Berkley Center

Peter W. Cookson, Jr. is the director of the Equity Project, principal researcher at the American Institutes for Research (AIR), and is an adjunct professor teaching Sociology at Georgetown University. He is president of Ideas without Borders, an educational consulting firm specializing in twenty-first century education, technology, and human rights. Prior to working at AIR, Peter was the managing director of Education Sector. Peter is the author of 20 books on education and educational reform; his most recent work includes Sacred Trust: A Children’s Educational Bill of Rights (2011); Hearts on Fire: Stories of Today’s Visionaries Igniting Idealism into Action (2013, with Jill W. Iscol, forward by President Bill Clinton); and Class Rules: Exposing Inequality in American High School (2013), which was voted the best book of the year in 2014 by the Society of Professors of Education.

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; one way she shares her expertise is through her blog Faith in Action. 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.