Berkley Center

Mohammed Abu-Nimer is a senior adviser at the International Dialogue Centre (KAICIID) and professor in the International Peace and Conflict Resolution program at American University's School of International Service. An expert on conflict resolution and dialogue for peace, his work has focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and on application of conflict resolution models in Muslim communities.

Susan Hayward is a specialist on religion, peace, and human rights and a research fellow at the Georgetown University Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. From 2007 to 2021, she worked with the Religion and Inclusive Societies team at the U.S. Institute of Peace, partnering with faith-based and religious actors worldwide to transform violence and advance just peace with a particular focus on Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Colombia. In this role, she also sought to strengthen religious literacy within U.S. foreign policy and global diplomacy, partnering with the State Department, USAID, and the European Union, among others. From 2020 to 2023, Hayward supported the establishment and development of the Religion and Public Life program at Harvard Divinity School, building a graduate level certificate program for students seeking careers to advance religious literacy for just peace in vocations such as policymaking, humanitarian action, and organizing.

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.

Jana Vobecká is a researcher with focus on demography, sociology, and social geography using quantitative as well as qualitative research techniques. She is engaged in the Peace Mapping Programme at the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue, where she is responsible for mapping interreligious dialogue organizations from around the world. In previous research engagements, she studied spatial population dynamics and its effects on social inequalities, local governance, population policies, and historical demography in centers in the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, and Austria. She is the author of Demographic Avant-Garde, Jews in Bohemia between the Enlightenment and the Shoah (2013). Vobecká holds a PhD in demography from the Charles University in Prague and University of Burgundy in Dijon.