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	Chairman of the Board of Advisors Hon. John F Maisto John F. Maisto is a former career diplomat with over three decades of service. He was Ambassador to the Organization of American States-OAS (2003-2006), Venezuela (1997-2000), and Nicaragua (1993-1996). From 2001 to 2003 he was Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council. He was Foreign Affairs Adviser at the U.S. Southern Command, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central American Affairs, Deputy Chief of Mission and Charge d’affaires in Panama, and Deputy U.S. Permanent Representative at the OAS. He headed the State Department’s Philippine Affairs office during the ”People Power” transition to democracy in 1986. He served in embassies in the Philippines, Costa Rica, Bolivia, and at U.S. Information Agency centers in Argentina and Bolivia. He is a Director of the Miami-based U.S. Education Finance Group, and Board member of the Washington-based International Student Exchange Program (ISEP). He is also a board member of ECI, a Central American resort and retirement development company, and of the North American Center for Transborder Studies (NACTS) at Arizona State University. He serves on the Board of Advisers at the Inter American Dialogue. He consults, speaks and writes on U.S. policies in the Americas, democratic transitions, security, and other foreign affairs issues. A native of Braddock, Pennsylvania, Ambassador Maisto has a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and a Masters in Latin American History from San Carlos University, Guatemala.

	Executive Director Philip C. French Philip C. French retired as a senior career diplomat after 30 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, serving in Latin America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, in addition to two tours in the State Department's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs in Washington, D.C. Following a tour in Madrid as Consul General, Mr. French was assigned in 2001 to San Salvador as Deputy Chief of Mission and later served there as acting Chief of Mission. He was posted to Caracas as Deputy Chief of Mission in 2007 before his final assignment as Team Leader for the Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team in Fallujah, Iraq in 2008. A graduate of the University of California, Riverside, Mr. French spent the 1996-97 academic year as Diplomat in Residence at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. He can be reached at frenchpc@acfr.org.

	Senior Program Manager Rhoda Rabkin Rhoda Rabkin became ACFR's Senior Program Manager and, as such, the Manager of our National Speakers Program in December 2007. She holds a B.A. Degree with distinction from Cornell University (1975) and a doctorate in Government from Harvard University (1983). She has taught in her specialty, Latin American politics, at Harvard and Cornell, and she has also been Visiting Professor at the Institute of Political Science at the Catholic University of Chile. She is the author of a book (Cuban Politics: The Revolutionary Experiment, Praeger Publishers, 1990) and numerous articles in her field and on other foreign affairs and public policy topics. Rhoda Rabkin can be reached at rrabkin@acfr.org.

	Operations Manager Tigist Gebru Tigist Gebru joined the ACFR staff as Operations Manager in September 2010. She brings experience from positions in research and administration, as well as leadership in extracurricular activities while a student at Southern Methodist University and Addis Ababa University. Ms. Gebru has most recently served as a research assistant to the Director of Studies at the Tower Center for Political Studies at SMU, and she is the author of a chapter on Sudan in Human Rights and National Security: A global predicament, published by the Tower Center. She is a graduate of Southern Methodist University with a major in Economics, Political Science, and Public Policy and a minor in International Studies. Prior to her years at SMU, she spent three years studying Political Science and International Relations at Addis Ababa University in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She is a board member of the Horn of Africa Peace and Development Center and belongs to the D.C. chapter of Young Professionals in Foreign Policy. Tigist Gebru can be reached at pm@acfr.org

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©2006 American Committees on Foreign Relations