Sherri G. Kraham joined the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) in March 2004 as its Director of Development Policy, working on a broad range of policy issues related to MCC's innovative approach to development. Ms. Kraham, a lawyer, transferred from the U.S. Department of State where she worked overseeing and implementing various U.S. Foreign Assistance including development, peacekeeping and security, humanitarian assistance, and human rights programs. She spent several years working on programs related to Iraq and prior to joining MCC, Ms. Kraham deployed to Baghdad working with the Coalition Provisional Authority as part of the first civilian team that worked on reconstruction following the war.

About the Millenium Challenge Corporation: President George W. Bush established the Millenium Challenge Account in order to link greater contributions from developed nations to greater responsibility from developing nations. The Millennium Challenge Account (MCA)is designed to concretely link assitance to performance by providing aid to those countries that rule justly, invest in their people, and encourage economic freedom. With strong bipartisan support, Congress authorized the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) to administer the MCA and provided $1 billion in initial funding for FY04. President Bush's request for the MCA in FY 2005 was $2.5 billion of which Congress appropriated $1.5 billion. The President has pledged to increase funding for the MCA to $5 billion in the future.

Since Vietnam, the US Army has focused an unprecedented degree of effort on capturing lessons learned in training and on the battlefield and communicating them to other affected units. The Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL), established after Operation URGENT FURY, is the prime example of the Army's efforts to institutionalize the process of learning during the Cold War. CALL continues to function and provide lessons learned in the current Global War on Terror, while other grassroots organizations have sprung up within the Army to target the learning needs of specific segments of the force. One such organization is CompanyCommand.com, an online professional forum of Army leaders dedicated to outstanding leadership at the small-unit level. This talk will discuss the evolution of organizational learning in the Army since Vietnam, and examine how organizations like CALL and CompanyCommand complement one other in the pursuit of excellence.

Captain Raymond A. Kimball is a native of Reading, Pennsylvania, and was commissioned through the United States Military Academy in 1995. After completing initial officer and flight training, he was assigned to the 1st Battalion (Attack), 10th Aviation Regiment, at Fort Drum, New York in November 1996. While assigned to the 10th Mountain Division, he served as an aeroscout platoon leader and logistics and support officer. In those positions, he participated in the full range of Army operations, from home station training to counter-drug operations along the Mexican border to peacekeeping in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In May of 2001, after completing further officer training, he reported to the 3rd Infantry Division, where he was assigned to the 3rd Squadron, 7th U.S. Cavalry. He took command of F Troop, 3-7 Cavalry in July of 2001. The troop consisted of 88 soldiers and $6 million in equipment and was responsible for all aspects of support and maintenance for the squadron's sixteen scout helicopters. In January of 2003, the troop deployed as part of 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry, to Kuwait in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. During combat operations the troop supported 870 flight hours over a period of twenty-one days while moving 700 kilometers through enemy territory without the loss of a single soldier. He gave up command of F Troop in June of 2003 and returned to the United States to begin graduate studies in history at Stanford. In addition to his coursework, he serves as a research assistant to the Preventive Defense Project in CISAC. For the past two years, he has also served as a Topic Lead and advisor to CompanyCommand.com. His next assignment will be as an Associate Professor of History at the United States Military Academy. His awards include the Bronze Star, the Army Commendation Medal, the Army Achievement Medal, and the Humanitarian Service Medal. He is married to the former Mindy Hynds of Vacaville, California; they have one son, Daniel.

Kimberly Marten is a tenured associate professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University, and also teaches at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA).

She earned her Ph.D. at Stanford in 1991, and held both pre-doc and post-doc fellowships at CISAC. She has written three books: Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past (Columbia Univ. Press, 2004), Weapons, Culture, and Self-Interest: Soviet Defense Managers in the New Russia (Columbia University Press, 1997), and Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and Soviet Military Innovation (Princeton University Press, 1993), which received the Marshall Shulman Prize. Her numerous book chapters and journal articles include a Washington Quarterly piece in Winter 2002-3, "Defending against Anarchy: From War to Peacekeeping in Afghanistan," as well as op-eds in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune.

In May 2004 she was embedded for a week with the Canadian Forces then leading the ISAF peace mission in Kabul. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Program on New Approaches to Russian Security (PONARS). Her current research asks whether warlords and gangs can be changed from potential spoilers to stakeholders in state-building processes.

Liz McBride, Director of the Post-Conflict Development Initiative at the London-based Internatinal Rescue Committee will discuss state reconstruction challenges following violent conflict in the developing world. McBride is a visiting researcher in the spring quarter at CDDRL. She has worked in humanitarian relief and post-conflict reconstruction in Tanzania and Rwanda. McBride's responsibilities at the International Rescue Committee include creating and ensuring implementation of new institutional program frameworks in response to the changing nature of humanitarian aid; overseeing technical areas of community driven reconstruction, good governance, civil society, local capacity development, conflict resolution and economic development; and supporting service delivery technical units in defining post-conflict strategies and priorities (i.e. health, education). She also works intensively with the International Rescue Committee's primary target post-conflict countries: Sudan and South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Liberia.

Assistant Professor of Political Science and CDDRL Faculty Associate, Jeremy Weinstein, will present a paper on whether or not states embroiled in violent conflict are better able to emerge with a stable peace when left to their own devices as opposed to receiving aid from the international community. Weinstein's research has focused on civil war and insurgencies in Africa in particular. He is the author of the forthcoming book manuscript, Inside Rebellion: The Political Economy of Rebel Organization.