Ted Mitchell is an experienced educator, innovator and policy maker. His long career in education has included roles in academia, federal education policy and organizational leadership, with a special focus on access to high-quality outcomes for all students. He is currently President of the American Council on Education (ACE).

Bruce Hoffman is a leading authority on terrorism, insurgency, and political violence, with a career that spans more than four decades of groundbreaking research, scholarship, and advice to governments and international organizations.

He is currently a tenured professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and has been the director of the university’s undergraduate Center for Jewish Civilization and also of its graduate-level Center for Security Studies and the Security Studies Master of Arts Program.

In addition, he is Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations; Senior Fellow at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NY; professor emeritus of terrorism studies at St Andrews University, Scotland; and an adjunct professor at the International Institute of Counterterrorism, Herzliya, Israel, and at Charles Stuart University, Canberra, Australia. He previously held the Chair in Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency at the RAND Corporation.

Ivo Daalder is a prominent global affairs expert with a career spanning academia, public service and policy analysis. He is retiring this year after 12 years as president and chief executive officer of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, an influential organization that convenes leaders and experts for discussions about the world’s most pressing issues. He also hosts the weekly podcast World Review with Ivo Daalder, featuring leading journalists from around the world discussing the week’s biggest news stories, and writes a bimonthly column From Across the Pond for Politico Europe and the Substack newsletter America Abroad.

Before leading the Chicago Council, he served as U.S. Ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013. In this capacity, he played a critical role in strengthening the transatlantic alliance, overseeing NATO’s response to crises, including the conflict in Afghanistan, and promoting strategic defense initiatives that shaped European security. His tenure was marked by efforts to adapt NATO to a rapidly changing global environment – changes that are even more rapid and far-reaching today.

Ambassador Daalder has also been a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, focusing on U.S. foreign policy, European affairs and international security, and on the staff of the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton, where he worked on key policy issues including European security and the Balkans.

In addition to his extensive policy experience, Daalder is a respected academic. He was educated at the Universities of Kent, Oxford, and Georgetown University, and received his Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an honorary Doctor of Civil Law from the University of Kent. For his service as US Ambassador to NATO, Daalder was honored by the governments of Germany, Latvia, and Estonia, and received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service.