Faculty Advisory Council (FAC): Buffett Institute for Global Affairs

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Faculty Advisory Council

Faculty Advisory Council (FAC)

Appointed for a year-long term, the members of the FAC serve as Buffett's faculty governance team. In monthly meetings, they offer advice to the director and deputy director on the Institute's work, suggest new initiatives and events, and act as ambassadors to the faculty at large across Northwestern's schools.

Members

Jennifer Chan

Feinberg School of Medicine

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Jennifer Chan is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine. She is a hybrid researcher-practitioner with over 15 years of experience working with NGOs and United Nations agencies as a public health, crisis informatics and humanitarian data specialist. She co-authored Disaster 2.0, a report describing the challenges of information sharing and technology in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and built the Crisis Informatics program at NetHope during the West Africa Ebola Response. Her transdisciplinary research in the information and computer sciences, engineering, and epidemiology focus on the translation of scientific methods into practice. She collaborates with research teams and practitioners to help strengthen the theoretical and methodological assumptions of how scientific applications translate into practice with a focus on operational impact and ultimately decision-making. She previously advised NetHope and the United Nations Centre for Humanitarian Data as well as acted as an external advisor to the International Federation of the Red Cross 2018 World Disaster Report. She continues to advise global health and humanitarian organizations.

Nick Diakopoulos

School of Communication

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Nicholas Diakopoulos is Professor of Communication Studies at the School of Communication and Computer Science (by courtesy) at the McCormick School of Engineering. He directs the Computational Journalism Lab and is the Director of Graduate Studies for the Technology and Social Behavior PhD program. His research focuses on computational journalism, including aspects of automation and algorithms in news production, algorithmic accountability and transparency, and social media in news contexts. He is the author of the award-winning book Automating the News: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media.

Jennifer Dunn

McCormick School of Engineering

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Jennifer Dunn is Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and (by courtesy) Mechanical Engineering as well as the Director of the Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience at the McCormick School of Engineering. She studies emerging technologies, their energy and environmental impacts, and their potential to influence air pollutant and greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, and energy consumption at the economy-wide level. Particular technologies of interest include biofuels and bioproducts, automotive lithium-ion batteries, fuels and chemicals made from carbon capture and utilization technologies and from natural gas liquids, and resource recovery from wastewater. She applies life cycle analysis as a key tool to evaluate emerging technologies.

Laura Hein

Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences

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Laura Hein is the Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of History at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, specializing in the history of Japan in the 20th century and its international relations. Her most recent book is Post-Fascist Japan: Political Culture in Kamakura After the Second World War (2018). She also co-edited with Rebecca Jennison Imagination Without Borders: Visual Artist Tomiyama Taeko and Social Responsibility (2010). The book accompanies a website created by the Northwestern University Library. She also has a strong interest in problems of remembrance and public memory, resulting in three co-edited books with Mark Selden: Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (1997), Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States (2000), and Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to American and Japanese Power (2003).

Ian Hurd

Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences

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Ian Hurd is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for International and Area Studies at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. His research on international law and politics combines contemporary global affairs with attention to the conceptual frames that serve to make sense of the world. His book How to Do Things With International Law (2017) examines the rule of law in international affairs. His earlier work on the United Nations Security Council includes the prize-winning book After Anarchy: Legitimacy and Power in the United Nations Security Council (2007). He is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of International Organizations (2017) and The United Nations Security Council and the Politics of International Authority (2008). His widely used textbook on the law and politics of global governance, International Organizations: Politics, Law, Practice, is in its fifth edition (2024). He has been chair of the International Organization section of the International Studies Association and a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, WZB-Berlin, Sciences Po in Paris and elsewhere.

Neha Jain

Pritzker School of Law

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Neha Jain is the Deputy Director of the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs and Professor of Law at the Pritzker School of Law. She teaches and writes on international law, human rights law, comparative law and criminal law. She is the author of Perpetrators and Accessories in International Criminal Law (2014) and her work has appeared in numerous journals, including the American Journal of Comparative Law, American Journal of International Law, European Journal of International Law and Harvard International Law Journal. Her article “Manufacturing Statelessness” was awarded the 2022 Francis Deák Prize for best article by American Journal of International Law.

Anna Parkison

Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences

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Anna Parkinson is an Associate Professor of German, a Core Member of the Critical Theory Program, and an affiliate of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and the Jewish Studies Program at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She specializes in twentieth-century German literature, film and critical thought. Her book An Emotional State: The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West German Culture (2015) is a literary-historical study that contests the long-standing reading of postwar West German culture as emotionally stagnant.

Kennetta Hammond Perry

Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences

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Kennetta Hammond Perry is an Associate Professor of African American Studies with a courtesy appointment in History at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Before joining Northwestern, Professor Perry served as founding director of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre at De Montfort University in Leicester, England, where she maintains an affiliation as an Honorary Senior Research Fellow. Her research primarily focuses on Black diasporic communities and political formations shaped by and within the imperial borderings of Britain. Her first book, London Is The Place For Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (2016) examines how a largely African Caribbean migrant community of Black Britons articulated claims to citizenship and publicly challenged the state to both acknowledge and remedy the ways in which anti-Black racism came to bear upon their lives in the decades following World War II.

Peter Slevin

Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications

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Peter Slevin is Professor of Journalism at the Medill School who spent a decade on The Washington Post’s national staff and is currently a contributing writer for The New Yorker, focusing on national politics. He teaches classes on politics and the media, the U.S. role in world affairs, and reporting strategies on current events, from the 2020 presidential campaign to the intersection of policing and race in Chicago. Slevin’s career as a reporter has taken him around the country and the globe, where he has covered events and personalities of every description, taking particular interest in telling stories rich with the voices of the people involved. His ambitious biography of Michelle Obama was voted one of the best biographies of the year by PEN America, and was translated into Chinese, Korean and Dutch.

Christopher Udry

Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences

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Chris Udry is the Robert E. and Emily King Professor of Economics at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He is a development economist whose research focuses on rural economic activity in Sub-Saharan Africa. His current research examines technological change, risk and financial markets, gender and households, property rights, psychological well-being and economic decision-making, and a variety of other aspects of rural economic organization. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a board member of Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.