His Excellency Zurab Noghaideli assumed the prime ministerial position in Georgia in February 2005. He started his political career in the Green Party of Georgia in the 1990s. Noghaideli was a member of the Parliament of Georgia from 1992 to 2000, where he chaired the Parliamentary Committee on Environment Protection and Natural Resources (1992-1995) and the Parliamentary Tax and Income Committee (1999-2000). He was appointed Minister of Finance in the government of Eduard Shevarnadze in May 2000, but was dismissed from this post in 2002 due to his growing dissent with the corrupt policies of the government. During these years, he was considered a member of a team of young reformists headed by Zurab Zhvania and Mikheil Saakashvili and proved to be quite an effective minister. After the Rose Revolution of November 2003, Noghaideli returned to government as the economic adviser to the acting president Nino Burjanidze. He was re-appointed to his old post as Minister of Finance in February 2004 in the government of Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania.

Noghaideli graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in physics in 1988. He also specialized in the Institute of Geology of the Academy of Sciences of Estonia.

Anders Åslund joined the Institute for International Economics in 2006. He has served previously as the director of the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace since 2003 and as codirector of the Carnegie Moscow Center's project on Economies of the Post-Soviet States. He joined the Carnegie Endowment as a senior associate in October 1994. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. His work examines the transformation of formerly socialist economies to market-based economies. While the central areas of his studies are Russia and Ukraine, he also focuses on the broader implications of economic transition.

Åslund has served as an economic adviser to the governments of Russia and Ukraine and to President Askar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan. He was a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics and director of the Stockholm Institute of East European Economics. He has worked as a Swedish diplomat in Kuwait, Poland, Geneva, and Moscow. He is a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and an honorary professor of the Kyrgyz National University. He is co-chairman of the Economics Education and Research Consortium and chairman of the Advisory Council of the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE), Warsaw.

He is the author of Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge University Press, 2001), How Russia Became a Market Economy (Brookings, 1995), Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform, 2d ed. (Cornell University Press, 1991), and Private Enterprise in Eastern Europe: The Non-Agricultural Private Sector in Poland and the GDR, 1945-83 (Macmillan, 1985) and editor or coeditor of several books, including with CDDRL Director, Michael McFaul, Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic Breakthrough (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006).

This event is co-sponsored with the Center on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Ambassador James E. Goodby is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has held several senior government positions dedicated to arms control and nonproliferation, including deputy to the special adviser to the president and secretary of state on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), 2000-2001; special representative of President Clinton for the security and dismantlement of nuclear weapons, 1995-1996; chief negotiator for nuclear threat reduction agreements, 1993-1994, and vice chair of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty talks, 1982-1983. He served as U.S. ambassador to Finland in 1980-1981.

Bart Bernstein is a Professor of American history at Stanford University. He has written very widely on post-World War II American history, including the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II, economic policy, diplomacy, nuclear history, and scientific discovery.