Jon M. Huntsman, Jr. is chairman of the Atlantic Council Board of Directors.

He began his career in public service as a staff assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He has served each of the four US presidents since then in critical roles around the world, including as ambassador to Singapore, deputy assistant secretary of commerce for Asia, US trade ambassador, and most recently, US ambassador to China. In all three Senate confirmations, he received unanimous votes. Twice elected governor of Utah, Huntsman brought about strong economic reforms, tripled the state’s rainy day fund, and helped bring unemployment rates to historic lows. During his tenure, Utah was named the best managed state in America. Recognized by others for his service, Governor Huntsman was elected as chairman of the Western Governors Association, serving nineteen states throughout the region.

This was a far better result than in his run for the Presidency in 2012 where he ultimately placed third in the New Hampshire primary before bowing out. He currently serves on the boards of Ford Motor Company, Caterpillar Corporation, Chevron Corporation, Huntsman Corporation, the US Naval Academy Foundation, and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, he serves as a distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institute, a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a trustee of the Reagan Presidential Foundation, and chairman of the Huntsman Cancer Foundation. Governor Huntsman has served as a visiting fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government as well as a distinguished lecturer at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. He was recently inducted into the American Academy of Diplomacy.

Huntsman is the father of seven children, including two adopted daughters from China and India. His two sons are midshipmen at the US Naval Academy, where his oldest son was selected as a Naval aviator. Huntsman is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and has eight honorary doctoral degrees.

Frederick Kempe has held the position of President and CEO of the Atlantic Council since December 1, 2006.

He is the author of four books, and a regular commentator on television and radio both in Europe and the United States. His latest book, BERLIN 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth (foreword by Gen. Brent Scowcroft) was published by Putnam in 2012 and is a New York Times bestseller. Under his leadership, the Council has achieved significant growth while considerably expanding its staff, work, and influence in areas that include international security, business and economics, energy and environment, and global issues of transatlantic interest ranging from Asia to Africa.

He comes to the Council from a prominent twenty-five-year career at the Wall Street Journal, where he won national and international recognition while serving in numerous senior editorial and reportorial capacities. His last position with the paper was in New York, where he served as Assistant Managing Editor, International, and “Thinking Global” Columnist. Prior to that, he was for seven years the longest-serving Editor and Associate Publisher ever of the Wall Street Journal Europe, simultaneously functioning as European Editor for the Global Wall Street Journal from 2002 to 2005. During this time he managed six news bureaus, several satellite offices, a Brussels news desk operation, and he oversaw European and Middle Eastern reporting.

Throughout his tenure as Editor and Associate Publisher, the newspaper won a number of awards including the prestigious Harold Wincott Award as UK Business Journal of the Year, the Media Tenor Award as the top international paper in Europe, and multiple “Business Journalist of the Year” prizes from the World Leadership Forum in London. His teams participated in two Pulitzer Prizes. As Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe from 1992 to 1997, he founded and managed the Central European Economic Review (CEER), which covered the countries of the former Soviet bloc. In 1993 he also cofounded Convergence, a magazine on Europe’s digital economy.

Kempe joined Journal in 1981 in London before opening the paper’s Vienna bureau in 1984. He transferred to Washington, DC, in 1986 as Chief Diplomatic Correspondent, and in 1990 opened its Berlin bureau. As a reporter, he covered a number of significant stories, including the rise of solidarity in Poland and the growing resistance to Soviet rule, the coming to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in Russia and all his summit meetings with Ronald Reagan, war reporting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon in the 1980s, and the American invasion of Panama. He also covered the unification of Germany and the collapse of Soviet communism.

He is a graduate of the University of Utah and has a master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he was a member of the International Fellows Program in the School of International Affairs. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Maryland University College and from Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina and is a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University’s Said School of Business. He has won the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism’s top alumni achievement award and the University of Utah’s prize for the top young alumnus.

He serves on a number of Boards of Directors, including the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and is on the Advisory Board of the Transatlantic Policy Network as well as the International Advisory Council of Atlantik-Bruecke e.V. in Berlin. He also served on the Senior Advisory Group of Admiral James Stavridis, Commander, US European Command (EUCOM). He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Kempe speaks German and is the son of German immigrants who came to the United States before World War II. His wife, Pamela Meyer, is the CEO of Calibrate. They live with their daughter, Johanna, in Washington, DC.

An internationally renowned futurist and business strategist, Peter Schwartz is the Senior Vice President for Government Relations and Strategic Planning at salesforce.com, the innovative business commerce company. In this capacity, he directs the company’s policy and politics throughout the world and manages the organization’s ongoing strategic conversation. He specializes in scenario planning, working with corporations, governments, and institutions to create alternative perspectives of the future and develop robust strategies for a changing and uncertain world. His research and scenario work encompasses the fast-moving world of connected business, energy resources and the environment, technology, telecommunications, media and entertainment, aerospace, and national security.

He has a long and storied history of doing pioneering futures based work. Schwartz founded the Global Business Network (GBN) in 1988 in his Berkeley basement with several close friends including Napier Collyns, Jay Ogilvy and Stewart Brand. GBN became the premier scenarios-based consultancy, which Schwartz described as an “information hunting and gathering company”. In his early career, Schwartz led the scenario team at Royal Dutch/Shell in the 1980s, where many of the scenario tools he pioneered were used to great advantage.

Schwartz has written several books, on a variety of future-oriented topics. His first book, The Art of the Long View (Doubleday, 1991) is considered by many to be the seminal publication on scenario planning, and is used as a textbook by many business schools. Inevitable Surprises (Gotham, 2003) is a look at the forces at play in today’s world, and how they will continue to affect the world. He also wrote The Long Boom (Perseus, 1999) with co-authors Peter Leyden and Joel Hyatt, which is a book about the future of the global economy. His book When Good Companies Do Bad Things (Wiley, 1999), is an argument for corporate responsibility in an age of corruption. China’s Futures (Jossey-Bass, 2001), is a vision of several different potential futures for China. He also co-authored the Pentagon’s An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security.

He has also worked as a consultant on several movies, including Minority Report, Deep Impact, Sneakers, and WarGames. He serves on the board of directors for the Long Now Foundation. In 2007, Schwartz moderated a forum titled “The Impact of Web 2.0 and Emerging Social Network Models” as part of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Vijay Kumar is the UPS Foundation Professor with appointments in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, Computer and Information Science, and Electrical and Systems Engineering.

Kumar’s group works on creating autonomous ground and aerial robots, designing bio-inspired algorithms for collective behaviors, and on robot swarms. They have won many best paper awards at conferences, and group alumni are leaders in teaching, research, business and entrepreneurship. Kumar is a fellow of ASME and IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Vijay Kumar has held many administrative positions in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, including director of the GRASP Laboratory, chair of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, and the position of the Deputy Dean. He served as the assistant director of robotics and cyber physical systems at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

August Cole is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council. He is the Director of the Art of Future War project, which explores narrative fiction and visual media for insight into the future of conflict.

His fiction writing tackles themes at the core of American foreign policy and national security in the twenty-first century, including the privatization of military and intelligence operations and the future of American power in the Pacific.

He is also Writer-in-Residence at Avascent, an independent strategy and management-consulting firm focused on the defense and aerospace sectors.

From 2007 to 2010, Cole reported on the defense industry for the Wall Street Journal. From Washington, he covered companies ranging from Boeing to Blackwater, as well as broader defense policy and political matters. He helped break many major national security stories, including foreign cyber spies hacking into the US Joint Strike Fighter program, major defense contractors doing “Smart Power” development work in Africa, US sales of F-16 fighters to Iraq, and a Blackwater civilian shooting incident in Afghanistan. He has discussed his reporting on CNBC, The John Batchelor Show, PRI’s The World, To the Point, and NPR’s Day to Day.

From 1998 to 2006, Cole worked as an editor and reporter for MarketWatch.com, a pioneering financial news website, where he covered defense issues, including private military contractors. He also has extensive experience writing about the automotive and airline industries, as well as the Internet economy. Cole was named to the Journal of Financial Reporting’s Top 30 Journalists under 30 in 2002 and 2003.

He holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Cole is also a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Heather Zichal
Senior Fellow, Global Energy Center, Atlantic Council (@hrzichal)

Heather Zichal is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center. She is the former Deputy Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change.

As President Barack Obama’s top White House Adviser on energy and climate change, Zichal coordinated policy development and implementation on these issues across the administration. She helped to shape and execute many of the president’s top energy and climate priorities, including establishing historic new fuel economy standards, reducing mercury pollution, and supporting clean energy deployment in the United States. Prior to joining the administration, Zichal served as a Policy Director to the Obama campaign, where she helped craft the 2008 energy platform.

She previously served as the Legislative Director to Senator John Kerry after managing energy and environmental issues in the 2004 presidential campaign. She has also served as Legislative Director for US Congressman Frank Pallone (D-NJ) and US Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ).

During her time in the federal government, Zichal has been a strong and steady voice for policies that reduce United States’ dependence on foreign oil, protect public health and environment, and address global climate change.

She grew up in Iowa and is a graduate of Rutgers University.

Hisham Melhem
Bureau Chief,Al Arabiya News Channel, Washington, DC (@hisham_melhem)

Hisham Melhem is the bureau chief of Al Arabiya News Channel in Washington, DC. Melhem has interviewed many American and international public figures, including Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, among others. Melhem speaks regularly at college campuses, think tanks and interest groups on U.S.-Arab relations, political Islam, intra-Arab relations, Arab-Israeli issues, media in the Arab World, Arab images in American media , U.S. public policies and other related topics. He is also the correspondent for Annahar, the leading Lebanese daily. For four years he hosted “Across the Ocean,” a weekly current affairs program on U.S.-Arab relations for Al Arabiya.

Xenia Wickett is the project director of the US project and the dean of The Queen Elizabeth II Academy for Leadership in International Affairs at Chatham House. Prior to this she was the executive director of the PeaceNexus Foundation, based just outside Geneva. From 2005 to 2009 Xenia was at Harvard’s Belfer Center where she was the director of the Project on India and the Subcontinent and the executive director for research, as well as being a member of the Center’s board. From 2001 to 2005, she served in the US State Department in numerous positions including in the Bureau of South Asia, the Bureau of Nonproliferation and the Homeland Security Group. After September 11, 2001 she was assigned to the Office of the Vice President (OVP) to work on homeland security. Her final position in government was as director for South Asia at the National Security Council (NSC). She is the author of numerous articles and op-eds and has been interviewed frequently on radio and television. She has previously worked in the private and non-profit sectors and in international organizations, in the US, UK, and Israel and the West Bank.

Christopher A. Preble
Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies, CATO Institute (@capreble)

Christopher A. Preble is the vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He is the author of three books including The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous and Less Free (Cornell University Press, 2009); and John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap (Northern Illinois University Press, 2004); and he coedited, with John Mueller, A Dangerous World? Threat Perception and U.S. National Security (Cato Institute, 2014); and, with Jim Harper and Benjamin Friedman, Terrorizing Ourselves: Why U.S. Counterterrorism Policy Is Failing and How to Fix It (Cato Institute, 2010). Preble has also published articles in major publications including the New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, National Review, The National Interest, and Foreign Policy, and is a frequent guest on television and radio. In addition to his work at Cato, Preble teaches the U.S. Foreign Policy elective at the University of California, Washington Center (UCDC). Before joining Cato in February 2003, he taught history at St. Cloud State University and Temple University. Preble was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy, and served onboard USS Ticonderoga (CG-47) from 1990 to 1993. Preble holds a Ph.D. in history from Temple University.

David J. Rothkopf is CEO and Editor of the FP Group, where he oversees all editorial, publishing, event and other operations of the company, publishers of Foreign Policy Magazine. He is also the President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf, an international advisory company specializing in global political risk, energy, resource, technology and emerging markets issues based in Washington, D.C.

He is the author of numerous internationally acclaimed books including most recently “Power, Inc.”, “Superclass” and “Running the World.” His next book, “National Insecurity: Making U.S. Foreign Policy in an Age of Fear” will be published in the fall of 2014. He writes a weekly column for Foreign Policy, a regular column for CNN and is a frequent contributor to leading newspapers, magazines including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, CNN, Newsweek, Time, and many others.

In addition, Mr. Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, chairman of the National Strategic Investment Dialogue and serves or has recently served as a member of the advisory boards of the Center for Global Development, the Center for the Study of the Presidency, the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Previously he served as CEO of Intellibridge Corporation, Managing Director of Kissinger Associates and as both U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade and as Acting Under Secretary in which capacity he directed the activities of the 2400 person International Trade Administration during the Clinton Administration. He has taught international affairs at Columbia University’s Graduate School of International and Public Affairs, the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and has lectured at leading universities including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, the National Defense University and the Naval War College.

Alessandra Orofino is the Executive Director and Co-founder of Meu Rio, an online platform which is developing tools for civic engagement and participation in Brazil. Meu Rio is organizing online petitions as well as campaigns and aims to make information of political processes accessible to a broader public. Orofino herself describes the work of Meu Rio as “translating public policy issues into a language that is understandable to broader society and young people”. Prior to that, Alessandra Orofino worked at Purpose.com, a partner organization of Meu Rio, where she took part in setting up Purpose Brazil. Before that, she worked at a corporate social responsibility consultancy that provides strategic advice to major Brazilian corporations, and in women’s rights advocacy and research in Brazil and India. She holds a degree in Economics and Human Rights from Columbia University and subsequently became a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts, contributing to their pioneering program in Design for Social Innovation.

Joshua Marcuse is the Senior Adviser for Policy Innovation in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. He works on leadership development and learning, organizational change, and policy innovation. He teaches human-centered design, is an executive coach, and launched the DoD Design & Innovation Practice. He is also an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Previously, he worked at the management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton and at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Josh is the founder and chairman of Young Professionals in Foreign Policy, a global nonprofit organization committed to fostering the next generation of foreign policy leaders. He served as President until 2012. He is a Fellow of the Truman National Security Project, a Next Generation National Security Leader at the Center for a New American Security, and is co-founder of the Darden Innovation Catalyst Initiative at the University of Virginia. He serves as an advisor or board member to several nonprofit organizations: Atlas Corps, Defense Entrepreneurs Forum, the Franklin Project of the Aspen Institute, LearnServe, Luke’s Wings, Millennium Action Project, the Next Generation of Government Summit, the Project for the Study of the 21st Century, and Young Government Leaders. 

Josh graduated from Dartmouth College. He is certified in change management from the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. Josh is a New Yorker who lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Cathryn. Together they started The Charcuterie Club of DC. 

Zvika Krieger is a Senior Advisor at the U.S. Department of State, where he leads the Strategy Office in the Bureau of Political and Military Affairs. He was previously a Strategist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where his portfolios included climate change, Middle East strategy, innovation, and emerging technology, and for which he received the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence. He also served as an advisor to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, and began his career in the Pentagon as an advisor to then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. He previously served as Senior Vice President of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace.

Before joining government, Krieger spent almost a decade as a journalist, including as a foreign policy correspondent at The Atlantic, editor and writer at The New Republic, and Middle East correspondent for Newsweek based in Egypt and Lebanon and covering most of the Arab world. His work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, Slate, New York Magazine, The Jerusalem Post, and various other publications, and he has appeared as a Middle East analyst on NBC News, CNN, and Fox News.

He has received fellowships to study topics including the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, the Kifaya reform movement in Egypt, public health in Bombay slums, religious identity in Kashmir, historical memory in Palestinian refugee camps, and the role of religion in Lebanese politics. He has also reported from such places as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Libya, North Ireland, Sri Lanka, Japan, and Korea. His writings have earned him awards from the Overseas Press Club, the Scripps Howard Foundation, and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.

He is a fellow at the Truman National Security Project and a member of the Aspen Institute’s Socrates Society. He has a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Middle East studies from Yale University and studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo.

Dr. Mathew J. Burrows serves as the Director of the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative in the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security. He was appointed Counselor to the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in 2007 and Director of the Analysis and Production Staff (APS) in 2010. As Director of APS, Burrows was responsible for managing a staff of senior analysts and production technicians who guide and shepherd all NIC products from inception to dissemination. He was the principal drafter for the NIC publication Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, which received widespread recognition and praise in the international media and among academics and think tanks. In 2005, he was asked to set up and direct the NIC’s new Long Range Analysis Unit, which is now known as the Strategic Futures Group.

Burrows joined the CIA in 1986, where he served as Analyst for the Directorate of Intelligence (DI), covering Western Europe, including the development of European institutions such as the European Union. From 1998 to 1999 he was the first holder of the Intelligence Community Fellowship and served at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Other previous positions included assignments as Special Assistant to the US UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (1999-2001) and Deputy National Security Adviser to US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill (2001-02). He is a member of the DI’s Senior Analyst Service.

Burrows graduated from Wesleyan University in 1976 and received a PhD in European history from Cambridge University, England in 1983.

Ashlee is the Deputy Editor of the RUSI Journal, the flagship periodical of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), working with prominent authors including General McChrystal, General Petraeus, and Vice Admiral Hudson, among many others. 

In 2014, Ashlee published a chapter on US-UK relations in Obama’s Washington: Political Leadership in a Partisan Era. A broadcast historian for local television and a journalist, Ashlee writes on matters of defense and international relations for the Huffington Post and Al Jazeera. She also volunteers for Centenary News, a website dedicated to events commemorating the First World War. Prior to joining RUSI, Ashlee worked at the international technology company the Symbian Foundation, first as an editor of print and web publications and then as the Head of the Global Communications and PR team. 

Ashlee is a Fulbright Scholar and holds an MA in War Studies from King’s College London and a degree in Modern History from Oxford University, where her research focused on British military history and the conduct of international diplomacy.

Kirk A. Radke is a Partner in the Corporate and Financial Services Department. Kirk has more than twenty-five years of experience handling nearly every type of private equity and corporate transaction. A business adviser to private equity sponsors and executives, he has counseled domestic and international clients in acquisitions, divestitures, fund formations and other complex transactions.

Kirk has been repeatedly cited as one of the country’s leading private equity practitioners by Chambers Global: The World’s Leading Lawyers for Business and Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business, as well as by other independent research teams. 

Jamie Metzl is a Nonresident Senior Fellow for Technology and National Security in the Brent Scowcroft Center of the Atlantic Council and a Senior Adviser to a New York-based global investment firm. He previously served as Executive Vice President of the Asia Society, Deputy Staff Director of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senior Coordinator for International Public Information at the US State Department, Director for Multilateral Affairs on the National Security Council, and as a Human Rights Officer for the United Nations in Cambodia. He ran unsuccessfully for the US House of Representatives from Missouri’s Fifth Congressional District in Kansas City in 2004. He has served as an election monitor on Afghanistan and the Philippines and advised the government of North Korea on the establishment of Special Economic Zones.

Metzl appears regularly on national and international media discussing Asian economic and political issues and his syndicated columns and other writing on Asian affairs, genetics, virtual reality, and other topics are regularly featured in publications around the world. He has testified before Congress outlining emergency preparedness recommendations after 9-11 and on the national security implication of the biotechnology and genomics revolutions. He is the author of a history of the Cambodian genocide and the novel The Depths of the Sea, both published by St. Martin’s Press. His novel Genesis Code, dealing with issues of human genetic enhancement in the context of a future US-China rivalry, was published by Arcade in November 2014.

A Founder and Cochair of the national security organization Partnership for a Secure America, Jamie is a Board Member of the International Center for Transitional Justice and the Jewish refugee agency HIAS, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former White House Fellow and Aspen Institute Crown Fellow, and is the Honorary Ambassador to North America of the Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy. He holds a PhD in Asian history from Oxford, a JD from Harvard Law School, and is a magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University. He has completed twelve Ironman triathlons, twenty-four marathons, and nine ultramarathons.