Board of Thinkers

Dr. Carlos Alberto Torres is a political sociologist of education, a published poet and short story author. He did his undergraduate work in sociology in Argentina (B.A. honors and teaching credential in Sociology, Universidad del Salvador), his graduate work in Mexico (M.A. Political Science. FLACSO) and the United States (Master of Arts and Ph.D. in International Development Education, Stanford University), and post-doctoral studies in educational foundations in Canada (University of Alberta). He is a Professor of Social Science and Comparative Education at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and Chair of UNESCO-UCLA in Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education.

In 1991, in partnership with several colleagues, he created the Paulo Freire Institute, PFI, and is currently serving as its Founding Director at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. He also served as director of the UCLA Latin American Center. Dr. Torres has been a Visiting Professor in universities in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. He has lectured throughout Latin America and the United States, and in universities in England, Japan, Italy, Spain, Tanzania, Finland, Mozambique, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Costa Rica, Portugal, Taiwan, Korea, Sweden and South Africa.

Robert Desimone is director of the McGovern Institute and the Doris and Don Berkey Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining MIT, in 2004, he was director of the Intramural Research Program at the National Institutes of Mental Health, the largest mental-health research center in the world. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of numerous awards, including the Troland Prize of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Golden Brain Award of the Minerva Foundation.

John A. Quelch is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He holds a joint appointment at Harvard School of Public Health as Professor in Health Policy and Management. He is also a fellow of the Harvard China Fund, a Member of the Harvard China Advisory Board and Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

Between 2011 and 2013, Professor Quelch was Dean, Vice President and Distinguished Professor of International Management at CEIBS, China’s leading business school. Between 2001 and 2011, he was the Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean at Harvard Business School. He served as Dean of London Business School from 1998 to 2001. Prior to 1998, he was the Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing and Co-Chair of the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School.

Professor Quelch is known for his teaching materials and innovations in pedagogy. Over the past twenty-five years, his case studies have sold over 4 million copies, third highest in HBS history. In 1995, he developed the first HBS interactive CD-ROM exercise (on Intel’s advertising budgeting process). In 1999, he developed and presented a series of twelve one hour programs on Marketing Management for the Public Broadcasting System.

Professor Quelch’s research focus is on global marketing and branding in emerging as well as developed markets. His current research projects address (a) understanding the contributions of marketing to the functioning of democracies and (b) formalizing appropriate marketing and customer metrics for periodic review by boards of directors. Professor Quelch is the author, co-author or editor of twenty-five books, including All Business Is Local (2011), Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy (2008), Business Solutions for the Global Poor: Creating Social and Economic Value (2007), The New Global Brands (2006), Global Marketing Management (5th edition, 2006), The Global Market (2005), Cases in Advertising and Promotion Management (4th Edition, 1996) and The Marketing Challenge of Europe 1992 (2nd edition, 1991). He has published eighteen articles on marketing strategy issues in the Harvard Business Review, most recently “How To Market In A Downturn” (April 2009), and many more in other leading management journals such as McKinsey Quarterly and Sloan Management Review.

Professor Quelch has served as an independent director of twelve publicly listed companies in the USA and UK. He is currently a non-executive director of WPP and Alere. He served pro bono for eight years as Chairman of the Port Authority of Massachusetts. He is the Honorary Consul General of Morocco in New England and served previously as Chairman of the British-American Business Council of New England. Professor Quelch has been a consultant, seminar leader and speaker for firms, industry associations and government agencies in more than fifty countries. He is a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council On Foreign Relations. He received the CBE for services to British business in 2011 and holds an honorary doctorate from Vietnam National University.

Professor Quelch was born in London, England, was educated at Exeter College, Oxford University (BA and MA), the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (MBA), the Harvard School of Public Health (MS) and Harvard Business School (DBA). In addition to the UK and USA, he has lived in Australia and Canada.

Joseph S. Nye Jr., is an American political scientist and former Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard Univesity. He currently holds the position of University Distinguished Service Professor.

He received his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from Princeton University, did postgraduate work at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, and earned a PhD in political science from Harvard.

He has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and Deputy Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology. Besides, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The British Academy, and a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy.

The 2011 TRIP survey of over 1700 international relations scholars ranks Joe Nye as the sixth most influential scholar in the field of international relations in the past twenty years. In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers

He pioneered the theory of soft power, which is appeared in his book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics(2004). He also published other books: Understanding International Conflict (5th edition, 2004); and The Power Game: A Washington Novel (2004), The Powers to Lead (2008) and The Future of Power (2011).

Mentor of the AIWS Innovation Network – Chairman of The Michael Dukakis Institute for Leadership and Innovation

Chairman of The Michael Dukakis Institute for Leadership and Innovation;

Co-Founder, Chairman of The Board of Directors and Board of  Thinkers, The Boston Global Forum;

Democratic Party Nominee for President of the United States, 1988;

Distinguished Professor J.D., Harvard University

As Co-Founder and Chairman of The Board of Directors and Board of Thinker of The Boston Global Forum, Michael Stanley Dukakis culminates a half-century career dedicated to public service, political leadership, fostering the careers of young leaders, and scholarly achievement.

Together with Nguyen Anh Tuan, this former Massachusetts governor, has established The Boston Global Forum as a globally recognized think tank noted for developing peaceful solutions to some of the world’s most contentious issues, among them: fair labor practices in third-world nations, US-North Korean denuclearization negotiations, and the militarization of the South China Sea. Most recently, Gov. Dukakis has called for the ethical development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things and other 21^st century Internet advances that permeate out daily lives.

To promote the work of the Boston Global Forum and to recognize those who support its goals, Gov. Dukakis co-created: “World Leader in Peace and Cybersecurity” Award; “World Leader in AI World Society” Award, and the AI World Society Initiative. Together with Nguyen Anh Tuan he also established December 12 as the annual Global Cybersecurity Day. Gov. Dukakis also coauthored, “The concepts of AI-Government,” “Ethics Code of Conduct for Cyber Peace and Security (ECCC),” and the “BGF-G7 Summit Initiative Report.”

Gov. Dukakis’s dedication to public service began modestly when he was elected Town Meeting Member in his native Brookline, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. He was later elected chairman of his town’s Democratic organization in 1960 and won a seat in the Massachusetts Legislature in 1962 where he served four terms as a state legislator. In 1970, he was the Massachusetts Democratic Party’s nominee for Lieutenant Governor and the running mate of Boston Mayor Kevin White in a gubernatorial race lost to Republicans Frank Sargent and Donald Dwight, Jr.

In 1974, he again ran for governor of the Commonwealth beating Gov. Sargent decisively in November of that year. He inherited a record deficit and record high unemployment and is generally credited with digging Massachusetts out of one of its worst financial and economic crises in history. But the effort took its toll. Dukakis was defeated in the Democratic primary in 1978 by Edward King, but came back to defeat King in 1982 and was reelected to an unprecedented third, four-year term in 1986. His colleagues in the National Governors’ Association voted him the most effective governor in the nation that year.

Gov. Dukakis ran for the presidency of the United States in 1988 but was defeated by George Bush. After announcing that he would not seek reelection as governor in 1991, he and his wife, Kitty, spent three months at the University of Hawaii where he was a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science and the School of Public Health. While at the University of Hawaii, he led a series of public forums on the reform of the nation’s health-care system that influenced the creation of Hawaii’s first-in-the-nation universal health insurance system whose lessons were incorporated into the national Affordable Care Act, championed by President Barrack Obama.

In addition to his Boston Global Forum role, Gov. Dukakis is currently a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University and Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy at UCLA. Recently, he and former U.S. Senator Paul Simon authored, “How to Get Into Politics-and Why,” to provide young people with a road map to a career in public service.

As a life-long public transportation advocate, Gov. Dukakis was nominated by President Bill Clinton for a five-year term as a named to the Board of Directors of Amtrak in 1998. He served a full five-year term on the Amtrak Board as Vice-Chairman. He is often called upon to offer his expertise on rail service to Boston.

Gov. Dukakis continues to live Brookline, where he was born on November 3, 1933 to Panos and Euterpe (Boukis) Dukakis, who had emigrated from Greece and settled there after marrying. He graduated from Brookline High School (1951), Swarthmore College (1955), and Harvard Law School (1960), after which, he served for two years in the United States Army, sixteen months of which were with with the support group to the United Nations delegation of the Military Armistice Commission in Munsan, Korea.

Mike and Kitty Dukakis have three children: John, Andrea, and Kara, and are the proud grandparents of eight grandchildren.

Thomas E. Patterson is Co-Founder and Member of Board of Directors, Boston Global Forum, and Research Director of The Michael Dukakis Institute for Leadership and Innovation. He is also Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press of Harvard Kennedy School and has served as the Acting Director of Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy since July 1, 2015. His book, The Vanishing Voter, looks at the causes and consequences of electoral participation. His earlier book on the media’s political role, Out of Order, received the American Political Science Association’s Graber Award as the best book of the decade in political communication. His first book, The Unseeing Eye, was named by the American Association for Public Opinion Research as one of the 50 most influential books on public opinion in the past half century.

He also is author of Mass Media Election and two general American government texts: The American Democracy and We the People. His articles have appeared in Political Communication, Journal of Communication, and other academic journals, as well as in the popular press. His research has been funded by the Ford, Markle, Smith-Richardson, Pew, Knight, Carnegie, and National Science foundation.

Patterson received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1971.

Nazli Choucri is Professor of Political Science of MIT. Her work is in the area of international relations, most notably on sources and consequences of international conflict and violence. Professor Choucri is the architect and Director of the Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD), a multi-lingual web-based knowledge networking system focusing on the multi-dimensionality of sustainability. As Principal Investigator of an MIT-Harvard multi-year project on Explorations in Cyber International Relations, she directed a multi-disciplinary and multi-method research initiative. She is Editor of the MIT Press Series on Global Environmental Accord and, formerly, General Editor of the International Political Science Review. She also previously served as the Associate Director of MIT’s Technology and Development Program.

The author of eleven books and over 120 articles, Dr. Choucri is a member of the European Academy of Sciences. She has been involved in research or advisory work for national and international agencies, and for a number of countries, notably Algeria, Canada, Colombia, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Japan, Kuwait, Mexico, Pakistan, Qatar, Sudan, Switzerland, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. She served two terms as President of the Scientific Advisory Committee of UNESCO’s Management of Social Transformation (MOST) Program.

• Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
• Toshiba Professor
• Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program Director
• Co-founder of The Social Contract 2020

Professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland directs the MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs and previously helped create and direct the MIT Media Lab and the Media Lab Asia in India. He is one of the most-cited scientists in the world, and Forbes recently declared him one of the “7 most powerful data scientists in the world” along with Google founders and the Chief Technical Officer of the United States.  co-led the World Economic Forum discussion in Davos that led to the EU privacy regulation GDPR, and was central in forging the transparency and accountability mechanisms in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.  He has received numerous awards and prizes such as the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review, the 40th Anniversary of the Internet from DARPA, and the Brandeis Award for work in privacy.

He is a founding member of advisory boards for Google, AT&T, Nissan, and the UN Secretary General, a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded more than a dozen companies including social enterprises such as the Data Transparency Lab and the Harvard-ODI-MIT DataPop Alliance . He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and leader within the World Economic Forum.

Over the years Sandy has advised more than 60 PhD students. Almost half are now tenured faculty at leading institutions, with another one-quarter leading industry research groups and a final quarter founders of their own companies. Together Sandy and his students have pioneered computational social science, organizational engineering, wearable computing (Google Glass), image understanding, and modern biometrics. His most recent books are Social Physics, published by Penguin Press, and Honest Signals, published by MIT Press.

Interesting experiences include dining with British Royalty and the President of India, staging fashion shows in Paris, Tokyo, and New York, and developing a method for counting beavers from space.

World Leader for Peace and Security Award 2019

Dr. Vaira Vike-Freiberga has been the President of the World Leadership Aliance Club of Madrid since 2014  and is former President of Latvia (1999-2007). She was instrumental in achieving membership in the European Union and NATO for her country, and was Special Envoy on UN reform among her international activities. Since 2007, she is an oft invited speaker on social issues, moral values, and democracy. She was Vice-chair of the Reflection group on the long term future of Europe, and chaired the High-level group on freedom and pluralism of media in the EU.

Having left Latvia as a child refugee to Germany in 1945, then French Morocco and Canada, she earned a Ph.D. in psychology (1965) at McGill University. After a distinguished career as Professor at the University of Montreal, she returned to her native country in 1998 to head the Latvian Institute.A year later she was elected President by the Latvian Parliament and re-elected in 2003.

She is member of four Academies, and Board member or patron of 30 international organizations, including the Board of Thinkers of the Boston Global Forum. She has received many highest Orders of Merit, as well as medals and awards, for distinguished work in the humanities and social sciences. She has published 14 books and authored over 200 articles, book chapters, reports, and audiovisual materials.

Mr. Nguyen Anh Tuan is co-founder and Director of The Michael Dukakis Institute for Leadership and Innovation (MDI), and co-founder and CEO of The Boston Global Forum (BGF).

Tuan is recognized globally for his pivotal role as a Vietnam Government reformist, who has successfully fostered freedom-of-expression, vigorous open debate and private enterprise in a nation that has become a leader in commerce, culture, and the innovation as well as a close ally of the West.

For his AI World Society Initiative and the concepts of AI-Government he developed, Vietnam National Television (VTV) named him Person of The Year 2018.

He is the Founder and Chairman of the VietNamNet Media Group and the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of VietNamNet, Vietnam’s preeminent online newspaper. Additionally, Tuan was the Founder and CEO of VASC Software and Media Company and VietNet, the first Internet service provider in Vietnam.

In recognition of his contributions to his native country, the Government of Vietnam named Tuan one of the nation’s 10 most outstanding young talents in 1996.

Under Tuan’s leadership, VietNamNet has raised significant political issues resulting in greater Vietnamese Government transparency and freedoms. He pioneered an interactive live format called the VietNamNet Online Roundtable that allowed online Vietnamese citizens to participate in interviews with leading political, social and cultural figures as well as foreign dignitaries. In 2009, Tuan conceived of an annual global initiative making September 9th World Compassion and Reconciliation Day. Additionally, he founded and organized the Vietnam National Concert to be held annually on September 2nd, Vietnam’s National Day holiday.

In 2011, he became a Pacific Leadership Fellow at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California San Diego. That year he addressed the prestigious Club de Madrid Conference, a gathering of former prime ministers and presidents, in a speech titled Democracy and Digital Technology.

From February 2011 to July 2014 Tuan was an Associate of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

He later became a Visiting Scholar at the College of Communication, Boston University for the academic years 2014-2015, and 2015-2016.

As a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School in 2007, Tuan researched major trends in the development of electronic media in Vietnam.

Tuan served on the Harvard Business School Global Advisory Board from 2008 to 2016. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of the Free-for-All Concert Fund in Boston. Since July of 2015 to November of 2017 he served as Chair of the International Advisory Committee of UCLA – UNESCO Chair on Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education at the University of California Los Angeles.

Tuan is a co-founder, and Chief Executive Officer of the Global Citizenship Education Network (GCEN), a collaboration between the Boston Global Forum and the UNESCO-UCLA Chair on Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education as well as being co-founder and Former Associate Editor of UCLA’s Global Commons Review.

In an effort to enhance cybersecurity worldwide, Tuan created Global Cybersecurity Day, produced the recent BGF-G7 Summit Initiative, and coauthored the Ethics Code of Conduct for Cyber Peace and Security (ECCC).

In November of 2017, Tuan and Governor Michael Dukakis founded AI World Society Initiative, and on June 25, 2018, Tuan and Governor Dukakis, Professor Thomas Patterson, Professor Nazli Choucri announced the Concepts of AI-Government. In 2018, Tuan created the World Leader in AI World Society Award, and the AI World Society Distinguished Lecture, and became the co-author of AI World Society Ethics and Practices Index.