�Ļ�Ӱ��

Featured Speakers, Authors, and Guests 

The biographies of our 2024 distinguished featured speakers, authors, and guests appear below. We invite you to learn more about them.

Curt Boyd is currently serving as the Director of Training, Doctrine, and Proponency at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School. His previous government civilian experience included a short assignment as a talent management analyst at the Army Special Operations Command and seventeen months as the Deputy Director for USSOCOM’s Mission Support Element at Fort Liberty. In 2011, Curt retired as an Army Colonel and the Chief of Staff of the JFK Special Warfare Center and soon thereafter joined the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory where he spent six years leading advanced technology development and in-depth research projects designed to solve some of the Army and the Special Operations community’s most difficult technical challenges. Mr. Boyd’s military service included 27 years in the Army with the first 7 spent in the infantry with assignments in Germany and Fort Bragg and the remaining 20 of those years spent in psychological operations units at Fort Liberty, where he successfully served in command and senior staff positions at the joint, component, and institutional levels. He is a 1984 �Ļ�Ӱ�� graduate with a B.A in Interdisciplinary Studies and a Minor in Psychology, an M.A in Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict from the Naval Postgraduate School and was a distinguished fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Curt is married to another native of Massachusetts, Carolyn. They have two children, who live and work in North Carolina.

Mariana Budjeryn is a Senior Research Associate at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, Project on Managing the Atom (MTA). She is the author of Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023). Formerly, she held appointments of a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at MTA, and a visiting professor at Tufts University and Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. Mariana is a senior non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academies of Sciences. Her research and analytical contributions appeared in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Nonproliferation Review, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, War on the Rocks, and in the publications of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where she is a Global Fellow. She is the 2024 recipient of the William E. Colby Military Writers' Award.

Nina Jankowicz is an internationally-recognized expert on disinformation and democratization, one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, and the author of two books: How to Lose the Information War (2020), which The New Yorker called “a persuasive new book on disinformation as a geopolitical strategy, ” and How to Be A Woman Online (2022), an examination of online abuse and disinformation and tips for fighting back, which Publishers Weekly named “essential.” Currently the Vice President at the UK-based Centre for Information Resilience, a non-profit focused on countering disinformation, Jankowicz has advised governments, international organizations, and tech companies, and testified before the US Congress, UK Parliament, and European Parliament.

In 2022, Jankowicz was appointed to lead the Disinformation Governance Board, an intra-agency best practices and coordination entity at the Department of Homeland Security; she resigned the position after a sustained disinformation campaign caused the Biden Administration to abandon the project. From 2017-2022, Jankowicz has held fellowships at the Wilson Center, where she led accessible, actionable research about the effects of disinformation on women and freedom of expression around the world. She advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry on strategic communications under the auspices of a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship in 2016-17. Early in her career, she managed democracy assistance programs to Russia and Belarus at the National Democratic Institute.

Dr. Bilyana Lilly, CISSP is a cybersecurity and foreign policy leader with over twenty years of managerial, technical and research experience. She is the Chair of the Democratic Resilience Track of the Warsaw Security Forum, an advisor to the venture capital firm Night Dragon, and an adjunct researcher at the RAND Corporation. Dr. Lilly is a mentor and speaker at DefCon, CyCon and the Executive Women’s Forum. She has worked at the United Nations and Deloitte financial cyber advisory, and has advised the Pentagon, the White House, and NATO among others. She has a Ph.D. and three master’s degrees, including a degree from Oxford University (distinction). Dr. Lilly has published two books. Her second book titled Russian Information Warfare: Assault on Democracies in the Cyber Wild West became an Amazon best seller. She has been denounced by Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and called a cyber expert by Tom Hanks

Scott Nelson currently serves as a Senior Advisor to the Director of Strategic Initiative's at the Cyber National Mission Force, United States Cyber Command.  Scott served as the Director of Academic Engagement for United States Cyber Command and Deputy Chief of Staff Operations, G3 for Army Cyber Command prior to his retirement after 32 years on 1 July 2022 as a US Army Colonel.  In addition to military service, Scott held the position as Vice President for �Ļ�Ӱ�� Applied Research Institutes from May 2018 and prior as Vice President of Strategic Initiatives for SecureSet a Denver based cyber security education start-up.  Over his 32 year career he has served in senior leadership positions in the Army, Government, Commercial and academic sectors.  Scott’s expertise includes Information Warfare, Public Affairs, Legislative and Congressional Affairs and strategic planning.  

Dr. Zizi Papacharissi is UIC Distinguished Professor of Communication and Political Science at the University of Illinois-Chicago and Department Head of Communication. She is also University Scholar and affiliate faculty with the Discovery Partners Institute at the University of Illinois System. Her work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media. She has published 10 books, over 80 journal articles and book chapters, and serves on the editorial board of fifteen journals. Zizi is the founding and current Editor of the open access journal Social Media & Society. She has collaborated with Apple, Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, Tencent, and Oculus and has participated in closed consultations with the Obama 2012 election campaign. She sits on the Committee on the Health and Well-Being of Young Adults, funded by the National Academies of Science, the National Research Council, and the Institute of Medicine in the US, and has been invited to lecture about her work on social media in several Universities and Research Institutes in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Her work has been translated in Greek, German, Korean, Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, Turkish, and Persian. Her latest book, titled After Democracy: Imagining our Political Future, is out now, from Yale University Press. She is presently working on two new books on Connective AI and Digital Media and Democracy.

Lieutenant General Laura Potter earned her commission in the Military Intelligence Corps in 1989. She is a Distinguished Military Graduate of Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, where she received a Bachelor’s Degree in Russian and Spanish. She holds a Master’s Degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies and a Master’s Degree in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College.

Lieutenant General Potter’s assignments include: Assistant S-2, 19th Support Command, Taegu, Republic of Korea; Division G-2 staff officer in 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry); Low Level Voice Intercept Platoon Leader in direct support of 2d Brigade, 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry); Signals Intelligence Officer, Company Commander, and Battalion S-3, 704th Military Intelligence Brigade, Fort Meade, Maryland; V Corps Collection Manager; Battalion S-3, 302d Military Intelligence Battalion and Brigade Deputy Commander, 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, Heidelberg and Wiesbaden, Germany; Joint Staff J-2 Intelligence Planner and Executive Assistant to the Joint Staff J-2; Commander 743d Military Intelligence Battalion, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado; Military Assistant, then Executive Officer to the 20th Secretary of the Army, the Honorable Pete Geren. In 2010, she returned to Europe to command Allied Command Counterintelligence, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, then served as the Deputy Chief of Staff, Intelligence G-2, U.S. Army Europe and the J-2, U.S. European Command, Stuttgart, Germany and as the Commanding General of the United States Army Intelligence Center of Excellence and Fort Huachuca.  Her most recent assignment was Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2 for the United States Army from 2020 to 2024.  She assumed duties as the 58th Director of the Army Staff on January 5, 2024.

Her deployments include United Nations Military Observer in Abkhazia, Republic of Georgia; 302d Military Intelligence Battalion S-3, then Deputy Commander, 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF); and Commander, Theater Intelligence Group, Combined Joint Task Force 435, Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), Afghanistan.

Lieutenant General Potter’s awards and decorations include the Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal (1 Oak Leaf Cluster), Legion of Merit (1 Oak Leaf Cluster), Bronze Star Medal (1 Oak Leaf Cluster), Defense Meritorious Service Medal, Air Force Commendation Medal, Army and Joint Staff Identification Badges, the Parachutist Badge, and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, Cross of Merit, 3rd Class. She is married to LTC (Ret.) Randy Potter and they have two school aged sons.

Dr Eszter Szenes is a Lecturer at the School of Education, University of Adelaide and a Senior Fellow at the �Ļ�Ӱ�� Peace and War Center and the Center for Global Resilience and Security. Between 2020-2022 she was hosted by the �Ļ�Ӱ�� Peace and War Center as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Research Fellow, co-hosted by the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Austria. Prior to joining �Ļ�Ӱ��, Dr Szenes held a post-doctoral researcher position at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She holds a doctorate in Linguistics from The University of Sydney. Dr Szenes was a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) in The Hague, Netherlands. Her research focuses on the role of language and multimodal resources in emerging complex and interrelated societal threats, for example, information disorder, radicalisation and the links between climate change and (violent) extremism. She is especially interested in preventing and countering the effect of disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining democracies from the perspective of computer-mediated communication and critical digital and media literacies. 

Dr. Diane Zorri is a Senior Fellow at the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida, specializing in Gulf politics, U.S. foreign policy, defense strategy, and maritime cybersecurity. She has held academic positions as an Associate Professor of Security Studies at the National Defense College of the United Arab Emirates, a tenured professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, and a visiting professor at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy.

Before transitioning to academia, Dr. Zorri served as an officer in the United States Air Force, gaining extensive experience in the aerospace and defense sectors. After her military service, she worked for an Italian-U.S. defense company, managing projects related to foreign military sales, integrated communications, and physical security. During the Iraq War, she contributed her expertise to Multi-National Corps-Iraq. Dr. Zorri's educational background includes a degree from the United States Air Force Academy, a graduate degree from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.