Milt Lauenstein is a retired corporate executive who has dedicated the last thirty years in peacebuilding efforts. After a successful business career, he founded the Purdue Peace Project to empower local leaders to prevent political violence in West Africa. Milt’s approach emphasizes the importance of evidence-based strategies and local leadership in creating sustainable peace. His work demonstrates a commitment to reducing human suffering through innovative, community-driven initiatives.

Annie Bird, PhD, is a strategy consultant at Red Thread Lab, where she collaborates with leaders in global peace and security, human rights, and social justice. She has held senior roles at Wellspring Philanthropic Fund and the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, leading efforts in atrocities prevention. Annie has taught at Princeton University, the London School of Economics, UC Berkeley, Binghamton University, and the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide. Her research and publications focus on atrocities prevention, transitional justice, armed conflict, and human rights law.

Ahn Lee is a researcher and organizational strategist specializing in program management and evaluation, product development, and strategic positioning in support of non-profit, public, and private sectors. Her academic and professional background is in mixed-methods research, with extensive experience managing research programs in the Middle East and Central Asia. She has dedicated her career to promoting the use of high-quality data to improve programmatic decision-making and elevating research capacities within local organizations.

Benjamin Valentino is a Professor in the Department of Government and the Associate Dean for the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College. His research interests focus on the causes, consequences and prevention of violent conflict. He is the co-creator of the Early Warning Project, which uses state-of-the-art methods to assess the risk of mass atrocities in countries around the world. At Dartmouth he teaches courses on international relations, international security, American foreign policy, and the causes and prevention of genocide.

Clionadh Raleigh is the President and founder of the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) and Professor of Political Geography and Conflict, University of Sussex. Clionadh’s areas of expertise include the dynamics of conflict and violence, changing patterns of political violence and conflict data. Her work has also focused on African political environments and elite networks, and she has largely concentrated on subnational power dynamics and their influence on violent movements.

Henrik Urdal (PhD, Political Science) is Director and Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). He is past Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Peace Research, and a former Research Fellow with the International Security Program at Harvard Kennedy School. Urdal’s work on political demography focuses on the impact of population and environmental change on armed conflict, and has been published in leading international academic journals. He has worked extensively on global trends in armed conflict as past Director for PRIOs Conflict Trends project.

Peter Lauenstein-Denjongpa was the founder and principal of Taktse International School in Sikkim, India. With a background from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Peter has dedicated his career to fostering compassionate leadership and innovative learning. Inspired by his grandfather’s peacebuilding legacy, Peter integrates empathy, dialogue, and evidence-based decision-making into education, aiming to cultivate leaders who can address global challenges with wisdom and compassion. At the Effective Peacebuilding Initiative, Peter’s commitment to ethical leadership and sustainable education aligns with the mission to develop leaders equipped for complex social challenges.