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 PhD Excellence Initiative, a predoctoral fellowship program in economics that identifies high-achieving students with the deepest commitment to economic research and prepares them for the rigors of pursuing a PhD in the field. For his leadership of the PhD Excellence Initiative, 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.

Deborah C. Gordon is an independent consultant providing consulting services to several small technology companies. Gordon is an Advisor Rhombus Power, Inc. She serves on the Board of Directors of Peninsula Volunteers, Inc., Peninsula Volunteers Properties, the Arms Control Association, Probability Management, Inc., the Institute for Security and Technology, Council on Strategic Risks, m-Lab.us, and the Fort Ross Conservancy. She is an Affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University from which she retired in August 2019 after 22 years as the Executive Director of the Preventive Defense Project. She is the former Mayor of Woodside, CA and served 17 years on the Town Council. She has also served as Director, City/County Association of Governments of San Mateo County and as Chair for many San Mateo County and California State Advisory bodies. Gordon has over 30 years of experience in algorithm design, signal processing, network design, and network security and holds U.S. and Canadian patents for her work in medical instrumentation. Gordon holds a BS in computer science from the University of Southern California.

James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of political science. He is a Senior Fellow at FSI, affiliated with CISAC and CDDRL. His research interests include civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy and the evaluation of foreign aid projects promoting improved governance. Fearon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. Some of his current research projects include work on the costs of collective and interpersonal violence, democratization and conflict in Myanmar, nuclear weapons and U.S. foreign policy, and the long-run persistence of armed conflict.