Karen Guttieri
Naval Postgraduate School

Karen Guttieri is a faculty member with the Global Public Policy Academic Group (GPPAG) at the Naval Postgraduate School.  Her research focuses on US military stability operations and the continuing evolution of civil-military relations.  Related research addresses the dynamics of transitional regimes, the metrics for evaluating the military support toward transition, and the civil implications of military intervention in interim governments.  She has developed curricula on stabilization and reconstruction, most notably a seminar in Geneva on leadership in complex operations and the “Complex Operations Case Series” for the Center for Complex Operations.  Dr. Guttieri received a BA in Economics and International Relations from San Francisco State University and earned a MA and PhD in Political Science at the University of British Columbia.  She joined the Naval Postgraduate School in 2001 after conducting post-doctoral research at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

Mark Nelson
Stanford Peace Innovation Lab

Mark Nelson founded and co-directs Stanford Peace Innovation Lab, where he researches mass collaboration and mass interpersonal persuasion.  Formerly a relief worker, investment banker, and social entrepreneur, Mark now designs and develops resources to scale-up collective positive changes in human behavior.  In doing so, he has developed a functional and quantitative definition of peace (in terms of engagement quantity and quality across social difference lines), created innovative automated methods to measure peace (from neighborhood to global scale), and formed structural description for “Peace Data.”  He leads the Social Energy Map project and designs technology interventions to measurably increase positive, mutually beneficial engagements across conflict boundaries.  Other projects include EPIC Global Challenge and Peace Markets.  Mark is also a Researcher at Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab and a member of Stanford’s Kozmetsky Global Collaboratory.

Charles Palmares
Stanford Peace Innovation Lab
US Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations

Charles Palmares is a Researcher and Project Coordinator with the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab, and he is a Civil Affairs Sergeant with the 1005th Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Training Company in the US Army.  Graduated with a BA in Political Science from the University of California, Davis in 2006, he has since worked with numerous governmental and non-governmental organizations in the promotion of governance, development, and rule of law, particularly in Southeast Asia.  His ongoing academic research examines how certain political institutional drivers affect human development in the Philippines.  Charles also studies how authoritarian regimes and violent non-state actors respond to deliberations in local governance.  Currently, he is developing improved technological tools for strategic communication and civil information management.

Maria-Dubravka Pineda
Naval Postgraduate School

Maria-Dubravka Pineda joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School in 2008 as a visiting professor.  Her research interests include global change and international governance, public sector risk, globalization, and gender and inclusion.  Dr. Pineda has an MBA in Finance from Pepperdine University and earned her PhD in Urban Planning (with a concentration on risk, economic policy, and regional development) from the School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has worked in leading capacities in both the private and public sectors, including the Ministry of Youth in Venezuela and as a Senior Advisor for energy sector reform in Latin America.

Margarita Quihuis
Stanford Peace Innovation Lab

A social entrepreneur and mentor capitalist, Margarita Quihuis has focused on diplomatic technologies, emergent social behavior and technology, cloud and mobile computing, crowd sourcing and open innovation, technology incubation, and access to capital.  Her accomplishments include being the first director of Astia (formerly known as the Women’s Technology Cluster), a business incubator (where her portfolio companies raised $67 million in venture funding), venture capitalist, Reuters Fellow at Stanford University, and Director of RI Labs for Ricoh Innovations.  She is currently a member of the research team at Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab and co-directs the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab, where she conducts research on innovation, mass collaboration, persuasive technology, and the potential of social networks to change society for the better.  Her projects have included the study of collaboration and citizen engagement to foster government innovation – Manor Labs, bottom-up post-disaster response and recovery – Relief 2.0 and advisory roles in persuasive technology efforts such as the Israel Loves Iran and Romancing the Border social media campaigns.

Marc Ventresca
Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Marc Ventresca is a Lecturer in Management Studies at Saïd Business School, a Fellow of Wolfson College, and Fellow at the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization, all at the University of Oxford.  He is a visiting Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Irvine.  From 2004 to 2005, he was a Research Fellow in Organizational Learning for Homeland Security at Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

Ventresca is an expert market and network formation, entrepreneurship, governance, and innovation and technology strategy.  His research investigates how large-scale organizational systems emerge and change, with applications to economic institutions like markets and industries.  In current projects, he examines institutional politics of strategy and governance innovation in global financial markets and the interface of states and entrepreneurial markets in the evolution of US and UK information services industries.  In his work with CISAC, he is reviewing issues of organizational learning and policy, as part of a project on how theories of action and practice can revitalize institutional theories of organization.

He earned MAs in Policy Analysis and Education and Sociology and a PhD in Sociology at Stanford University.  He served on the faculty at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and he has held visiting faculty positions at the University of Illinois, the Copenhagen Business School, the Center for Work, Technology, and Organizations at Stanford University, and the Stanford Institute for Research on Higher Education.

Prior to his faculty career, Ventresca worked as a policy analyst at the Congressional Budget Office in Washington, D.C., studied language and politics in Florence, Italy, and worked as a technical writer for hopeful start-ups in Silicon Valley.  He serves as Director for Citizens Information Service (Chicago-based community organizing agency) and Connections for the Homeless (Evanston-based nonprofit). He also works with the Aspen Institute’s Initiative for Social Investments in Business.