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 the Institute'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

Nicholas Diakopoulos

School of Communication

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Nicholas Diakopoulos is a Professor of Communication Studies and Computer Science (by courtesy). 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, published by Harvard University Press.

Jennifer Dunn

McCormick School of Engineering

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Jennifer Dunn is Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and (by courtesy) Mechanical Engineering. She is also the Director of the Center for Engineering Sustainability & Resilience. 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.

Mark Hauser

Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences

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Mark Hauser, Professor of Anthropology, is a historical archaeologist who specializes in materiality, slavery, and inequality. These key themes intersect in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries Atlantic and Indian Oceans and form a foundation on his research on the African Diaspora and Colonial Contexts. His research uses slavery’s archaeological record to map alternative geographies of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century world. His first book, An Archaeology of Black Markets (Florida, 2008), maps the informal economies of enslaved people in Jamaica through the utilitarian pottery they made and with which they furnished their houses to trace the cultural and political registers of their everyday lives. His most recent book, Mapping Water in Dominica (Washington, 2021) examines the archaeological record of water, its management, and everyday uses during the island’s short lived "sugar revolution" to map the ecological legacies of colonialism and slavery in the Caribbean. His current research on the labor histories and social lives of two communities in the Caribbean and South India explores a "prehistory" of the global south by mapping the movement of people, objects, and ideas between two oceans.

Wendy Pearlman

Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences

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Wendy Pearlman is the Jane Long Professor of Arts and Sciences and a professor of political science. She also serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Perspectives on Politics. A scholar of Middle East politics, social movements, conflict processes, and forced migration, she is the author of six books and more than 40 journal articles or book chapters. Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada (Nation Books, 2003), a collection of interviews from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, was a Boston Globe and Washington Post bestseller. Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2011), named one of Foreign Policy’s best books on the Middle East in 2011, examines Palestinian’s twentieth-century history to consider how a self-determination movement’s internal organizational cohesion or fragmentation affects its strategies of protest. Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States That Host Nonstate Actors (co-authored with Boaz Atzili, Columbia University Press, 2018) examines the causes and consequences of 70 years of Israel’s use violence and/or threats against neighboring states to prevent or punish their support for nonstate actors on their territory. Since 2012, Wendy has also conducted interviews with more than 500 displaced Syrians on five continents. She shares these voices in two books. We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria (HarperCollins, 2017) is a curation of testimonials and poetic fragments that chronicle and explain the Syrian experience of authoritarianism, revolution, and war. It ends with the forced migration of millions of Syrian refugees. The Home I Worked To Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora (Liveright Books, 2024), is a second collection of personal stories. Taking Syria’s refugee outflow as its point of departure, it shares and explores Syrians’ stories and reflections on losing home, searching for home, and rethinking the meaning of home.

Hatim Rahman

Kellogg School of Management

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Hatim A. Rahman is an Associate Professor of Management and Organizations and Sociology (by courtesy). He is also PepsiCo Chair in International Management. His research investigates how artificial intelligence is impacting the nature of work and employment relationships in organizations and labor markets. His research and teaching have received numerous awards, including the National Science Foundation CAREER award. In 2023, he was named as one of the best 40 business school professors under 40 years of age by Poets & Quants. His award-winning book, Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers (University of California Press), investigates how digital labor platform organizations use algorithms to control workers' job opportunities. The book won the 2025 George R. Terry Book Award by the Academy of Management, was selected as the 2025 Responsible Research in Management Award Distinguished Winner, won the 2025 McGannon Book Award Winner, was a finalist for the EGOS Book Award, and earned a Silver Medal from the Axiom Business Book Award in the "Independent Thought Leadership" category. Professor Rahman's research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Academy of Management Annals, and Academy of Management Discoveries. These articles have been recognized for both their theoretical and empirical impact by the National Science Foundation, Academy of Management, Responsible Research for Business and Management, Labor and Employment Relations Association, Thinkers50, Financial Times, Industry Studies Association, International Labour and Employment Relations Association, Psychology of Technology Institute, and International Conference on Information Systems.

Peter Slevin

Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications

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Peter Slevin is a Professor of Journalism. He 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.

Faith Summersett-Williams

Feinberg School of Medicine

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Faith Summersett Williams is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics with secondary appointments in Medical Social Sciences and Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences. She is the director and founder of the Implementation science + Health Equity Advancement Lab (I+HEAL), housed in the Potocsnak Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine (DAYAM) at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital. Trained as a pediatric clinician-scientist, her academic and clinical interests are focused on health equity and justice to center the values and needs of historically marginalized communities. She combines this perspective with learning health system and implementation science frameworks to examine health inequities in relation to structural disenfranchisement with the goal of promoting justice in healthcare. Her current research program is focused on implementing evidence-based alcohol and substance use interventions for adolescents in three settings: pediatric hospitals, school-based health centers, and global settings such as community health clinics. Through her research she hopes to serve a particularly vulnerable pediatric population—adolescents with chronic medical conditions who are at high-risk for secondary alcohol and substance use disorders.

Sepehr Vakil

School of Education & Social Policy

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Sepehr Vakil is an Associate Professor of Learning Sciences. He is the faculty director of the Center for Technology, Policy, & Opportunity, and the MS program in Technology, People, & Policy (MTePP). He received his PhD in the Education in Mathematics, Science, & Technology program at UC Berkeley (2016) and his BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from UCLA (2007). He is currently serving as Senior Adviser to the Spencer Foundation on their AI initiative and was recently appointed to the National Academy of Science Engineering & Medicine committee on Developing Competencies for the Future of Data & Computing: The Role of K–12. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Equity for the Center of STEM Education at the University of Texas at Austin.