leading peer-reviewed journals in management (e.g. Academy of Management Review), political science (e.g. Comparative Political Studies), development studies (e.g. Studies in Comparative International Development), economic sociology (e.g. Socio-Economic Review), and general interest (e.g. Daedalus). It has also been recognized through many awards, including the Wilson Center Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in D.C.; the Harvard Academy Fellowship from the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies; the Jean Monnet Fellowship from the European University Institute; the Academy of Management Best Paper Award; and the Best Article in Comparative Politics Award from APSA.

Prof. Markus has lived in Russia, Ukraine, China, and several West European countries. He has native fluency in Russian and German, proficiency in French and Ukrainian, and a conversational understanding of Mandarin.

His commentary has been featured in media outlets, including CNN, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Forbes, Fortune, CNBC, NPR, Vox, and Voice of America, among others.

Peter Blair Henry is the Class of 1984 Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and Dean Emeritus of New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. The youngest person ever named to the Stern Deanship, Peter served as Dean from January 2010 through December 2017 and doubled the school’s average annual fundraising. Formerly the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, from 2001–2006 Peter’s research was funded by an NSF CAREER Award, and he has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in the flagship journals of economics and finance, as well as a book on global economic policy, Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth (Basic Books).

A Vice Chair of the Boards of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Economic Club of New York, Peter also serves on the Boards of Citigroup and Nike. In 2015, he received the Foreign Policy Association Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the organization, and in 2016 he was honored as one of the Carnegie Foundation’s Great Immigrants.

With financial support from the Hoover Institution and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Peter leads the Ph.D. Excellence Initiative (PhDEI), a post-baccalaureate program designed to address underrepresentation in economics by mentoring exceptional students of color interested in pursuing doctoral studies in the field. For his leadership of the PhDEI, Peter received the 2022 Impactful Mentoring Award from the American Economic Association. Peter received his PhD in economics from MIT and Bachelor’s degrees from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead-Cain Scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a reserve wide receiver on the football team, and a finalist in the 1991 campus-wide slam dunk competition.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1969, Peter became a U.S. citizen in 1986. He lives in Stanford and Düsseldorf with his wife and four sons.