Michael Shifter is president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based center for policy analysis and exchange on Western Hemisphere affairs.
Shifter also directs the Andean program at the Inter-American Dialogue. Since 1993, he has been an adjunct professor of Latin American politics at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. Shifter writes and comments widely on U.S.-Latin American relations and hemispheric affairs. His recent articles have appeared in major U.S. and Latin American publications such as The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Journal of Democracy, Harvard International Review, Clarín, O Estado de S. Paulo, and Cambio. He is also co-editor, along with Jorge Domínguez, of Constructing Democratic Governance in Latin America, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Since 1996, he has regularly testified before Congress about U.S. policy towards Latin America.
Peter Hakim is president emeritus of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based center for
policy analysis and exchange on Western Hemisphere affairs.
Mr. Hakim writes and speaks widely on hemispheric issues, is regularly interviewed on radio and television, and has testified more than a dozen times before Congress. His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times, and Financial Times, and in many Latin American newspapers and journals. He was a vice president of the Inter-American Foundation and worked for the Ford Foundation in both New York and Latin America. He has taught at MIT and Columbia. He has served on boards and advisory committees for the World Bank, Council on Competitiveness, Inter-American Development Bank, Foreign Affairs en Español, Partners for Democratic Change, and Human Rights Watch. He is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations.
Marifeli Pérez-Stable
is a senior non-resident fellow at the Dialogue and a professor at Florida International 
University. Her column on Latin American topics appears every other Thursday in the Miami Herald. Her opinion pieces have also appeared in El País, the Financial Times, La Vanguardia, El Clarín, Excelsior, El Nuevo Herald, and The Nation. She is an editorial contributor to the Real Instituto Elcano and Infolatam. She authored The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy (Oxford University Press, 1993, 2nd edition 1999) which is under revision for a third edition. She is the editor of Looking Forward: Comparative Perspectives on Cuba’s Transition (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). Looking Forward was a finalist in the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (2007). In 2001-2003, she chaired the task force on Memory, Truth, and Justice which issued the report, Cuban National Reconciliation. Marifeli is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an associate of COMEXI, the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations. (http://MarifeliPerez-Stable.com)
Jeffrey M. Puryear is vice president for social policy at the Dialogue. He directs the Dialogue's education program - the Partnership for Educational Revitalization in the Americas (PREAL). He previously served as head of the Ford Foundation's regional office for the Andes and the Southern Cone, and as a research scholar at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in comparative education from the University of Chicago. Puryear has authored numerous articles on inter-American affairs. His book on intellectuals and democracy in Chile was published in 1994 by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Joan Caivano is deputy to the president and director of special projects. She directs the Dialogue's project on press freedom issues
a
nd its work on women's leadership in the Americas. She manages a range of i
nstitutional responsibilities, including the Dialogue's Sol Linowitz Forum, its publications program, outreach to the press, and membership issues. She worked previously at the Overseas Development Council and the Brookings Institution, and managed several small business enterprises. She has been a frequent guest lecturer on issues of concern to women in Latin America at the Foreign Service Institute. She holds a masters degree in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University, where she also completed her undergraduate studies.
Daniel P. Erikson is the senior associate for U.S. policy and director of Caribbean programs at the Inter-American Dialogue. Erikson has published more than sixty articles in publications including The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, and The Washington Post, and his book chapters appear in The Obama Administration and the Americas: Agenda for Change (2009), The Diplomacies of Small States (2009), Latin America’s Struggle for Democracy (2008), Looking Forward: Comparative Perspectives on Cuba’s Transition (2007), Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Latin America (2007), and Transforming Socialist Economies: Lessons for Cuba and Beyond (2005), which he co-edited. Erikson has taught Latin American politics at Johns Hopkins-SAIS, is frequently interviewed in U.S. and international media, and has testified before the U.S. Congress. His past positions include research associate at Harvard Business School and Fulbright scholar in U.S.-Mexican business relations. He earned a Masters in Public Policy as a Dean’s Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a BA from Brown University.
Erikson is the author of the highly acclaimed book, The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States, and the Next Revolution (Bloomsbury Press, 2008), which was described by Current History magazine as “the most important book on Cuba in a generation.”
Manuel Orozco is a senior associate at the Inter-American Dialogue, where he serves as executive director of the Remittances and Rural Development project funded by the Multilateral Investment Fund of the Inter-American Development Bank and the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development. He is chair of Central America and the Caribbean at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute and senior researcher at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. Orozco taught political science at the University of Akron, Ohio, and international relations in Costa Rica. Orozco holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Texas at Austin, masters in public administration and Latin American studies, and a B.A. in international relations from the National University of Costa Rica.
His recent publications include the book, International Norms and Mobilization for Democracy (London: Ashgate Publishers, 2002), "The Remittance Marketplace: Prices, Policy and Financial Institutions,” (Washington: Pew Hispanic Center, June 2004), “Mexican Hometown Associations and Development
Opportunities,” (Journal of International Affairs, Spring 2004).
Claudio M. Loser is a visiting senior fellow at the Dialogue, working on financial, macroeconomic and trade issues, focusing particularly on the management of financial crises in Latin America. A native of Argentina, Loser led the International Monetary Fund's activities in Latin America since 1994, where he was most recently the head of the Western Hemisphere department. He graduated from the University of Cuyo in Argentina and received his Masters of Arts and PhD from the University of Chicago.
Paul Isbell is the director of the Energy Program at the Elcano Royal Institute for International and Strategic Studies in Madrid, as well as the Institute’s senior analyst for international economy and trade. As of the autumn of 2008, he is based in Washington D.C. where he is representing the Elcano Royal Institute and collaborating with the Inter-American Dialogue as a visiting senior fellow. Before joining the Elcano Royal Institute in 2002, Isbell was the analyst for Emerging Markets and Currencies – with a focus on Latin America – at the Madrid-based investment bank of Banco Santander. For a number of years he was also a professor of economics and international political economy at many Spanish and American universities, including the University of Alcala de Henares, ICADE, CUNEF, Syracuse University and the George Washington University. His areas of interest include international economy, currencies, energy economics and geopolitics, as well as the political economy of emerging market countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Isbell received his BSFS from the Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and his MA from the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania where he studied under a Rotary International Foundation fellowship.
Viron Peter Vaky is a senior fellow focusing on multilateral governance and U.S.-Latin American relations. A retired career foreign service officer, he was formerly United States ambassador to Costa Rica, Colombia and Venezuela and assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs. Following retirement from the foreign service, he was associate dean and research professor in diplomacy at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Genaro Arriagada was appointed senior fellow (non-resident) of the Inter-American Dialogue in January 2008. Arriagada has served as minister of the presidency of Chile, ambassador of Chile to the United States, chairman of the board of Radio Cooperativa, and national director of the “NO” Campaign, which defeated General Augusto Pinochet in the plebiscite of October 1988. Arriagada served as ambassador-at-large and special envoy of the president of Chile to the Second Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile in April 1998. He was head of Ricardo Lagos’ 1999 presidential campaign and of Eduardo Frei’s 1993 presidential campaign.
Arriagada is on the Board of Universidad de las Américas; senior advisor to the president of the Club de Madrid; and editor of www.asuntospublicos.org. In January and February of 2007, he was public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Arriagada has published a dozen books and numerous articles and columns regarding political, social, and economic issues, including Pinochet: The Politics of Power (Boston: Unwin & Hyman, 1988) and with Carol Graham, “Chile: Sustaining Adjustment during Democratic Transition” in Voting for Reform. Democracy, Political Liberalization and Economic Adjustment (Oxford University Press, 1994). He has been a fellow of The Woodrow Wilson Center (1978-79) and The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (1990).
Nora Lustig is Samuel Z. Stone professor of Latin American economics at Tulane University and 
nonresident fellow at the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Dialogue. Previously she was Shapiro visiting professor of international affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University; director of the poverty group at UNDP; president and professor of the Department of Economics of the Universidad de las Americas, Puebla, Mexico; senior advisor and chief of the Poverty and Inequality Unit at the Inter-American Development Bank; senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; and, professor at the Center of Economic Studies of the Colegio de Mexico. Her research has focused on poverty and inequality, social policies and social protection with particular emphasis on Latin America.
Dr. Lustig has published 15 books and more than 70 articles (33 in refereed journals). Dr. Lustig was co-founder and president of LACEA, the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association; co-director of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty; president of the Mexican Commission of Macroeconomics and Health; co-director of the UNDP project Markets, the State and the Dynamics of Inequality; and the director of the Inter-American Dialogue’s Social Report Card. She obtained her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
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