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Meet the Team: Staff and Advisors

Staff

Advisory Group

Team Bios

Ambassador David Aaron
Ambassador David Aaron is Director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the RAND Corporation where he also coordinates counter-terrorism and homeland security research. He has served in both the government and the private sector. A graduate of Occidental College and Princeton University, he then entered the Foreign Service, where he held a variety of posts, which included the U.S. Delegation to NATO and to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union. After leaving the Foreign Service, he continued in government in several positions, including the National Security Council staff where he was responsible for arms control and strategic doctrine. Subsequently, he became a Task Force Director for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and then Deputy National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter. In the latter capacity, he chaired sub-Cabinet committees dealing with Arms Control and with Intelligence. He also served as a confidential presidential emissary to Europe, where he negotiated the deployment of Medium Range missiles, to the Middle East where he helped prepare for the Camp David negotiations, as well as to Africa, Latin America, and China.

Upon leaving government, Amb. Aaron became Vice President for Mergers and Acquisitions at Oppenheimer & Co. and Vice Chairman of the board of Oppenheimer International.

During the Clinton administration, he served as Ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, where he negotiated the international anti-bribery convention. At the same time, he was appointed Special White House Envoy for Cryptography, to develop international guidelines for encryption technology in trade and communications. Subsequently, Amb. Aaron was appointed Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade where he negotiated the US/EU privacy accord.

After leaving government in 2000, he became Senior International Advisor to the law firm Dorsey LLP until his appointment as a Senior Fellow at RAND. He is the author of three novels published in ten languages and two PBS documentaries including Lessons of the 1991 Gulf War.

 

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Saif Ali Al-Hajari, Ph.D.
Dr. Saif is Vice Chairperson at the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development in Doha, Qatar. He is also founder of Friends of the Environment Center (FEC), a professor of Geology at Qatar University and General Supervisor at Al-Noor Institute for the Blind. Dr. Saif received his B.S. at Qatar University and completed his Master's and Ph.D. in Geological Sciences at the University of South Carolina.

 

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C. Ross Anthony, Ph.D.
Dr. Anthony is a Senior Economist at RAND and interim Director and Associate Director of Global Health of the Center for Domestic and International Health Security, which seeks among others to conduct studies in international health that seek to improve quality and access to care and to make health a more important part of our foreign policy. Dr. Anthony is also Director of the Center Military Health Policy Research, which is a joint program at RAND between its FFRDCs and the Health Program, which conducts research to improve the provision and budgeting of health care to active duty and retired military personnel. He also just completed serving on the U.S. Presidential Task Force on Improving Health Care for Our Nation's Veterans.

Dr. Anthony has over twenty years of experience and leadership in the health care field¥including a unique combination of work at all levels of government (local, county, state, national, and international) and in all sectors of the economy (public, private, and volunteer). He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Before joining RAND, Dr. Anthony was a Vice-President and Director of the International Health Services Group, at IPAC which was a consulting firm offering health care expertise and marketing support to U.S. and international governments, private companies, and organizations. Before this, Dr. Anthony served as Director of the Office of Development Resources for Europe at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). There he oversaw six divisions including the Health Division with responsibility for program design and oversight in 15 Eastern European countries, and managed design of health programs for the former Soviet Union. From 1986-89, Dr. Anthony served as an Associate Administrator for Program Development of the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA). He oversaw the development of program policy, regulations, and health services research for the $120 billion Medicare and Medicaid programs.

Dr. Anthony also developed and managed the Dhorpatan Health Project, a small hospital and community health project located in remote rural Nepal; was a Principal in Health Policy Alternatives, Inc., a private consulting firm that works with national and international health care organizations to develop policy alternatives; taught health economics at the University of Oregon, and was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal.

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Kristen Cordell
Kristen Cordell is a research assistant with the Initiative on Middle Eastern Youth. She graduated in May 2005 from Pepperdine University, with a Masters in International Relations Policy, with a concentration in Middle East affairs. Her Masters thesis discussed the role of United States Secretaries of State in the Arab Israeli peace process. She has previously worked as a Research Assistant at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Middle East Program, where her research projects included women’s political participation in the Middle East and the role of public opinion in the Arab Israeli peace process. During the summer of 2005 she traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories, where she conducted research regarding the role of women’s peace based NGO’s in the then-forthcoming disengagement and peace process overall.  She is an intermediate Arabic speaker.

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Kim Cragin
Kim Cragin is an international policy analyst at RAND Corporation. Before coming to RAND in the fall of 2000, Kim attended the Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University. She wrote her Masters Thesis on comparative peace processes, including Plan Colombia, the Good Friday Agreement and the Oslo Accords for the Department of State. She was awarded the Boren Fellowship by the National Security Education Program (funded by the Congress) in 1999 to study religious extremism — Gush Emunim and Hamas — at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Kim also received the Harry S. Truman Graduate Fellowship in 1996.

Since joining RAND, Kim has continued to focus on issues of political violence. She has spoken on these topics to a wide range of audiences, including conferences for law enforcement personnel, national security policymakers, and academics. Her RAND publications include Arms Trafficking and Colombia, Terrorism and Development, and the forthcoming (2004) report titled Dissuading Terror: The Role of Strategic Influence in the Struggle Against Terrorism. Kim has conducted fieldwork in the Israeli Occupied Territories, Colombia, Northern Ireland, Northwest China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. Kim managed the RAND Terrorism Chronology from 2000 through 2003.

In addition to her academic pursuits, Kim is married and her husband helps multinational companies in the extractive industry institute sustainable development practices in Africa and Latin America. Kim recently returned to graduate school to further her studies; she is a PhD candidate at Cambridge University (Clare College) in the United Kingdom.

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Haleh Esfandiari, Ph.D.
Haleh is the Director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. Her expertise includes the women's movement in Iran, Persian language, and contemporary Iranian intellectual currents and politics. Haleh was the Deputy Secretary General of the Women's Organization of Iran, a journalist, Fellow, at the Wilson Center 1995-1996, educator at Princeton University from 1980-1994 and is a frequent lecturer on current Iranian affairs. Haleh's publications include, An Assessment of the Iranian Presidential Elections (proceedings of the conference held June 5, 2001, Wilson Center, 2002), Symposium on Palestinian Refugees (a report of the symposium held June 9, 2000, co-editor, Wilson Center, 2001), Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution, Iranian Women: Past Present and Future (editor), The Economic Dimensions of Middle Eastern History, (co-editor), and was the co-editor of the multi-volume memoirs of the famed Iranian scholar, Ghassen Ghani. She has her Ph.D. from University of Vienna is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Grant.

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Susan Everingham
Susan Everingham is the Director of International Programs within RAND's National Security Research Division. International Programs comprises three regional centers: the Center for Asia Pacific Policy, the Center for Middle East Public Policy, and the Center for Russia Eurasia, as well as other internationally focused work and the Pardee Center for Longer Term Global Policy and the Future Human Condition. As the Director of International Programs, Susan is guiding these centers to support RAND's globalization agenda.

A quantitative policy analyst at RAND since 1988, Susan has been involved in a diverse array of policy studies, concentrating on the mathematical modeling of complex systems, and cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analyses of policy alternatives. Her early work focused on ballistic missile defense and military communication systems. She co-authored RAND's 1994 study comparing the cost-effectiveness of various cocaine control strategies and developed the Markov-based model of the demand for cocaine that was used in that research; she also contributed to a number of studies on violence prevention. Ms. Everingham is also a Professor in the Pardee RAND Graduate School, and a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. She has a B.A. degree in mathematics and biology from Williams College, and an M.A. degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of California at Los Angeles.

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Dr. Mounzer Fatfat
Born in Lebanon into a politically and socially active family, Dr. Fatfat moved to the United States when he was 17. Now an American citizen, he has had a distinguished career in education, humanitarian and international policy development and administration.

Dr. Mounzer Fatfat currently serves with the United States Department of State, at the American Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. He is the Senior Advisor for the American Embassy in Baghdad-Iraq, for the Iraqi Ministry of Youth and Sports (MOYS) and the National Olympic Committee in Iraq (NOCI), within the Iraqi Reconstruction Management Office in Baghdad. Along with overseeing the refurbishment and development of more than 160 youth centers and more than 350 sport clubs across Iraq, Dr. Fatfat has been instrumental in assisting the rebirth of the Iraqi Olympic Movement. He played a vital role in the orchestration of more then 500 Sports Clubs and 41 Sports Federations’ democratic elections, held throughout the country, to elect the new Iraqi Olympic Committee. These elections represented the first democratic Iraqi elections in approximately 35 years and thus the first democratic elected official in Iraq in 35 years.

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Charles Goldman, Ph.D.
Charles A. Goldman is a Senior Economist and Associate Director, RAND Education. He specializes in the economics of education. He and several colleagues are currently leading a large effort to reform the education system of the State of Qatar. His most recent book is In Pursuit of Prestige, with RAND colleagues Dominic Brewer and Susan Gates. He has also recently published The PhD Factory, which analyzes the production and employment of science and engineering Ph.D.s in the United States, and RAND's report Paying for University Research Facilities and Administration. Prior to joining RAND in 1993, Dr. Goldman earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate in economic analysis and policy from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

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Tarek Heggy
Tarek Heggy is an expert in the politics of the Arab world and is an International Petroleum Strategist. His work, which has been published internationally in English and Arabic, advances the causes of modernity, democracy, tolerance, and women's rights in the Middle East — advocating them as universal values essential to the region's progress. Tarek Heggy has written thirteen books and hundreds of essays, many of which have also appeared in Egypt's leading publications. He has lectured at universities worldwide, including Princeton, Columbia, and UC-Berkeley. He is also a regular guest on Arabic television and radio. Tarek Heggy is also an expert in Natural Gas and has written about the Middle East's Natural Gas plans in relation to its political and economic future. Tarek Heggy studied Law and Comparative Law at Ain Shams University (Cairo) and Modern Management Techniques at the International Management Institute (formerly "IMI" and currently "IMD" — Switzerland). He is a member, board member and a trustee of over thirty Organizations, Universities, and Societies including Egypt Supreme Culture Council, the board of Egyptian Society for Historic Studies, the board of MSA University (Cairo, Egypt), the board of the Faculty of Economics and Political Sciences of Cairo University and the board of the Middle East Research Centre of Ain Shams University (Cairo).

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Carole Gresenz, Ph.D
Carole Roan Gresenz is an economist in RAND's Arlington, Virginia office and the Associate Director for Research for RAND's Institute for Civil Justice (ICJ). Over the past five years, she has conducted studies on health law topics for the ICJ. Previous work explored the effects of legislation that would remove obstacles to civil litigation against managed care organizations for wrongful benefit denial or delay. A recent study describes the nature of disputes between patients and managed care organizations, and ongoing research is analyzing the system of external review of managed care organizations' decisions. Dr. Gresenz has also been active in a number of other health-related research areas. Her current research addresses how health care markets affect access to health care among the uninsured, and in previous research she studied health insurance coverage of welfare leavers in California, and the relationship between community income inequality and mental health. Carole has M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Brown University.

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Lynn Karoly, Ph.D.
Lynn is a Senior Economist at RAND Corporation and Professor of Economics at the RAND Graduate School. Her expertise includes social welfare policy, welfare and children, early care and education, poverty and inequality, U.S. labor markets, and retirement. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics, Yale University; B.A., Claremont McKenna (Men's) College.

Lynn recently led a project that comprehensively synthesized the research literature on the effects of the 1996 welfare reform legislation on economic outcomes and family and child well-being. Testified in 2001 on the findings for the hearing on "Welfare Reform: Success in Moving Toward Work," before the Subcommittee on 21st Century Competitiveness, Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives. Also led a team that investigated the costs and benefits of early childhood intervention programs based on a thorough literature review and synthesis, and a cost-benefit analysis. Testified in 1998 on the findings before the Subcommittee on Human Resources, Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, U.S. House of Representatives. Also testified on the widening income and wage gap before Subcommittee on Human Resources, Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of Representatives.

She is a member of the Panel on Research and Development Spending on Children, 2002-present, associate editor of the Cambridge University Press "RAND Studies in Policy Analysis" Book Series, and research associate for the Institute for Research on Poverty; and has served as a co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources, as a member of the NIH Social Sciences, Nursing, Epidemiology, and Methods (SNEM-3) Study Section; as a member of the design team that developed the questionnaire instrument for the 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLYS) survey; and as a member and chair of the Dorothy S. Thomas Award Committee.

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Dr. Rollie Lal, Ph.D.
Dr. Rollie Lal is a Political Scientist at RAND. She is a South Asia specialist, with extensive experience analyzing the foreign relations and internal dynamics of India and Pakistan, and the national interests of India and China. She also conducts regional analyses of Central Asia and North Africa and recently completed research on political Islam and insurgencies in India and North Africa. Dr. Lal is a co-author of the recently published America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, author of "The Hindu Muslim Divide," published in the Atlantic Monthly, and various articles in the Financial Times, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Sun-Times and the Daily Yomiuri. Prior to coming to RAND, Dr. Lal was the Associate Director of the South Asia Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She is also a former foreign correspondent for the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, and holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Maryland at College Park, and an M.A. in Strategic Studies and a Ph.D. in International Relations from Johns Hopkins SAIS.

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Lt Col (Ret.) Edward (Ed) O’Connell

Lt Col (Ret.) Edward (Ed) O'Connell was commissioned in the U.S. Air Force in 1983 and spent more than 20 years as an intelligence officer. During the first Gulf War Ed initially served in a Special Targeting Cell and later on a combat assessment team in Iraq. He was selected as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Air Force Intelligence fellow at RAND from 1993 to 1994 and subsequently served as Chief, Commander’s Action Group at the Air Intelligence Agency/Air Force Information Warfare Center. Ed’s last active-duty assignment was Chief of Current Ops Targeting Branch, HQ USCENTCOM J-2, during the War in Afghanistan. He is currently a senior defense analyst in RAND’s Washington office, exploring counterinsurgency, terrorism, information operations, and youth issues . Ed has co-authored of a study for the Air Staff on ìNon-kinetic Operations in Operation IRAQI FREEDOMî and another for the Army's Combined Arms Center on "IO Perpectives in Iraq." In 2004 Ed was the sole civilian member of an Army Information Operations (IO) Combined Arms Assessment Team (CAAT) in Iraq and stayed behind to advise the Multinational Force Iraq (MNF-I)'s Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Communications on the Iraqi information environment . In 2005, Ed returned to Iraq for six months to serve as the RAND Team Lead for an Operational Analysis effort in Iraq supporting the Counter-Improvised Explosive Devise (IED) campaign. He has addressed youth issues in the Muslim world in the Washington Post, the academic circuit, and on network news programs. Ed is a graduate of the Naval War College, the Foreign Service Language Institute, and a distinguished graduate of the Joint Military Intelligence College.

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Olga Oliker
Olga Oliker is an International Policy Analyst at the Washington, D.C. office of RAND. Her research focuses primarily on U.S foreign and defense policy; military roles in reconstruction during and after conflict; and defense and security issues relating to Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Ukraine. She also writes on post-Soviet economic reform and energy policy. Before coming to RAND, Oliker worked as an independent consultant and held positions in the U.S. Departments of Defense and Energy. In early 2004, she took some time away from her RAND research to serve as a special advisor for national security affairs to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. She holds a Master in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

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Angel Rabasa, Ph.D.
Dr. Angel Rabasa is the RAND Corporation's senior Southeast Asia policy analyst. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Southeast Asian security, including the International Institute for Strategic Studies Adelphi Paper No. 358, Political Islam in Southeast Asia: Moderates, Radicals and Terrorists; The Military and Democracy in Indonesia: Challenges, Politics, and Power, with John Haseman; Indonesia's Transformation and the Stability of Southeast Asia, with Peter Chalk. He is and the project leader and lead author of the forthcoming RAND report, The Muslim World After 9/11 and is currently leading a project on the future of terrorism: "Beyond Al Qaeda: Countering Terrorist and Other Non-Traditional Threats." Before joining the RAND Corporation, Dr. Rabasa served in a variety of political-military positions in the U.S. Departments of State and Defense. He is one of the authors of the Defense Planning Guidance of the first Bush administration, which set U.S. defense policy for the post-Cold War era. He has a B.A. and Ph.D. in history from Harvard University and was a Knox Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford University.

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Cathryn Thurston
Cathryn Quantic Thurston is an Associate Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation in Washington, D.C. where she works primarily on projects for the US Army. Her most significant work has focused on designing measures of effectiveness for the Army’s peacetime international activities with foreign militaries and for Army Information Operations during major combat operations as well as in post-conflict peacebuilding. Dr. Thurston is an adjunct faculty member of the George Mason University School of Public Policy in the Peace Operations Program where she teaches conflict analysis and resolution. From 1995-2000, Dr. Thurston was a West Europe/NATO analyst for the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence on the Army Staff. Dr. Thurston holds a Ph.D. in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from George Mason University. Her dissertation focused on the role of group conflict styles and their impact on third party intervention in crisis situations. Dr. Thurston holds a BA in International Studies from the University of Denver, and an MA in International Relations from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

Cheryl Benard, Ph.D. (Director of IMEY)
Dr. Cheryl Benard is a senior political scientist with the RAND Corporation. She received her B.A. in political science from the American University of Beirut and her doctorate (sub auspiciis praesidentis) as well as the postdoctoral degree granting tenure ("Habilitation") from the University of Vienna, where she later taught and became an associate professor.

Benard's career has spanned two continents. Her focus has been on published results with a high degree of accessibility for policy makers, media and the interested public. For this she has been the recipient of several awards, including the Theodor Kery Prize for Socially Relevant Research and the Donauland Prize for Nonfiction Writing, and her book publications have been translated into many languages including Turkish, French, Italian, Swedish, Spanish, Hungarian, Russian, Hebrew and Chinese. Her previous research has ranged from refugee and immigrant integration; police intervention in domestic disputes; ethnic cleansing in Bosnia; changing socialization patterns; integration of women into the European military; and problems in the delivery of humanitarian crisis relief; school reform issues; radicalization and youth; and issues of multicultural education.

Benard has been a member of numerous academic and governmental advisory commissions to evaluate reform programs in areas such as basic training in the military, rule of law issues in peacekeeper training, curriculum and school reform, teacher training, gender-unbiased development aid, and the integration of handicapped children.

Since writing her dissertation on Arab nationalism, Islam and the Middle East have been strong themes in Dr. Benard's work. Her study of the Iranian revolution was entitled The Government of God, (Columbia U. Press). In another project, she surveyed and analyzed the social and political consequences of Muslim communities and centers in Europe and investigated links between culture centers and expatriate political organizations and known terrorist organizations.

For the U.N. Women's Division, Dr. Benard participated in a cross-cultural survey of gender-specific human rights violations. She has published widely on women in the Muslim world and women in development. The Afghan situation has been of particular interest to her since the 1980's. Her most recent book publications are Veiled Courage (Random House 2002) which describes various forms of civil resistance against the Taliban during the years of their rule, and Civil Democratic Islam (Rand 2004) which suggests a way to better understand Islamic groups and movements by aligning them along a differentiated ideological spectrum.