Laurie S. Fulton served as U.S. Ambassador to Denmark from July 2009 to February 2013.  She retired in 2104 as a partner in the law firm Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington, D.C., where she practiced law for more than two decades and was recognized as one of “Washington’s Top Lawyers” by Washingtonian Magazine in 2004.  As Ambassador, she managed U.S. relations with Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands in areas related to national security, counter-terrorism, arctic policy, piracy and international law enforcement, among others.

Donna Brazile is a veteran political strategist, a Fox News contributor, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, and the King Endowed Chair in Public Policy at Howard University. She previously served as interim Chair of the Democratic National Committee and of the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute. She managed the Gore campaign in 2000 and has lectured at more than 225 colleges and universities on race, diversity, women, leadership and restoring civility in politics.

Rye Barcott is co-founder and CEO of WithHonor.org, a movement to build a cross-partisan coalition of veterans in Congress who can help fix our broken politics and put principles before politics. Barcott served previously in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he first came across NDI’s courageous and important work enabling elections in Fallujah.

J. Brian Atwood became dean of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs in October 2002, where he is widely credited for raising the school's profile and national ranking. He served for six years as Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) during the Administration of President William Clinton. In the Clinton Administration, Atwood led the transition team at the State Department and was Under Secretary of State for Management prior to his appointment as head of USAID.

Bernard W. Aronson is co-founder and managing partner of ACON Investments LLC, a private equity group with offices in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Madrid, Mexico City and Sao Paulo. Mr. Aronson served as assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs from 1989-1993. Following his service, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Award, the State Department’s highest honor, by Secretary of State Warren Christopher for his role in ending the wars and promoting democracy in Central America. Mr.

Rob serves as the Treasurer of the Board of Directors at NDI. He has served on many non-profit boards including the German Marshall Fund, the Atlantic Council and as long-time chair of the Faith and Politics Institute, Congressman John Lewis’s group. He also served on for-profit boards including FiatChrysler Automotive in Detroit, Fiat Industrial in Torino, Italy, and Airbus North America.

Matt Dippell is deputy director of the Latin America and Caribbean team at NDI. For more than a decade, he has organized democracy strengthening programs on civil-military relations, political parties, civic organizing and elections in more than 15 countries. In addition, Mr. Dippell serves as an advisor on candidate debate programs and is NDI's liaison for projects around the world with the Commission on Presidential Debates, the independent nonprofit organization that has sponsored and produced all U.S. general election presidential debates since 1987. Before joining NDI, Mr.

Linda Stern is the director of Global Design, Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning (G-DMEL), and leads the Institute’s efforts to build an evidence base for democracy assistance programs; and promote evidence-based learning at NDI. On behalf of the Institute, Linda also leads the Fundamental Freedoms Fund - Research, Evaluation & Learning (FFF-REL) initiative, a consortium of evaluators from seven leading democracy and human rights organizations.