Berkley Center

Katherine Marshall, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, leads the center’s work on religion and global development. She is also a professor of the practice of development, conflict, and religion in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, teaching diverse courses on the ethics of development work and mentoring students at many levels. She helped to create and now serves as the executive director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue, an NGO that works to enhance bridges between different sectors and institutions. In September 2022, she was appointed as a member of the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Marshall has five decades of experience on a variety of development issues in Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and the Middle East, particularly those facing the world’s poorest countries. She was a World Bank officer from 1971 to 2006, and she led the World Bank’s faith and ethics initiative between 2000 and 2006. Marshall is a member of the Working Group on Child Rights and Family Values and the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, both part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Pekka Metso is ambassador at large for intercultural and interreligious dialogue processes in the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs (MFA) in Helsinki, focusing on both multilateral and bilateral fora. He has worked for the past 28 years in the Finnish MFA; his most recent posting was as the Finnish ambassador to Slovenia and to Bosnia and Herzegovina. In his previous duties Metso worked with the United Nations, serving both in Geneva and New York, with human rights at the heart of that work. He did post-graduate work at the University of Minnesota.